By James F. Cotter

When we hear the word "inventor" we tend automatically to think in terms of men.  People like Thomas Edison, Ben Franklin, Elias Howe, Leonardo da Vinci, Richard Drew.   This type of thinking--

Drew.  Richard Drew.  Well, he was, ahh--look,  I'm pretty sure he invented something.  I'll think of it later. 

Almost sorry I mentioned him.

This stereotype of inventors as men only is, to put it mildly, skewed.  For centuries, women have been contributing  valuable innovations to the world, from the office to the orchestra, from millinery to the military.  This article deals with only two twentieth-century  women inventors in the United States;  there are many others, from other countries and other centuries.

Bette Nesmith Graham was born Bette Claire McMurray  in Dallas in 1924.  A stubborn child, she inevitably encountered problems at school, from which she dropped out at 17, and landed a job as a secretary at a bank (1) even though she could not type.  In 1942 she married Warren Nesmith.  They had a son, Michael, in 1943, but the marriage did not last; they divorced in 1946.  (2)

She eventually worked her way up to the position of executive secretary at the bank, though she still did not type very well.  Her problems were compounded when the office switched to electric typewriters in the early 1950s.  She could not erase mistakes without making a mess.  Since she could not type over her mistakes, she decided to do what artists do:  paint over the mistakes.  So she mixed some waterbased paint, coloured to match her stationery, and brought it to work, along with her watercolour brush.  She corrected her mistakes with this fluid, and her boss never noticed.  All the  other secretaries  in the building began asking  to borrow some of the fluid. (3)  She refined her invention--which she named Mistake Out--by experimenting in the kitchen.     (2)

Later she renamed the product Liquid Paper.  When, in 1958, an office trade magazine mentioned her product, she received  hundreds of orders from around the country. Then  she was fired for accidentally typing her own company's  name on a letter she had typed for the bank, but this may have been a blessing in disguise:  She now  had more time to devote to selling her product.  And  Liquid Paper was definitely  a hit.  By 1964 the company was making 5,000 bottles a week; by 1968 the company moved into its own plant and grossed over $1 million.  (3)

Her son,  Michael, incidentally, became a  guitarist and songwriter  for the Monkees in the 1960s.

Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler was born in Austria and while still a teenager began playing major roles in German films.  At 19-Oh, yes!  Scotch tape, that's what Richard Drew invented.  (4)

Thank God, now I'll be able to sleep tonight.

At 19,  she married an arms manufacturer 13 years her elder.  He was a very controlling man with pro-fascist sympathies.  In 1937 or 1938, depending on whose account one believes,  she fled, obtained a divorce in Paris, then moved to London, where she met the film producer Louis B. Mayer, who hired her to act in films and insisted that she use the name Hedy Lamarr.  (She was  to marry five more times and adopt a son in 1941--after her divorce from screenwriter and producer Gene Markey.)  (5)

Lamarr  went on to make the films Algiers, White Cargo, Tortilla Flat, and others--more than twenty in all, not counting the films she had previously appeared in on the continent.  In addition to her film work, the actress was eager to assist in the war against the Nazis.  She mentioned to composer George Antheil her idea for a radio-controlled torpedo.  The two discussed the matter and eventually proposed a plan for "frequency hopping"--the rapid and random switching of  a radio signal's frequency, making it impossible to intercept or change the course of a torpedo.  (6) They applied for a patent in 1941 and received it the following year,  but the concept was ahead of its time, too advanced for the mechanical technology of 1942.  It was finally implemented by the United States 20 years later, during the Cuban Missile Crisis.  Antheil and Lamarr made no money off the patent.  Finally, in 1997, the Electronic Frontier Foundation presented Lamarr with an award for her contribution to today's anti-jamming technology.  (5)

Hedy Lamarr  would almost certainly rather be remembered for her brains than for her beauty.   As she once said, "Any girl can be glamorous.  All you have to do is stand still and look stupid."  (6)

REFERENCES

1.    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bette_Nesmith_Graham

2.    http://www.celebratingtexas.com/tr/lsl/94.pdf

3.    http://inventors.about.com/od/lstartinventions/a/liquid_paper.htm  

4.    http://www.enchantedlearning.com/inventors/indexd.shtml   

5.    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr

6.   http://invention.smithsonian.org/centerpieces/ilives/womeninventors.htm

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