Social Studies GradeFour

1. What does it mean to "invent" and "discover"?
2. What inventions and discoveries are your familiar with? Can you identify the people who were responsible?
3. Why do people invent or discover things?
4. Have you ever read a book about inventors and inventions? Have you noticed that all or nearly all the inventors are men? Have you wondered why? Do women not invent things?

An example is the cotton gin. This is a machine that makes it possible to take the very sticky seeds (bolls) out of raw cotton quickly and efficiently. The machine made a huge difference to the cotton farmers of the southern U.S.A. If you have read about the machine, you know that Eli Whitney invented it. Well, he got the credit for it, but he didn't invent it. It was invented, perfected and marketed by Mrs. Catherine Littlefield Greene who lived in Georgia and was very familiar with the cotton boll. In 1793, when the machine was invented, Eli Whitney was a guest in her house. How is it that he got the credit for it? People have different ideas about that. Some say that women were not allowed to buy patents during that time, so she let her guest buy the patent for her. Some say that she gave him the plans. Others say that he actually did "invent" the machine and she just suggested all the ideas and helped pay to make it.

Many things were first discovered or invented a very long time ago. It is difficult or impossible to know exactly who was responsible. However, throughout history, it was mainly women who looked after the family's needs. It was the women who gathered and prepared food. It was women who made medicines and looked after the sick. It was women who made and furnished the shelter the family lived in. It was women who looked after the children. So it would make sense that it was a woman who invented the first pot or pan, the first dishes and cutlery, and the first recipe. It was probably a woman who first used wool from an animal to weave some cloth. It was probably a woman who invented agriculture when she gathered and planted seeds. It was probably a woman who first invented a syrup to soothe a sore throat. But who those women were, we don't know.

But we do know the names of some women who invented things to make their work easier.

Bette Nesmith Graham invented liquid paper. She worked as a secretary but was not a very good typist. She made a lot of mistakes. She painted for a hobby, and noticed that an artist doesn't erase her mistakes, but paints over them. So she used some white paint to paint out her mistakes at the typewriter. When all the other secretaries in the office started borrowing her paint, she decided to make a better product and try to sell it.

For several years she worked on her invention in her kitchen and garage. When she had a paint that dried quickly and blended nicely with white paper, she and her son bottled and sold it out of their garage. She offered her product to IBM but they were not interested. They were probably sorry later.

When she died, she left a fortune worth about 50 million dollars. Half her fortune went to her son and the other half went to various charities she had supported all her life.

Melitta Benz, a woman from Germany, invented the first coffee maker using a filter. She used her first name when she formed her company. This was in 1908. You can still find Melitta coffee makers.

Before Fannie Farmer came along, recipes called for "butter the size of an egg", "3 handfuls of flour", or "a heaping spoon of sugar". Fanny Farmer wrote a recipe book called Boston Cooking School Cook Book, which called for "1 cup of flour", "2 level tablespoons of sugar", and "half a pound of butter". In this way she standardized recipes, so that the amounts would always be the same. Although the book was first published in 1896, it went through many editions. You can still find copies in second-hand bookstores, if you are lucky.

Women also invented and discovered things in science and medicine.

In the 1800s diphtheria was a deadly disease that killed a lot of children. The germ settled in the throat and caused problems in a person's heart and nervous system. The disease was contagious, that is, it could be passed from one person to the other. So when one child became sick with diphtheria, it would sweep through the community killing many people, mainly children. Dr. Anna Wessel Williams developed a vaccine that would prevent children from getting the disease. Since the vaccine has been used for many years now, very few people ever get the disease anymore.

Marie Curie was probably one of the greatest scientists of all time. She is the only person ever to win two Nobel Peace Prizes. Her daughter Irene, along with her husband, also received a Nobel Prize.

Marie was born in Poland in 1867. She taught herself to read by the time she was 4 years old. Her father was a chemistry teacher at the university. She often helped him in his lab because he couldn't afford to hire a helper. When she was grown up, she moved to Paris to study at the Sorbonne. In 1898 she discovered radium, which is used in the treatment of cancer. She, along with her husband, also worked for many years with something new that she called radioactivity. During World War I, she developed the X-ray machine and drove through battlefields with it to help treat wounded soldiers.

Marie probably never realized that radioactivity could also be very dangerous to her without protection. She died of cancer, probably because of her work with radioactivity.

Her daughter Irene and Frederic, Irene's husband, carried on Marie Curie's work. Among their many inventions, they drew plans for a nuclear reactor. At the time, France was in the middle of World War II. So they deposited the plans in a secret place. Ten years later the plans were used when France built its first nuclear reactor.

Both Irene and Frederic died of leukaemia, like Irene's mother, probably because of their exposure to radioactive materials.

Many years later, and on a different continent, Sylvia Fedoruk worked with a team of scientists to develop one of the world's first Cobalt 60 units for treating cancer and one of the first nuclear medicine scanning machines. That was at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon.

Sylvia Fedoruk's father was a school teacher and the family lived in different towns around Yorkton. When she was young, she thought she would be a secretary, which was one of the few jobs women did at the time. Later she became very interested in science. After university, she came back to Saskatchewan and worked on nuclear medicine with the Cancer Clinic and the Cancer Foundation.

Besides her work, she loved all kinds of sports. She was an excellent curler and badminton player. She often went camping and fishing in northern Saskatchewan.

After working for 35 years she retired. But she didn't have a chance to relax for long. In 1988 she was appointed Lieutenant- Governor of Saskatchewan. As Lieutenant-Governor, she visited many schools and encouraged both girls and boys to do well in their studies, especially science and maths.

Young people can invent or discover things too.

Allison Hood was 12 years old when she and her friend Melanie Plewes invented the Muv. They had an assignment in a science class to think of a problem and then search for a solution, just as most inventors do.

The problem: Gloves let you do things with your hands, but are often not warm enough in the winter.

The solution: The Muv. It is a mitt with a glove inside. With the use of zippers and velcro, the mitt folds out of the way when you need to use your fingers.

Their invention won a first in their Ontario school division. The judges voted it the most practical.

The girls decided to try to market it. Although they tested it with a number of people who liked the Muv, no company seemed interested enough to buy the patent.

A few years later, Allison looked back fondly on their inventing adventures: "We were really surprised, we didn't expect that it would go so far."

Information about Hood and Plewes adapted with permission from The Women Inventors Project, Inventing Women: Profiles of Women Inventors by Janet Panabaker, 1991, p. 46 - 47.