Juliana Rotich

Juliana Rotich is Executive Director and co- founder of Ushahidi Inc, a non-profit tech company, born in Africa, which specializes in developing free and open source software for information collection, interactive mapping and data curation. Ushahidi was originally designed as a crowdsourced map to track violence after the troubled Kenyan elections in 2007-8 but now it builds tools for democratizing information, increasing transparency and lowering the barriers for individuals to share their stories. Through Crowdmap.com, Swiftly.org and accompanying mobile applications, Ushahidi is expanding its global footprint and making crowdsourcing tools available and useful. She is also an advisor to the iHub in Kenya.

Juliana has worked in the telecommunications and data warehousing industry for over ten years. She is originally from Kenya, with a Computer Science degree from the University of Missouri, Kansas City. She is a Technologist, TED Senior Fellow & MIT Media Lab Director’s Fellow. She is chair of the Global Agenda Council on Data Driven Development with World Economic Forum.

She was named one of the Top 100 women by the Guardian newspaper and top 2 women in Technology 2011, and Social Entrepreneur of the year 2011 by The World Economic Forum.

Janet Emerson Bashen (February 12, 1957- Present)

Janet Emerson Bashen is an American inventor, entrepreneur, and business consultant. She patented a software program to assist with web-based equal employment opportunity investigations. She founded a human resource consulting firm focusing on equal employment opportunity compliance, which investigated civil rights violations and employee misconduct. From 1997 to 2001, according to Inc magazine, her firm's revenue grew 552%, at which time it had 43 employees. In May 2000, she argued before Congress that civil rights and employee misconduct investigations should be exempt from the Fair Credit Reporting Act. In 2012, she was named to Ebony magazine's list of the 100 most influential African-Americans in entertainment, politics, sports and business, called the Power 100 List.

Dr. Giuliana Tesoro (June 1, 1921 – September 29, 2002)

Giuliana Cavaglieri was born in 1921 in Venice into a Jewish family. Her father, Gino Cavaglieri, managed an insurance firm; he died when Giuliana was only twelve. In 1938, after completing her high school education, she was denied access to Italy's university system due to the promulgation of the Fascist Racial Laws. She moved to Switzerland first and then in 1939 to the United States.

In the United States she was allowed to enter Yale University's graduate program and completed it in record time. In 1943, at the age of 21, Cavaglieri received her Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry. The same year she married Victor Tesoro, with whom she would have two children.

Following her marriage, Giuliana Cavaglieri Tesoro worked summers for Calico Chemical Company before accepting a position as research chemist at Onyx Oil and Chemical Company in 1944. Here she was promoted to head of the organic synthesis department in 1946, assistant director of research in 1955, and associate director in 1957. She was then appointed assistant director of organic research for J.P. Stevens & Company. Late she moved to the Textile Research Institute for two years. In 1969, she accepted a position as senior chemist at Burlington Industries and was appointed director of chemical research in 1971.

In 1972 she accepted a post as Visiting Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she taught until 1976, remaining on the Faculty as adjunct professor and senior research scientist until 1982. She was then appointed research professor at Polytechnic Institute of New York University in Brooklyn, New York in 1982 and retired from there in 1996.

Tesoro made a number of advances in textile processing and organic compounds that improved textile performance for everyday consumers as well as efficiency for manufacturing systems. She developed flame-resistant fibers, designed ways to prevent static accumulation in synthetic fibers, and created improved permanent press properties for textiles.

Rachel Zimmerman (1972 - Present)

Rachel Zimmerman born in Ontario Canada 1972, grew up an inquisitive young girl, with a role model of a mother. Linda Zimmerman was the founder and president of her own software company and gave Rachel inspiration to enter the field of technology. She was a young girl that liked girl scouts and science.

The turning point in her life came when in the sixth grade, while researching Keller and Braille, she stumbled across a book on Blissymbols. With the idea of a science fair coming soon, she dove into everything about the system Blissymbols, communication system for the severely disabled, and decided to research other methods to improve it’s accessibility. It was then, at the science fair at the age of 12, that she created the Blissymbol printer.

This new device used a software program to enable those using Blissymbol language to “talk” to each other and preform all the other types of communication through the computer. Until then the user needed another person to translate the symbols they would point out. With the new printer, she developed a tap pad that enabled the person to simply touch the board and the software would do the translating, transmitting the output in the language of the user’s choice onto a computer screen. When she initially presented the concept at a science fair, it received a silver medal and she went on to compete in the World Exhibition of Achievement of Young Inventors. The Blissymbols printer also ended up winning a silver medal at the Canada-wide contest. Rachel Zimmerman, along with her forward-thinking invention, were showcased when they won a VTV Television Youth Achievement Award. Rachel continues her passion for the sciences.

Today according to her Linkin profile, she attended Bradeis University and International Space University. She has worked for

• Outreach Specialist at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

• Education Outreach Coordinator at Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Past

• Education and Outreach Specialist at California Institute of Technology (Caltech)

• Education and Outreach Coordinator at The Planetary Society

• Space Vision System Specialist at Canadian Space Agency

• Intern at NASA Ames Research Center

• Master of Space Studies student at International Space University

Rachel now works for NASA and still has the same concern for those who are not able-bodied. She is currently helping NASA mold their innovations to better fit the needs of disabled people. To this day she works on better forms of communications for the disabled. Below is and example of a tap=board used by those severely handicapped for communication, thanks to Rachel Zimmerman.

Patricia Era Bath (November 4, 1942 - Present)

Patricia Era Bath is an American ophthalmologist, inventor and academic. She has broken ground for women and African Americans in a number of areas. Prior to Bath, no woman had served on the staff of the Jules Stein Eye Institute, headed a post-graduate training program in ophthalmology or been elected to the honorary staff of the UCLA Medical Center (an honor bestowed on her after her retirement). Before Bath, no black person had served as a resident in ophthalmology at New York University and no black woman had ever served on staff as a surgeon at the UCLA Medical Center. Bath is the first African-American woman doctor to receive a patent for a medical purpose. Her Laserphaco Probe is used to treat cataracts. The holder of four patents, she is also the founder of the American Institute for the Prevention of Blindness in Washington, D.C.

Inspired by Albert Schweizer for his work in medicine, Bath applied for and won a National Science Foundation Scholarship while attending Charles Evans Hughes High School; this led her to a research project at Yeshiva University and Harlem Hospital Center on cancer that piqued her interest in medicine. In 1960, still a teenager, Bath won the "Merit Award" of Mademoiselle magazine for her contribution to the project.

After graduating high school early, Bath received her Bachelor of Arts in chemistry from New York's Hunter College in 1964. She relocated to Washington, D.C. to attend Howard University College of Medicine, from which she received her doctoral degree in 1968. During her time at Howard, she was president of the Student National Medical Association and received fellowships from the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Mental Health.

Bath interned at Harlem Hospital Center, subsequently serving as a fellow at Columbia University. During this period, from 1968 to 1970, Bath became aware that the practice of eye care was uneven among racial minorities and poor populations, with much higher incidence of blindness among her black and poor patients. She determined that, as a physician, she would help address this issue. She persuaded her professors from Columbia to operate on blind patients at Harlem Hospital Center, which had not previously offered eye surgery, at no cost. Bath pioneered the worldwide discipline of "community ophthalmology", a volunteer-based outreach to bring necessary eye care to underserved populations.

She served her residency in ophthalmology at New York University from 1970 to 1973, the first African American to do so in her field.

After completing her education, Bath served briefly as an assistant professor at Jules Stein Eye Institute at UCLA and Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science before becoming the first woman on faculty at the Eye Institute. In 1978, Bath co-founded the American Institute for the Prevention of Blindness, for which she served as president. In 1983, she became the head of a residency in her field at Charles R. Drew, the first woman ever to head such a department. In 1993, she retired from UCLA, which subsequently elected her the first woman on its honorary staff. She served as a professor of Ophthalmology at Howard University's School of Medicine and as a professor of Telemedicine and Ophthalmology at St. Georges University. She was among the co-founders of the King-Drew Medical Center ophthalmology training program.

Bath has lectured internationally and authored over 100 papers.

Bath holds four patents in the United States. In 1981, she conceived of the Laserphaco Probe, a medical device that improves on the use of lasers to remove cataracts, and "for ablating and removing cataract lenses". The device was completed in 1986 after Bath conducted research on lasers in Berlin and patented in 1988, making her the first African-American female doctor to receive a patent for a medical purpose. The device — which quickly and nearly painlessly dissolves the cataract with a laser, irrigates and cleans the eye and permits the easy insertion of a new lens — is used internationally to treat the disease. Bath has continued to improve the device and has successfully restored vision to people who have been unable to see for decades.

Three of Bath's four patents relate to the Laserphaco Probe. In 2000, she was granted a patent for a method she devised for using ultrasound technology to treat cataracts. Bath has been honored by two of her universities. Hunter College placed her in its "hall of fame" in 1988 and Howard University declared her a "Howard University Pioneer in Academic Medicine" in 1993.

Alice Augusta Ball (July 24, 1892 – December 31, 1916)

Alice Ball was an African American chemist who developed an injectable oil extract that was the most effective treatment of leprosy until the 1940s. She was also the first woman and first African American to graduate from the University of Hawaii with a master's degree.

 Ball attended Seattle High School and received top grades in the sciences. She graduated from Seattle High School in 1910 and entered the University of Washington to study chemistry. During her four years there, she earned bachelor degrees in both pharmaceutical chemistry and pharmacy. She also, with her pharmacy instructor, published a 10-page article in the prestigious Journal of the American Chemical Society titled "Benzoylations in Ether Solution." Following her graduation, Ball was offered scholarships to attend the University of California Berkeley and the University of Hawaii. Ball decided to move back to Hawaii to pursue a master's degree in chemistry. In 1915, she became the first woman and first African American to graduate with a master's degree from the University of Hawaii.

In her postgraduate research career at the University of Hawaii, Ball investigated the chemical makeup and active principle of Piper methysticum (kava) for her master's thesis. While working on her thesis, Ball was asked by Dr. Harry T. Hollmann, an assistant surgeon at Kalihi Hospital in Hawaii, to help him develop a method to isolate the active chemical compounds in chaulmoogra oil. Chaulmoogra oil had previously been used in the treatment of Hansen's disease (leprosy) with mixed results. Most patients with Hansen's disease were hesitant to take the oil over the long term because it tasted bitter and tended to cause an upset stomach. Ball developed a process to isolate the ethyl esters of the fatty acids in the chaulmoogra oil so that they could be injected, but died before she could publish her results. Another chemist at the University of Hawaii, Arthur L. Dean, continued her work and began producing large quantities of the injectable chaulmoogra extract. In 1918, a Hawaii physician reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association that a total of 78 patients were released from Kalihi Hospital by the board of health examiners after treatment with injections. The isolated ethyl ester remained the preferred treatment for Hansen's disease until sulfone drugs were developed in the 1940s.

Alice Augusta Ball died on December 31, 1916, at the age of 24. She had become ill during her research and returned to Seattle for treatment a few months before her death. A 1917 newspaper article from the Pacific Commercial Advertiser suggested that the cause may have been chlorine poisoning that occurred while teaching. However, the cause of her death is unknown as her original death certificate was altered, giving the cause of death as tuberculosis.

Although her research career was short, Ball introduced a new treatment of Hansen's disease which continued to be used until the 1940s. The University of Hawaii did not recognize her work for nearly ninety years. In 2000, the university finally honored Ball by dedicating a plaque to her on the school's lone chaulmoogra tree behind Bachman Hall. On the same day, the former Lieutenant Governor of Hawaii, Mazie Hirono, declared February 29 "Alice Ball Day" which is now celebrated every four years. More recently, Ball was honored by the University of Hawaii Board of Regents with a Medal of Distinction in 2007.

Ruth Handler (November 4, 1916 – April 27, 2002)

Perhaps one of the most famous toys in American history, the Barbie doll is a staple in the toy chests of little girls everywhere. Along with co-founding the renowned toy company Mattel, woman inventor Ruth Handler also designed the doll that would become an American cultural icon.

While watching her daughter play with paper dolls, Ruth Handler noticed that she and her friends used the dolls to act out the future rather than the present. So, she set out to invent a grown-up, three-dimensional doll that girls could use to act out their dreams. This, of course, included the presence of breasts (and what many would later call "unrealistic body proportions"). The female inventor named her new Barbie doll invention after the nickname of her daughter Barbara. Later on, a male counterpart doll would be named after her son: Ken.

After premiering at the Toy Fair in 1959, Barbie became an instant sensation. The success of the doll propelled Mattel to become a publicly owned company that soon made Fortune's list of the 500 largest U.S. industrial companies. Handler served as the company's president for several of its most successful years. Along with being an inventor and businesswoman, Ruth Handler is also a breast cancer survivor – an experience she used to start another company, Nearly Me, which manufactured realistic-looking breast prostheses.

To this day, the Barbie doll invention remains one of Mattel's best-selling products.

Dr. Temple Grandin (August 29, 1947 - Present)

The thing that usually amazes people most about prolific woman inventor Dr. Temple Grandin is not all the great strides she has made to improve animal-handling devices, nor the fact that she earned a Ph.D in animal science and became a world-renowned teacher and speaker. Instead, what usually amazes people most about Dr. Temple Grandin is that she accomplished all this while living with autism.

With guidance and mentoring, Grandin, who didn't speak until she was nearly four years old, learned to use aspects of her autism to fuel her work as an inventor. The social stigmas attached to her diagnosis also may have helped inform her belief that animals should not be mistreated or subjected to a lower quality of life. To put her beliefs into practice, Dr. Temple Grandin designed a number of inventions that use behavioral principles rather than excess force to control animals.

Dr. Grandin's restraint systems keep animals calm and prevent them from getting hurt, and her center-track restraint system is currently used to handle nearly half of all the cattle in North America. She also has designed livestock handling facilities around the world (everywhere from the U.S. and Canada to Europe and New Zealand), and developed an objective scoring system for assessing the handling of cattle and pigs at meat plants.

To help others with Autism created the "hug box", a device to calm those on the autism spectrum. The subject of an award-winning, 2010 biographical film, Temple Grandin, she also was listed in the Time 100 list of the one hundred most influential people in the world in the "Heroes" category

Along with being an inventor and animal-handling expert, Dr. Grandin is a prominent author and expert on the subject of autism. Strongly believing the characteristics of the condition can be controlled and modified, she has been featured on major television programs, such as "Today," "48 Hours" and "20/20," and written about in publications like People magazine, Forbes and The New York Times.

Bette Nesmith Graham (March 23, 1924 – May 12, 1980)

As electric typewriters came into widespread use after World War II, Bette Nesmith Graham and countless other secretaries let out a collective groan. The new machines did make typing easier, but their carbon-film ribbons made it impossible to correct mistakes neatly with a pencil eraser. As a result of this predicament, Graham ended up inventing one of the most widely used office products of the 20th century.

Born in 1924 in Dallas, Texas, Bette Graham dropped out of high school at the age of seventeen and went to secretarial school. By 1951, she had worked her way up to the position of executive secretary for W.W. Overton, the Chairman of the Board of the Texas Bank and Trust. It was at this time that Graham and her colleagues at the bank began experiencing trouble with the new IBM electric typewriters. Tired of having to retype entire pages because of one small error, Graham determined to find a more efficient alternative. Little did she know her frustration would lead to her becoming one of the most famous women inventors of the 20th century.

The impetus for Graham's breakthrough came as she observed painters decorating the bank windows for the holidays. Rather than remove their mistakes entirely, the painters simply covered any imperfections with an additional layer. The quick-thinking Graham mimicked their technique by using a white, water-based tempera paint to cover her typing errors.

When the other secretaries realized how well the invention worked, they flooded Graham with requests for their own supplies. The now-famous woman inventor sold her first batch of "Mistake Out" in 1956, and soon she was working full-time to produce and bottle it from her North Dallas home. Her son Michael – who would later achieve fame as a member of the pop group The Monkees – and his friends helped to fill the growing number of orders for Mistake Out.

Graham continued experimenting with the makeup of the substance until she achieved the perfect combination of paint and several other chemicals. The refined product was renamed "Liquid Paper" in 1958 and, amid soaring demand, Graham applied for a patent and a trademark that same year.

Graham's Liquid Paper Company experienced tremendous growth over the next decade. By 1967, the company had its own corporate headquarters and automated production plant, and sales were in excess of one million units per year. In 1975, Graham moved operations into a 35,000-sq. ft. international Liquid Paper headquarters building in Dallas.

From the start, Graham ran her company with a unique combination of spirituality, egalitarianism, and pragmatism. Raised a Methodist, Graham converted to Christian Science in 1942 and this faith inspired the development of her corporate "Statement of Policy." Part code of ethics, part business philosophy, it covered everything from her belief in a "Supreme Being" to a focus on decentralized decision making and an emphasis on product quality over profit motive. She also believed that women could bring a more nurturing and humanistic quality to the male world of business, and did so herself by including a greenbelt with a fish pond, an employee library, and a childcare center in her new company headquarters in 1975.

She sold the company to Gillette Corporation four years later, just six months before her death in 1980.

Sally Fox (December 30th, 1955 - Present)

"I never really planned to be an inventor, but my attitude toward life has always been inventive." 

–Sally Fox

In the modern world, there is an unfortunate tendency to value profit over intellect. People may know a practice is harmful, but continue to do it anyway because it produces an in-demand product. Fortunately, there are inventors who work persistently to develop more responsible solutions. Sally Fox is one such individual.

Prior to Fox's invention of Foxfibre cotton, naturally colored cotton could only be spun by hand – which was such a long and laborious process that businesses instead chose to take white cotton, bleach it, dye it and spin it on a machine. This produced the colored fabrics people wanted, but also created a lot of pollution through the bleaching and dying processes. Sadly, there weren't really any viable alternatives available – that is, until Sally Fox came along in the late 1980s and revolutionized the industry.

While working as a pollinator for a cotton breeder looking to develop more pest-resistant plants, Fox began breeding brown and green cotton, picking out the best seeds that produced the longest fibers and replanting them year after year. Eventually, she created two colored cottons that could be spun on a machine, and she purchased a small lot of land to grow them. Sally even received Plant Variety Protection Certificates (the plant equivalent of patents) for the new cottons.

By the early 90s, Sally Fox had a $10-million-dollar business that produced naturally colored cotton for major companies like Levi's, Espirit, Land's End and L.L. Bean. It was the best of both worlds – a more environmentally friendly product that was also turning a profit. After globalization forced most of the spinning mills to South America and Southeast Asia, Fox's business took a hit, but she continues to make new naturally colored cottons to this day. Each new color takes about 10 years to produce – but, for Sally Fox, the patience is worth the payoff.

Mary Anderson (1866–1953)

Mary Anderson was born in Greene County, Alabama, at the start of Reconstruction in 1866. In 1889 she moved with her widowed mother and sister to the booming town of Birmingham, Alabama. She built the Fairmont Apartments on Highland Avenue soon after settling in. By 1893, Mary Anderson had moved west to Fresno, California where until 1898 she operated a cattle ranch and vineyard.

In a visit to New York City in the winter of 1903, in a trolley car on a frosty day, she observed that the motorman drove with the front window open because of difficulty keeping the windshield clear of falling sleet. When she returned to Alabama she hired a designer for a hand-operated device to keep a windshield clear and had a local company produce a working model. She applied for, and in 1903 was granted, a 17-year patent for a windshield wiper. Her device consisted of a lever inside the vehicle that controlled a rubber blade on the outside of the windshield. The lever could be operated to cause the spring-loaded arm to move back and forth across the windshield. A counterweight was used to ensure contact between the wiper and the window. Similar devices had been made earlier, but Anderson's was the first to be effective.

In 1905 Anderson tried to sell the rights to her invention through a noted Canadian firm, but they rejected her application saying "we do not consider it to be of such commercial value as would warrant our undertaking its sale." After the patent expired in 1920 and the automobile manufacturing business grew exponentially, windshield wipers using Anderson's basic design became standard equipment. In 1922, Cadillac became the first car manufacturer to adopt them as standard equipment.

Barbara Askins (1939 - Present)

Barbara S. Askins is an American chemist. She is best known for her invention of a method to enhance underexposed photographic negatives. This development was used extensively by NASA and the medical industry, and it earned Askins the title of National Inventor of the Year in 1978.  She was the first individual woman to earn this honor.

Barbara Askins (née Scott) was born in Belfast, Tennessee, in 1939. Originally a teacher, she returned to school to pursue a science career after having had a son and daughter. Askins earned Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees from the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

Askins is a physical chemist who worked for NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center and is best known for her pioneering invention of a process in which "images on developed photographic emulsions can be significantly intensified by making the image silver radioactive and exposing a second emulsion to this radiation." The resulting print, known as an autoradiograph, reproduces the image with significant increases in density and contrast. Her groundbreaking method enhanced underexposed emulsions and increased the limits of photographic detection. In short, it made visible the invisible in photos that would otherwise have been useless. This was very useful for a number of applications, including the coaxing of data from underexposed space images—such as those peering deep into space as well as those highlighting the geology of other bodies in our solar system.

Askins' invention also led to significant advances in the field of medical technology. In particular, Askins' method prompted improvements in the development of X-ray images. Medical images that were 96 percent underexposed suddenly become readable; this meant that doctors could dramatically decrease the amount of X-ray radiation they gave to patients when running routine or emergency tests. Askins' process was also later used in the restoration of old photographs. Askins patented her invention in 1978 (U.S. patent No. 4,101,780), and NASA employed it extensively for its research and development work.

Askins is a member of the American Chemical Society, the Sigma Xi honorary research Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the World Future Society.

Patricia Billings (1926 - Present)

Imagine a building material that is indestructible, fire-proof and non-toxic. Sounds like something you'd find in a work of science fiction, but actually it's a very-real invention called Geobond®, designed by female inventor Patricia Billings.

Patty Billings, a sculptor, initially sought to create a cement additive to prevent her sculptures from shattering in the 1970s. After years of experimenting, she finally achieved her goal of making an indestructible plaster. Soon after, she discovered the material was also amazingly resistant to heat(it could resist heat up to temperatures over 6,500 degrees) – which opened the door to a larger number of applications. Because the Geobond® invention is non-toxic as well as indestructible and fire-proof, it is the world's first workable replacement for asbestos after asbestos was found to cause cancer..

While Patricia Billings has two patents on her work, she continues to keep the exact recipe of Geobond® a secret. The inventor and great-grandmother hopes to see her invention used to revolutionize the construction industry, and she even turned down millions of dollars from a company she thought would try to bury her new technology.

Marion Donovan (October 15, 1917 - November 4, 1998)

Born in Fort Wayne, Indiana in 1917, Marion Donovan was instilled with an inventive spirit at a young age. She spent the greater part of her childhood hanging around the manufacturing plant run by her father and uncle, two men who combined to invent, among other things, an industrial lathe for grinding automobile gears and gun barrels.

Years later, as a post-World War II housewife and mother of two in Connecticut, Donovan would make good use of the ingenuity that she had observed in her youth. Frustrated by the thankless, repetitive task of changing her youngest child's soiled cloth diapers, bed sheets and clothing, she decided to craft a diaper cover to keep her baby – and the surrounding area – dry. Donovan sat down at her sewing machine with a shower curtain and, after several attempts, she completed a waterproof diaper cover.

Unlike the rubber baby pants that were already on the market, Donovan's design did not cause diaper rash and did not pinch the child's skin. The soon-to-be famous female inventor subsequently perfected her invention, adding snap fasteners in place of the dangerous safety pins that were commonly used. Donovan named her diaper cover the "Boater" and explained that "at the time I thought that it looked like a boat."

When no manufacturers would even consider her invention, Donovan struck out on her own, and the Boater was an unqualified success from the day it debuted at Saks Fifth Avenue in 1949. Donovan received a patent in 1951 and promptly sold the rights to Keko Corporation.

Her next project was a fully disposable diaper, for which she had to fashion a special type of paper that was not only strong and absorbent, but also conveyed water away from the baby's skin. Donovan took her finished product to every large manufacturer in the country, but once again she found no takers. Incredulously, everyone she talked to told her that the idea was superfluous and impractical. It was not until nearly a decade later, in 1961, that Victor Mills drew upon Donovan's vision to create Pampers®.

In keeping with her innovative heritage, this "mother of invention" explored numerous ventures that were completely unrelated to her diaper improvements. She earned a total of 20 patents in her lifetime and also received an Architecture degree from Yale University in 1958. Although Donovan's extraordinary life may go largely unnoticed by the public, this famous woman inventor deserves the undying gratitude of new parents around the globe.

Maria Christina Bruhn (1732–1802)

Maria Christina Bruhn was a Swedish inventor, likely to be the first patented female inventor of her country.

Bruhn was the eldest of three daughters of the book printer Johan Bruhn (d. 1742). She took over a tapestry- and wallpaper manufactury after the death of her widowed mother Inga Christina in 1751. In 1771, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences offered a reward for anyone who would be able to produce a suitable package for gunpowder for the army. During her work manufacturing paint and preparing paper, she had been inspired to the idea which she presented to the academy March 2, 1774. In a letter form 1783, she explained that she often experimented during her work. The men of the Academy expressed deep skepticism against the invention of a woman, and it took twelve years of testing, during which she had to fight among others the attempts of Anrep, General of the Artillery, to take credit for her invention, before the ministry of war approved it, recognized her as its inventor and gave her the reward in 1786. Her invention was long used within the Swedish army.

Si Ling-Chi (c. 2640 BCE)

(c. 2640 BCE) ALMOST 5000 YEARS AGO SHE INVENTED A FABRIC AS TRANSLUCENT AS ICE AND AS LIGHT AS A CLOUD. REVEALING THE SECRET OF ITS CREATION BECAME PUNISHABLE BY DEATH.

Si Ling-Chi sat in the shade of her court garden, sipping tea beneath gracious mulberry trees. She heard a tiny rustle in the leaves above her, and the breeze suddenly dropped a white cocoon into her teacup. Instead of picking it out of her drink, she watched as the hot water began to dissolve it. Soon her tea was laced with shimmering filaments. And Si Ling-Chi imagined the luminous gown she might weave for her husband, Hoang-ti, the mythic “Yellow Emperor”. That is how Chinese tradition recounts the discovery of silk in the year 2700 BC. Si Ling-Chi went on to develop sericulture - the science of silk production. She learned to cultivate silkworms, to reel the fibers, to test it for strength and reliability, and how to weave it into garments.

Hedy Lamar 1914-2000

(1914-2000) STARLET BY DAY-INVENTOR BY NIGHT. OVER 60 YEARS AGO, THIS HOLLYWOOD GLAMOUR QUEEN PATENTED A MISSILE GUIDANCE SYSTEM THAT KEEPS YOUR CELL PHONE WORKING.

Hollywood, 1940: on the eve of World War Two, a silver screen goddess and an avant-guard composer meet at a party. Over the piano they tinker with notes in a duet. Suddenly the actress observes that they are using the changing notes to communicate. Hedy Lamar was about to make history. Back home in Austria, Lamar had been married to a prominent arms dealer. Her domineering husband threw lavish parties for fascist politicians and scientists. Hedy absorbed the details of weapons control systems, and developed an abiding hatred for the Nazis.

She fled her husband by drugging the maid he hired to guard her and escaped to London. Then it was on to Hollywood and that fortuitous piano duet with composer George Antheil. They developed 'Frequency Hopping", a kind of spread spectrum technology. They reasoned that a piano score is a way to communicate using 88 alternating notes ...or sound frequencies. With slotted paper rolls, they devised and patented a jam-proof radio control system for torpedoes, using rapid frequency changes between a synchronized transmitter and receiver. Lamar and Antheil hoped to help the war effort, so they offered their invention to the U.S. Navy. But the Navy thought it was too cumbersome to use.

The war ran its course, the patent ran out, and the inventors never made a dime. But microprocessors eventually made the idea easier to use. Our cell phones, traffic controllers, pagers and wireless internet are all based on spread spectrum technology. And the Milstar satellite communications system provides jam proof military transmissions, using an idea pioneered by Hedy Lamar- a digital girl in an analog world.