Sometimes I find my mind wandering over various eclectic topics and occasionally I am inspired to write some of them down. Today, following on from last month's post about misattributed inventions, I was thinking about the inventions made by women who lost the credit to a man.
Here are a few examples of women inventors whose credit was given to men:
Mary Anning - invention: Dinosaur Fossils - credit taken by: The Geological Society
Anning discovered several dinosaur skeletons on a beach but they and she were ignored, decried as fake and blocked from being accepted with credit going to scientists who bought fossils from her.
Rosalind
Franklin
It was Franklin who produced the groundbreaking image in 1951 which was passed on to Crick & Watson who published their 'findings' 2 years later.
Chien Shiung Wu
Wu worked on electromagnetic interactions with the Wu experiment. The findings from which prompted a Nobel Prize... for two physicists working on a similar project.
Lise Meitner
Frisch won the Nobel Prize for their work but Meitner wasn't even mentioned. She went on to receive 49 Nobel nominations but never succeeded in winning any of them.
Hedy Lamarr
Lamarr created the basis for today's wifi as part of WWII work to prevent the bugging of military radios. Although she had a patent for her work, this was ignored by the US Navy
Alice Ball
Ball died in a tragic accident just months after her discovery and the head of her department published her work as his own - he and it were later corrected.
Marion Donovan
Before Donovan's invention, nappies were made of cloth. Her disposable nappies were initially ignored by manufacturers until Victor Mills started Pampers using Donovan's idea.
Margaret Keene
Keane's husband persuaded her the pictures would sell better under his name. She eventually took him to court and was able to prove her ownership by producing a picture on the spot.
Margaret Knight
Annan stole Knight's invention while it was being made and patented it under his name. When she took him to court, his defence was that a woman couldn't have invented it.
Elizabeth Magie
Darrow sold Magie's 'Landlord's Game' to Parker Brothers who claimed their version was sufficiently different to the one Magie created to protest against monopolists.
Vera Rubin
Rubin confirmed the existence of dark matter in the atmosphere yet her work was ignored until later scientists proved that she was right. However, she never received acknowledgement for her work.
Grace Hopper
von Neumann may have been the one to initiate the program for the Harvard Mark I computer but it was Hopper's codes that were used to program it.
Caresse Crosby
Crosby sold her patent for the 'backless brassiere', which was to become the modern bra, to Warner Brothers and subsequently fell from public knowledge or recognition
Ada Harris
Grateau actually invented the curling iron in 1852 - a big difference to the hair straightener Harris was the first ever to patent in 1893.
Esther
Lederberg
Although she worked jointly with her husband on her work and was actually the one to discover the lambda phage virus, it was her husband that took the credit and Nobel Prize
Jocelyn Bell
Burnell
Burnell discovered and pointed out the irregular radio pulses she had detected while a research assistant at Cambridge to her advisor - it was said advisor who claimed the credit.
Ada Lovelace
The father of modern computing actually had a lot of help from the daughter of Lord Byron as it was Ada who actually wrote the programme that made Babbage's machine work.
ENIAC
programmers
Mauchly might have invented the computer itself but it was the team of 6 women - the ENIAC programmers - who developed the functionality of the machine.
Katherine
Johnson
Johnson was a crucial 'computer' who calculated the path used for the successful landing of Apollo 11 on the moon. Yet she continued to be ignored and overlooked by her racist colleagues.
Mary Anderson
Anderson created and patented the now commonplace invention back in 1903. However, it was ignored by the car manufacturers. By the time they should an interest her patent had expired.
Nettie Stevens - invention: Sex Chromosomes - credit taken by: E B Wilson
Despite Stevens producing the breakthrough work that showed the connection between chromosomes and sex determination, it was her colleague who published the findings first.
Candace Pert - invention: opiate receptors - credit taken by: Solomon Snyder
Pert was just a graduate student when she made this crucial discovery but her professor was rewarded for it. When she objected, he said, "That's how the game is played."
Anna Atkins - invention: photography book - credit taken by: Henry Talbot
Atkins published her photographically illustrated book 8 months earlier than Henry Talbot but even the work itself was miscredited or else claimed as Anonymous.
