Featured / Woman Innovator

Margaret A. Wilcox

Margaret Wilcox patented her invention for a railway car heater in 1893. Her genius innovation redirected the heat generated from the train’s internal combustion engine to the interior of the passenger cars, which could become unbearably frigid on cold winter days. It also kept the windows free of frost and mist. Alas, the system had no controls and led to overheating in the cars, and thus was abandoned by the railway system because of safety concerns. But along came the automobile and, in 1917, engineers followed Wilcox’s design to heat the interior of the cars. The design was perfected when Ford began using her hot engine air model in 1929. Thus her invention became the predecessor for our modern automobile climate control systems.  

Featured / Woman Innovator

Barbe-Nicole Clicquot Ponsardin

Born in 1777, Barbe-Nicole Clicquot is known as the “Grande Dame of Champagne.” Widowed from her husband Francois Clicquot at the age of 27, her legacy includes inventions that completely revolutionized the making of champagne, including vintage, the riddling table, and blended rosé champagne. Under her skill and ownership – a rarity for women of the early 19th century — she developed a technique for eliminating the opaqueness, or cloudiness, of champagne. The brand and company of Veuve (widow in French) Clicquot still bears her name.

Featured / Woman Innovator

Ada Lovelace

The World’s First Computer Programmer  Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, was an English mathematician and writer known for her work on Charles Babbage’s proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical …

Wanda Díaz-Merced
Featured / Woman Innovator

Dr. Wanda Díaz-Merced

As we celebrate National Hispanic Heritage Month, our innovative attention turns to a Puerto-Rican born female astronomer who can’t see the stars, but can listen to them. Blind since her early twenties, Wanda Díaz-Merced studies the light emitted by gamma-ray bursts, the most energetic events in the universe. When she lost her sight and was left without a way to do her science, realized that the light curves she could no longer see could be translated into sound. Through sonification, she regained mastery over her work, and now she’s advocating for a more inclusive scientific community.

Woman Innovator

Madame CJ Walker

Born Sarah Breedlove, the daughter of Louisiana sharecroppers and former slaves, today we know her as Madam C. J. Walker, a woman who would ultimately offer employment opportunities to thousands of Black women hired to sell and manufacture her unique formula for a hair-care system. As a singularly successful female Black entrepreneur, her reputation and legacy have been recognized for over 100 years. 

Woman Innovator

Dr. Grace Brewster Murray Hopper

Grace Hopper came of age at a time when a relatively high number of women were receiving doctorates –numbers that would not be matched again until the 1980s. The war also created opportunities for women to enter the workforce in greater numbers. Nevertheless, her success in a male-dominated field and in male-dominated organizations such as the US Navy, was exceptional.

Woman Innovator

Mary Sherman Morgan

America’s First Female Rocket Scientist  Mary Sherman Morgan grew up in a poor farming household in North Dakota and didn’t attend school until she was nine years old. In an …

Woman Innovator

Mirian Friedman Menkin

She changed the course of human fertility. In March of 1944, this Latvian-born scientist was the first person to successfully fertilize an egg in vitro – the first to conceive …

Woman Innovator

Dr. Patricia Bath

Cataract surgery inventor and Cancer Research Pioneer Dr. Patricia Bath discovered and invented the laser probe Laserphaco, a new device and technique for cataract surgery, dramatically reducing the pain of …