Stuff You Should Know - Salute to Women Inventors

Episode Date: July 4, 2024

Women inventors have always had a tough time, for obvious reasons. So we're here today to pay tribute to those who persevered in the face of the laws and customs that prevented progress. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

For so many people living with an autoimmune condition like myasthenia gravis or chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, the emotional toll can be as real as the physical symptoms. That's why in an all new season of Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition from Ruby Studio and Argenics, host Martine Hackett gets to the heart of the emotional journey for individuals living with these conditions. To find community and inspiration on your journey, listen now on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Hear insightful, entertaining discussions on today's important health and wellness topics on the Health Discovered podcast from WebMD. Through in-depth conversations with experts, Health Discovered covers everything from tips for healthier living to the latest on therapy and mental health. My goal is to really destigmatize mental health treatment

and looking at it from a whole health perspective. Physical health and mental health can be intertwined. Listen to WebMD Health Discovered on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too and we're just going to play a rousing version of Yankee Doodle Andy or something like that in the background of this stirring episode.

You got a piccolo? No, I'm just gonna go like this. I'll record a track of do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do. And we'll play that on a loop underneath us talking. Jerry said she can do it with editing. That's great. I'm sure this would be an all time great. Okay.

The reason I want to do that is because as I was reading this, I was, um, what's the word I'm looking for? I'm toying with enthused. That's not it. That sounds like the opposite of how I feel. It is inspiring, but also rousing. Like it's just cool that there's this, well, in a way it's not cool.

It's cool to discover this whole group, this whole cadre of inventors that just are overlooked. That's the uncool part. They've been overlooked for so long, but there's a bunch of women inventors here in America and around the world, presumably, but we're just talking about American ones today, that really made some amazing contributions and especially at first for the first significant amount of time they really had an uphill battle to get their invention like out there

because of just how generally mistreated women were. Yeah, absolutely. Here's a fairly horrifying stat, because it was not that long ago, but in the late 20th century, only about 10% of all patents were awarded to women and their inventions. And we're gonna talk about some of the reasons before we get going on highlighting some of these great inventions

and some of these great women. But one reason obviously is just a lot of times, if you're a woman and you had an invention, you had to file it, at least the patent, under your husband's name or your brother's or your father's name or any man in your life that was willing to sign on the dotted line saying, yeah, that's my idea because you can't grant intellectual property or a patent to my sister or wife or daughter. Yeah, remember in the widow's episode we talked about coverture, which was a woman was either essentially an extension of her father while she lived with her parents or

her husband after she got married and could not, she had no property rights. If you have no property rights, you can't own intellectual property and therefore you can't have a patent on anything because that by definition gives you intellectual property. And that was a huge deal for a while. In addition to that, because women were just generally mistreated,

they also didn't have access to schooling or education, especially technical education, that would kind of help those who were already inventive by nature to actually like blossom. Yeah, and what incentive is there too if you know that you can't get a patent for something, it's going to dull your inspiration to go out and try and invent something to begin with. Because what's the point? I mean, sure there's a point to inventing things because you might make the world better, but I think a lot of the drive for invention is also to do with like money. Having something in your name and making money on it. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, but yeah, having something in your name I think is a more sentimental way to put it for

sure. But it does deter it and I'm sure that was part of the whole name, I think, is a more sentimental way to put it for sure. But it does deter it, and I'm sure that was part of the whole thing. I mean, at the very least, women weren't seen as a group that should be encouraged to pursue these kinds of things, if not actively discouraged. And some women faced that. There was actually, I didn't know about this, but at the Seneca Falls Convention and then the suffrage movement that followed, there were a couple of competing groups that were like, we really need to put all of our time and effort behind suffrage, like giving women the right to vote. That needs to be our focus. We

need to stay laser focused on that because that's important. That's the one you think of when you think of the women's rights movement of the 19th century. But there's a other group, economic feminists, that were like, hey, you can have all the voting rights you want in the world, but if you don't have any means of being self-sufficient, if you need to be, it doesn't add up to a hill of beans. I think that was their slogan. Yeah. There was a woman named Charlotte Smith who,

like you said, she was like, you know, if we want to make real advances, then how about, and she eventually came to the invention part of it, but how about property rights and intellectual property rights? And then starting in 1875, she really focused in on inventors and invention and getting patents and getting the patent office to just simply recognize the fact that women were starting to get patents was, took nine years. It was in, I believe 1879, she moved to DC, started hassling the patent office to say, hey, here's all I want.

Just give me a list of women inventors. Period. I think it could inspire other women. We could publish it. So if you could just put together that list, you got the list, put it together for me, and they said, sure. Nine years later, they came back with women. Well, I think she packaged it, but women inventors to whom patents have been

granted and in 1888, she published it, but women inventors to whom patents have been granted. And in 1888, she published it, 500 copies worth. And that, I'm sure, was a big game changer as far as like, hey, look, it's happening, it's possible, you can do it. Yes. And while that did kind of open up the floodgates to women inventors seeing like, I can do this, there is like a path for me here to take toward inventing. There were women who did have patents in their name prior to this. It was just extremely rare.

Oh yeah. I mean, well, there were, uh, how many were there? Did I thought there was a list here? Uh, yeah. The only one that I've come across, I never saw the list of women inventors to whom patents have been granted. But I did see one, I think the first American woman to earn a patent in her name was named Mary Dixon Keys, K-I-E-S.

Yeah, she was the first one about 90 years earlier, but it supposedly took four clerks 10 days to put this list together. So, you know, it was a great thing that Charlotte Smith did. She had a vision that this could be a game changer and it seems like it probably was. Yeah. She was like, you can't hide the truth any longer with your walrus mustaches and your arm garters.

Give me that list. And they did. So should we highlight some of these? These are pretty great. Yes. All right. Let's do this. Well, let's take a break after this first one maybe.

Because I'm eager to talk about Marie Van Brittan Brown. She was awesome. She was born in 1922 in Jamaica, Queens, New York City, an African American woman who worked as a nurse and oftentimes was working late night shifts coming and going at odd hours. Her husband Albert Brown was an electronics technician. He had odd hours of work too. So how that shakes out is a lot of times, Marie Van Brittan Brown would be at home or come home late at night, be a little worried in, you know, what was a rough neighborhood at the time, as to who may become a knock-in on her door. So she invented, along with her husband's help, a what ended up being kind of the first

closed-circuit TV system and home security system in the 1960s. Yeah, it's pretty amazing. It was a bunch of different systems that they put together to create this one complete system, pretty much out of the box. It was like a complete security system, but they really had to work with a lack of technology at the time. Like, there was no way to pan the video camera that the whole thing was based on. So instead they had four separate peep holes and you could raise or lower the camera to the correct peep hole depending on the height of the person on the other side. I find that ingenious.

Great idea. I said CCTV, so there were television monitors. This camera fed into these monitors. So the idea is that you didn't actually have to go to the door. And even looking through a peephole can be dangerous. If someone knows you're just on the other side of the door at that peephole, they can get you. That's what it says in the patent application.

That's what it said. So she had a remote control that would let her unlock the door from a distance away and an emergency button a distance away that would alert the police or security in the apartment building. You had these four peep holes, the sliding camera, and two-way microphones so she could actually say like, who's, you know, basically what we have now with like ring doorbells and nest doorbells. Yeah. She thought of this idea and her husband helped her

pull it off in 19, what, 66? Yeah. And the idea of just how ubiquitous this has become, this is like such a commonplace everyday thing now, is kind of a testament to what she invented. Because at the time, this was completely revolutionary. There was nothing like this at the time. And she and her husband just invented it from whole cloth.

And I think they got patent number 3,482,037. That was the US patent for their closed circuit television security system. That's right. She also got an award from the National Scientists Committee. She was recognized in the Times, the paper of record. Sadly, she passed away in 1999 at the age of 76, but it was such a good idea that 32 subsequent patent applications referenced her original invention in their patent application.

So in other words, great idea. Yes, indeed. You want to take that break now? Let's do it. OK, we'll be right back. I can just check it all the way Stop you should know For so many people living with an autoimmune condition, the emotional toll is as real as the physical symptoms. Starting this May, join host, Martine Hackett

for season three of Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production, and Partnership with Arginics. From myasthenia gravis, or MG, to chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, also known as CIDP, Untold Stories highlights the realities of navigating life with these conditions from challenges to triumphs. In this season, Martine and her guests discuss the range of emotions that accompany each stage of the journey. Whether it's the anxiety of misdiagnosis or the relief of finding support and community,

nothing is off limits. And while each story is unique, the hope they inspire is shared by all. Listen to Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Babe. Yeah babe. Do you think they can hear us?

Yeah, those are mics. Guys, we are back. We are so excited. It is season two of your favorite New Girl Rewatch podcast. We have got a new season, we got a new name, and we got a brand new episode every week starting July 2nd. Yeah, I am so excited for you folks to check out this mess around.

When I say it's gonna get weird, I mean, it's gonna get weird. Just save it for the show. Okay, that's probably for the best. We've got some of your favorite people from the New Girl universe. We've got the creator and show runner, Liz Merriwether.

We got the Max Greenfield, Olivia Munn. We also have some of your least favorites, like Jake Johnson. Oh, more. No, no, I'm just saying, like, if you're listing off your favorites, like, he'd be... More! He's still a favorite. Hannah, what's up? We do have Jake Johnson, though.

Yeah. Listen to the mess around on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Do, do, do, do, do, do. We all know what that music means. Is somebody getting coronated? No, it's time for the Olympics in Paris. The opening ceremony for the 2024 Paris Games is coming on July 26.

Who are these athletes? When are the games they're playing? We may be looking for the sports experts to answer those questions, but we're not that. Well, what are we? We're two guys. I'm Matt Rogers. And I'm Bowen Yang. And we're doing an Olympics podcast? Uh, yeah. We're hosting the Two Guys, Five Rings podcast. You get the two guys, us, to start every podcast, then the five rings come after. Watch every moment of the 2024 Paris Olympics beginning July 26th on NBC and Peacock. And for the first time, you can stream the 2024 Paris games on the iHeartRadio app.

And listen to Two Guys, Five Rings on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you followed my story, you know I've grown up on reality TV. My mom, Jenny Rivera, is a music icon and my family can be wild at times. But now I get to tell my story. Join me, Jenica Lopez, for season three of the Overcomfort Podcast. Every week I push out of my comfort zone to have real and honest conversations. My mom was that rockin' foundation that everyone kind of relied on financially and I guess emotionally and it sucks because my mom was just more than like a paycheck.

Tune in as my guests and I get personal on todos los topics, the good, the vulnerable, and the cringy, with some advice along the way. What are your top three tips as a man? Like, the way you take care of yourself. I definitely would put manicure. First of all, when the nail is too long, cortate las uñas, aunque sea. Nice underwear. Really?

This season, we're all leveling up our confidence and we're on this journey together. Listen to Overcome our podcast with Yonica Lopez as part of the MyCultura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, Chuck. So up next, we're going to talk about a woman named Josephine Cochran, who kind of bucked the trend of inventors and was a wealthy socialite. And supposedly, the origin of her invention, the dishwasher, the first actual useful dishwasher came from a dismay that her servants washing her fine china that had been in her family since the 17th century

that it was getting chipped. And so at first she's like, give me that, I'll do this. And then she was like, oh, doing the dishes really sucks. There's gotta be a better way. And she put it off to the side for a while. But then her husband died and left her and her family in debt. And she decided to bring that idea off of the shelf and invent her way out of debt.

And that's exactly what she did. Yeah, for sure. You mentioned this was the first sort of really practical, usable dishwasher. There had been other attempts, but they're a little clunky, literally clunky. They were the kind of thing where like you turn a crank on the side and the dishes are jumbling around. They just break?

Yeah, well, they would break and chip and she was like, this is my original problem is that I have chip dishes here. So why don't we do something mechanical that you don't crank and move those dishes around? She very smartly, at least for her because she was making something for herself, she measured her dishes and made sure that each compartment fit the dishes very well and stayed in place. Like I said, I don't know that she had the idea that this is going to be a big mass-marketed product yet. She was just trying to solve her problem. And she had a motor, a motor-powered wheel above a boiler,

spraying soapy water on dishes, and got a patent on December 28, 1886. Yes. And can't you just imagine the person who came up with that hand-cranked dishwasher demonstrating it? You can just hear all the dishes breaking inside. And they keep cranking it. They're like, I'm sure they're fine in there. It's just what it sounds like when they're being washed. It rarely happens that way. Um, so the 1893 world's fair in Chicago, the white city, where the devil

in the white city is set, um, that was a huge, um, kind of like, uh, introduction of women inventors in the United States to the world. And, um, Josephine Cochran was one of them. She debuted her dishwasher at the 1893 world's fair and actually won a world's fair award. So I abbreviated this, um, I, and I don't remember exactly how it goes, but it has to do with mechanical construction, I, and I don't remember exactly how it goes, but it has to do with mechanical

construction, durability, and adapted to its line of work. Oh, great. So she knocked out all four of those boxes or else to put briefly best mech construct durable and adapt to its line of work and quote. It looks strange on a trophy, but hey, she earned it. She earned it and this little company that she established ended up becoming KitchenAid. It was after she died in 1913, but hey, pretty big feather in the old burial cap, I guess. Hotels and restaurants were the first ones to use it because even though it was super handy as a thing,

houses didn't have hot water heaters that could sustain that level of output at the time. So you had to have these big giant boilers and hotels and stuff that could handle that. But her time would come, and by the 1950s, when those hot water heaters got better, the home dishwasher became a pretty great thing. And I think anyone who ever has lived in a small apartment

or is apartment searching, a dishwasher was always very high at the top of my list. Because you didn't always get them. Yeah, so hats off Josephine Cochran. at the top of my list because you didn't always get them. Uh, yeah. So hats off Josephine Cochrane. You know, you got to, sometimes you rent a vacation house. They got two of those things. Oh yeah. Like two dishwashers, like full size dishwashers.

Yeah. If you rent like a house on the beach where, you know, they want those houses to sleep like 20 people. I gotcha. Sure. Uh, they'll have like sometimes two stoves, two dishwashers or two sets of washers and dryers and stuff.

It's pretty amazing. We got one of those ones that's like one full size washer, but broken into two drawers. So you can run your dishwasher, dishwasher like pretty frequently. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I like it. It works really well.

Yeah. I like them too. Uh, and we can thank Josephine Cochran for that. She originated that in a pretty direct way. I wonder who came up with the drawer style. I don't know. I just don't know. Yeah.

Do you want me to look it up? No, that's okay. Okay, good. Uh, cause we're going to talk about diapers, right? Yeah. We're going to move on to an inventor named Marion Donovan, who has a bunch of inventions to her name, but the one that she's most famous for is disposable diapers.

That's right. A lot of times necessity is a mother of invention. And at the time Marion Donovan was working at home as a homemaker. And this is after graduating from college and working for Vogue magazine. And after inventing things, even as a kid, I think in elementary school, she came up with a tooth powder that improved dental hygiene. So Marion Donovan just had one of those inventor's brains. Right. Uh, but while she was, uh, working as a, as a mom and at home, she was putting her little babies down right after she changed that diaper for a little nappy time.

And that baby would just be so happy. They would peel over the place. And with those cloth diapers at the time that you safety pin, that would leak out onto the bed sheets. So now she's got a wet baby or poopy baby, and you've got a wet or poopy diaper. those cloth diapers at the time that you safety pinned, that would leak out onto the bedsheets. So now she's got a wet baby or poopy baby, and you've got a wet or poopy diaper, and then you have wet or poopy sheets,

and that is no good, and she said, there's gotta be a better way. Yeah, and at the time there were something called rubber pants already, which is like a diaper made of really thick material that didn't breathe. So you would just pee yourself and your neglectful parent would leave you to wallow in your own urine and get diaper rash because that stuff wouldn't leak out. Yeah.

I think they went over the diaper. It was like a little pair of pants. Exactly. Yeah. And, but it would keep, it would prevent those leaks from happening, but that didn't mean you didn't still pee yourself. So you would get diaper rash as a result. Yeah.

That probably cut off some circulation to the, the calf and the waistline. Yeah. And then they would take you out in one of those death strollers that we were raised in and you'd spend some time on the jungle gym that was also related to death because not only were there like rusty edges, there were also hornet's nests in the end of every single one of those. That's right. So all you have to do is not vibrate those things and you're fine.

Those hornets are going to stay in place. Yeah. If you just hang from the monkey bars without moving. Dead still like a bat. You'll be fine. So she said nuts to all this, ran and grabbed a shower curtain, cut it actually to size, and was like this isn't just a big pair of rubber pants,

and sewed it on the outside of the cloth diaper, added some snaps so you didn't need those safety pins, and all of a sudden you had your cloth diaper that could fit inside of a fitted shower curtain, basically. Yeah, I think that's what she started out with was a shower curtain, but she landed ultimately on something like nylon parachute material. It could generally keep leaks in,

but it was much more breathable. And so this is not necessarily the disposable diaper. This is the thing that led to the disposable diaper. She marketed and called it boaters. To her, they looked like boats. I looked at these things, I did not see it, but

that's what they were called. It's a catchy, cute little name. And what it was, was like an improved rubber pants or rubber like diaper cover, because you still use the cloth diaper in there, but it would prevent leaks, but it was breathable enough that it didn't cause diaper rash. So this caught the attention of a lot of people.

Apparently it started being sold at Saks Fifth Avenue in 1949. Um, and the Kiko corporation came knocking and said, we'll give you $1 million for this idea. And Marion just laughed all the way to the bank. Yeah, because she said, you know what, that's 1949. And when these two dopes podcast about me in 2024, that's gonna be like 13 million bucks.

Yeah, which is pretty sweet for a woman who just invented something out of necessity. Yeah, I mean, it meant she was rich immediately. which is pretty sweet for a woman who just invented something out of necessity. Yeah, I mean, she was rich immediately. She got a patent for those boaters, 1951, and then went to work on what you were talking about, the disposable paper diaper, and did that, and it worked pretty well, but it wasn't a big commercial success because the diaper industry didn't get behind it. Why? because the diaper industry didn't get behind it. Because they were like, hey, you know, this is pretty good,

but all it really is doing is keeping you from having to wash cloth diapers over and over, and we don't see the value in that. Right. It's an unnecessary convenience. Get back to work. Exactly. It took 10 years, and finally Procter & Gamble

saw the usefulness in this and came up with Pampers. And the landfills of the world just shuttered in expectation. That's right. I said that Marion Donovan also invented some other stuff too. She invented something called the Zippity Doo. Very cool. Very cool. So it's like an elastic extension that you put onto a zipper so that you can zip your own dress much more easily.

Yeah. There's also something called the big hang up. I love that thing. Which came out in the late 60s or 70s based on the font used in the advertisement. But it essentially took your clothes and turned them the opposite way that you would normally hang them from a hanger. So you would hang it at like a rack from the, the, the, what is the thing that you hang the hangers on in a closet? The rail, the pole, the rod. Thank you.

And you would take those clothes and turn them the opposite way. So you could fit more clothes front to back and side to side. It was an enormous space saving measure. Yeah. I mean, it was basically a grid, like a metal grid, and you could hang anything. So it used paper, or not paper clips, so clothes pins.

Right. So you could hang your belts, you could hang a hat, you could hang a pair of boots, you could hang whatever you wanted. What else? And more, lots of things. But the point is, this one grid could hold like four pair of pants, two pair of boots, seven belts.

Are you sure you can hold a pair of boots up with some clothespins? That's what the ad said. All right, they must have been lightweight boots back then. Like maybe they're talking about like Aladdin shoes. Yeah, well, I think it speaks to the clothespins too. Sure. They're not like these woke clothespins these days.

So one other thing about Marion Donovan, if you weren't already smitten with her enough, at 41, she went back to school and received a degree in architecture from Yale and then used it to design her own house in Connecticut. Amazing. Agreed. Should we take another break?

I think it's time. All right, we're gonna come back and talk about grocery s sex right after this. Music For so many people living with an autoimmune condition, the emotional toll is as real as the physical symptoms. Starting this May, join host, Martine Hackett for Season 3 of Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production, and partnership with Argenics.

From myasthenia gravis, or MG MG to chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy also known as CIDP untold stories highlights the realities of navigating life with these conditions from challenges to triumphs. This season Martina and her guests discuss the range of emotions that accompany each stage of the journey whether it's the anxiety of misdiagnosis or the relief of finding support and community nothing is is off limits. And while each story is unique, the hope they inspire is shared by all. Listen to Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Babe. Yeah, babe. Do you think they can hear us? Yeah, those are mics. Guys, we are back. We are so excited. It is season two of your favorite New Girl Rewatch podcast. We have got a new season, we got a new name, and we got a brand new episode every week starting July 2nd.

Yeah, I am so excited for you folks to check out this mess around. When I say it's going to get weird, I mean, it's going to get weird. Just save it for the show. Okay, that's probably for the best. We've got some of your favorite people from the new girl universe. We've got the creator and show runner, Liz Merriwether. We got the Max Greenfield, Olivia Munn.

We also have some of your least favorites, like Jake Johnson. Lamorne. No, I'm just saying, if you're listing off your favorites, like he'd be. Lamorne. He's still a favorite. Just, Hannah, what's up? We do have Jake Johnson, though.

Yeah. Listen to the mess around on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Do do do do do do do. We all know what that music means. Is somebody getting coronated? No, it's time for the Olympics in Paris. The opening ceremony for the 2024 Paris Games

is coming on July 26th. Who are these athletes? When are the games they're playing? You may be looking for the sports experts to answer those questions, but we're not that. Well, what are we? We're two guys. I'm Matt Rogers.

And I'm Bowen Yang. And we're doing an Olympics podcast? Uh, yeah. We're hosting the Two Guys Five Rings podcast. You get the two guys, us, to start every podcast, then the five rings come after. Watch every moment of the 2024 Paris Olympics beginning July 26th on NBC and Peacock. And for the first time, you can stream the 2024 Paris games on the iHeartRadio app.

And listen to Two Guys, Five Rings on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My name is Curly. And I'm Maya. And welcome to the Super Secret Bestie Club's podcast. A super secret club where we talk about super secret things. Yeah, like secrets that are super.

That's what it is. In each episode, we'll talk about love, friendship, heartbreaks, men, and of course, our favorite secrets. Get in here. How's your spirit? My spirit is, it's poppin'. I was like, text your ex. I spirit is, it's poppin'. I was like, text your ex.

I'm like, touch the flame. Ego will have you crying over a closed door that had nothing behind it. And I say, be yourself, have fun, and have a good giggle. Listen to the Super Secret Bestie Club as part of the Michael Thurow Podcast Network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. ["My Kultura Podcasts"] All right, we promised talk of grocery sacks, and you might be thinking,

well, did someone invent the grocery sack? And was that person a woman and why is that a big deal? Because it's just a bag. No, that's not what we're going to tell you. We're going to tell you what a historian named Henry Petrosky told you in an article called The Evolution of the Grocery Bag. And a woman named Margaret Knight, who was another one of these kids who was inventing

things from a very, very preteen age. Yeah. She got a job at 12 at a loom or a fabric factory, textile mill. That's what they call it. Yeah. Cotton mill. And when you're using, when you're weaving, using

a loom in an industrial setting, there's these little torpedo, heavy wooden torpedo things with the steel tip on the end that you use to basically separate the fibers as you're weaving. And the whole thing moves very fast. And if you lose your grip on it, that thing that it's called a shuttle can go flying and injure your neighbor at the next loom.

Right. Yeah. Um, so Marion Knight got a job at one of these that thing that is called a shuttle can go flying and injure your neighbor at the next loom, right? Yeah. Um, so Marion Knight got a job at one of these mills, saw this, that how dangerous this could be. And before she turned 13, invented a way to prevent steel tip flying shuttles from flying off of the loom and injuring somebody that became distributed industry wide at all textile mills that became like a standard part of any loom and injuring somebody that became distributed industry-wide. At all textile mills, it became like a standard part of any loom.

She wasn't even 13 yet. Yeah. Also, pre-teen, the age of 12, she got a patent for a device that automatically just stops an industrial machine if something gets caught up in it. So, I mean, that every industrial machine on the planet now stops when your arm gets caught or when something goes wrong and something gets caught in the machinery, they all stop. And that is because of Margaret Knight.

Yep. So we finally, after years and years of this, of coming up with great ideas and implementing them, she's like, I should start to look into patenting these things. And she got a job ultimately at Columbia Paper Bag Company in Springfield, Massachusetts. And this is where her greatest patent came along. There were paper grocery sacks already, but they were kind of envelope-like. They didn't do the job very well. Like, you know, when you buy a greeting card and they put it in that bag that doesn't really do

anything, it's just an envelope, it's like a cover for your greeting card to go home with. Okay. Yeah. You know what I'm talking about? Sure. Okay. That's what grocery bags were like, paper

grocery bags. And she said, we can do way better than this. If we just make a square bottom grocery sack, it'll stand up on its own. And as you put stuff into it, the weight will be distributed and you can carry so much more stuff. Yeah. People were putting canned goods in basically envelopes. Like total morons.

Like total morons. She came along and not only figured out that that was a good idea, figured out how to do it. In 1870, she built a wooden machine that would cut and glue, fold and glue these things and manufacture them. She was working on a heavier duty or prototype made out of iron, and some jerk comes along. And bald face steals her idea.

Like he had seen this thing before. His name was Charles Annen, A-N-N-A-N. And he had seen it a few months earlier, went to file a patent, she filed a claim against him, a patent interference suit. And he was like, there's no way that this lady came up with this thing. And she came into court with just reams of the most detailed blueprints and

spelled out exactly how and when she invented it. And they went, you're wrong. And she's right, buddy. Yeah. That thieving SOB Charles Annan, I couldn't see anything about what became of him aside from losing that patent suit. Um, and something he should have gotten some sort of come up, he shouldn't have just been let off

the hook for, like you said, bald faced stealing and idea or an invention that shouldn't be. Unpunished, you know, but I guess we'll have to go dig them up and have a talking to you with them. That's the best we can hope for at this time. We can besmirch his name. I guess, I guess we kind of are, but we're not besmirching. I think besmirching indicates a certain level of like exaggeration or, you know,

Oh, okay. I'm, that's just my interpretation. I don't know if it's correct or not. I've never read the definition. So you're probably right. So she won that patent claim and won the patent for the device in 1871 and went on to be awarded more than 20 patents in her lifetime.

So hats off. Amazing again. Yep, way to go Margaret Knight. Boo Charles Ann and boo. So let's move on to the Windchill Wiper because this is a pretty fun one. It was a woman from Alabama, her name was Mary Anderson, born in 1866, a long, long time ago, long before the car came along.

She was visiting New York City, and she was on the, I guess they were street cars, and she was like, these guys are driving around in rain and snow with their head out the side window because they can't see. They look like Ace Ventura, Pet Detective. And they would have to stop and get out and wipe the snow off of the trolley windshield like every so often. That was part of the trip.

That was part of driving a trolley at the time. And she said there has to be a better way. So she took this experience back to Alabama and she invented the first windshield wiper, essentially. It was pretty clever as a matter of fact. Yeah, she said this thing wipes windshields. I just don't know what to call it. So there was a spindle, right?

So like kind of like a spool, but with a point on it, sticking out of the windshield and attached to it was an arm with a squeegee on it. And the other side of the spindle that went into the car was attached to a cord that had a handle in the car. And when you pulled the handle, it operated this spring mechanism that made that windshield wiper go back and forth and it would reset.

And then the next time you needed to clear off your windshield, you it would reset. And then the next time you needed to clear off your windshield you just pulled it. No stopping, no getting out, no sticking your head out of the car like Ace Ventura. It could all be done within the car. And in I think very short order, Cadillac, I think 10 years after she got the patent for this, Cadillac started making windshield wipers standard on their cars starting in 1922. So that was all Mary Anderson. Yeah, absolutely.

It was more like 20 years, but still, it was the first thing to roll off the line as something you didn't have to ask for. What do you call those, options? Yeah, it wasn't an option, it was standard. That's right. It was standard. 19 years later. Uh, and she also, um, would go on to, um, build and manage an apartment building in

Birmingham, made some good money doing that and said, I'm going to California. And she went out to, uh, Fresno and operated a cattle ranch at a vineyard in her later years. Yes. Unfortunately, though, on the way out there, she got a punch in the nose and it started to flow. She thought for a second that she might be sinking, but she made it out. Okay. Oh, man. Oh, it's on the tip of my tongue. Led Zeppelin. Okay. Okay. It was one of those, that was like it was rattling

in my head and I heard it and I heard it. Oh God, that's frustrating when those never come, you know? I'm glad that it came then. I just saw this weather person who does the weather on the news and I guess is a Pearl Jam fan and inserts Pearl Jam lyrics into his weather report. Oh yeah. On the reg.

It was pretty fun. What news? National? Local? I think it was a local news. I didn't catch the city. I mean, maybe Seattle. Oh, gotcha.

So you saw this on like, uh, like the internet. Yeah. Yeah. It was on the internet. I wasn't just watching the news. I didn't know if you were like talking about an Atlanta news person. I'm like, why aren't you telling everybody who? No, no, no, no.

I don't, as we know, I don't watch the local news, but what I do enjoy occasionally on tour is watching local news wherever I am, if it happens to be on. Sure. I don't seek it out, but it's kind of fun when you hear about, you know, what's going on in a car wreck incks that happen nearby. Yeah, exactly. A car wreck in Boston. Very fascinating. Right.

Everyone was okay though. That's good. That's usually how it pans out on the news. Can we talk about car heaters? Yeah, Chuck, I think this might be the last one, right? I think so. Okay. Well, let's talk car heaters because Margaret Wilcox, Margaret A.

Wilcox, my apologies, invented the car heater. As you know it today, the car heater decades before there was such a thing as cars. Why? Yeah. She invented the car heater for railway cars because when she came along and reached, I think her late twenties, this would have been

the 1850s, 1860s, rail travel was still pretty, um, no frills for most people. Like you see that one rail car that the millionaire has and it's like all outfitted in beautiful like velvet and there's oil lamps and everything. Um, most people's experience was nothing like

that. And in fact, um, especially during in fact, especially during like cold months and cold climates, you would be freezing in the railway car. And Margaret Wilcox once stood up and said, enough, enough of being cold. Let's get warm everybody. And they said, invent it Margaret. And she said, I will, I'll be right back.

They said, what is warm even? We forgot. This was in Chicago. So, you know, she was, had plenty of experience in the cold. I cannot imagine how cold it was. Oh man. I mean, it's like now, but maybe colder with no break. No heat. You just stayed cold.

Yeah. I mean, people's roofs collapse in Chicago in the winter because it gets so snowy. And that would indicate it gets stayed cold. Yeah, I mean, people's roofs collapse in Chicago in the winter because it gets so snowy. And that would indicate it gets pretty cold. Yeah, absolutely. So she's like, hold on a minute. I know that they're shoveling coal up there. Those guys are sweating up there in the engine room.

We're freezing our tokes off back here. What do we got to do to get some of that heat back here? And shockingly, no one to get some of that heat back here? And shockingly, no one had ever thought of that. The fact that there was heat onboard that train in spades. And all you had to do was send it back to the, to the, uh, what do you call them? Passenger cars. Yeah. So that's essentially what she did.

She figured out how to pipe engine heat back to the passengers There were some problems with this invention the the train car heater one was there was no way whatsoever to regulate this heat I mean, I imagine you could open the windows when you needed to but it would just get hotter and hotter and hotter in the rail car And that was kind of a problem, but I think it was still preferable to the cold. Yeah. And, uh, now is where I introduce you to my first car is a 16 year old. Talked about it before 1968 Volkswagen Beetle.

Sure. And if you ever rode in those old Volkswagen's, you know, they had heat that I like to refer to as the ankle burners. Right. I remember that. Same concept as Margaret Wilcox's heat idea. Those old VWs would just pump heat straight from that rear engine out to these little vents on the floorboard right by your ankles. And there was, at least in the 68 that I had, there was no way of regulating it. I think at a 75 later on that had like a little lever that you could, you know, bring in a little bit

of the cool air to. It just opened the passenger door? Yeah, exactly. But I had a hole in my floorboard too, so that helped. Yeah. I'm sure you said that, and I'm sure when you've told me that before, I told you that my dad had a hole in his floorboard of his Malibu when we were kids.

So reckless. Just sit there and watch the world go by under your feet. That's right. So, Margaret Wilcox's idea was implemented in train cars. More importantly, when automobile engineers came along and started enclosing cars, because you know, the first cars were all open. There was no roof. Yeah. As they started doing close and they're like, we could control the climate in here. We need some sort of climate control mechanism. And they looked around and they found Margaret Wilcox's patent for trans

women in the United States, and they were like, oh, we can control the climate in here. We need some sort of climate control mechanism. And they looked around and they found Margaret Wilcox's patent for transmitting engine heat to the passenger compartment. And over time, they kind of refined it and it got more and more advanced to where now there's hot coolant that's heated by the engine that transfers that heat to the cabin air.

When you turn the heat on, even more amazingly, you can adjust the heat, the temperature, by letting in colder outside air without even opening your windows. That's right. And she got a patent for this thing. 1893, she received a patent. Obviously, they were, women were able to get patents by

that point and she was on a pretty short list. At least a hundred. Was there a hundred? Yeah, remember a hundred women who had the list of a hundred women who were inventors that had patents that the patent office created in 1880? Was it called a hundred women who were inventors that had patents that the patent office created in 1880. Oh, was it called a hundred women? I guess not, no, you're right.

I wonder what the list was. I gotta get that list. I mean, it had to be decent size. It took four clerks 10 days to compile the list, but I don't know how many on it. Yeah, but they had to go through all the patents period though to get that list, so. Yeah, yeah.

Who knows, I don't know. Well, anyway, she was on that list eventually. That's right. Actually, that's not even true either. The list came out a couple of years before she got her patent, five years before. So it's completely moot. But there is one other mention about her too, that I love. She had some other ideas that she patented,

unfortunately not in her name, because this was before women could have had property rights. Um, for a combination clothes dishwasher. Oh yeah. Yeah. I don't know if it was the same time, maybe the same time, if so, that is really gross, but it's still also very clever. Yeah. Like you don't want your champagne glass being washed next to your bloomers. No, especially if they're soiled because you drank too much

champagne. Oh gosh. You got anything else? I got nothing else. Are you sure? Yeah. Okay, well since Chuck affirmed that he has nothing else, I think everybody it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this misunderstanding from episode titles. Okay. And I should say that we had a wonderful young woman in maybe DC. I think it was DC. That said that she was a bird enthusiast

and that she was all excited about the cranes episode and then realized it was construction cranes. Mm-hmm. That's why we've titled things like our Nirvana episode I think it was Nirvana not the band. Sure. So we do stuff like that we try to be clear but not always. Sometimes we're purposely obtuse. Yeah because like you might want the bird crane and then be delightfully surprised or disappointed. Right, exactly. Hey guys, I'm in and out, but OG, all the time,

Stuff You Should Know has stayed with me as a weekly listen ever since I heard the Jellyfish app. I consider myself well-versed in the English language and American pop culture, but every now and then, titles of the episodes set me up for quite the surprise. I should probably read the descriptions for the episodes. Yes But I'm gonna listen regardless. So what's the point? For example hobo signs I thought it was about handwritten signs that hitchhikers make or someone saying will work for food or The end is messed

What I think it was probably supposed to be the end is messed. What? I think it was probably supposed to be the end is near. Yeah. And it was some weird AI. Auto-correct. Auto-correct. I like the end is messed though. That should be a t-shirt.

Sure. I like that. To my delight, as a UX designer, it was about iconography and communication. Even better than those cardboard signs. The last episode about conductors... Oh, even better than those cardboard signs. The last episode about conductors, oh I know what's coming, thought it was about train conductors in the tagline, what the heck is going on there, was referring to their mindset when they're patrolling in the aisle and train station. Like an American equivalent of the

British, what's all this then? I was also hoping that it was not about electric conductors because I really wanted a train episode. Turned out I was wrong once. Thanks for all the great knowledge. That is from Morten Lagarud in Norway. Great name, Morten. Thank you for listening to us all these years. Yeah, have we done one on just trains? listening to us all these years. Yeah, have we done one on just trains? I don't think so, no. That seems like a big, big one.

Yeah, that's a big ASMR-Sci too. Oh, sorry everybody. Hopefully not a misophonia-Sci. Yeah. Yeah, well, we could try to do one on trains sometimes. We just have to figure out how to condense it. Yeah. Can't get into electric trains, I'll tell you that, by God.

No way. Well, if you want to be like Morton and let us know some hilariousness that comes from our titles or something we said or just something you thought of, we love hearing stuff like that, you can send it to us in an email to stuffpodcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. For so many people living with an autoimmune condition like myasthenia gravis or chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, the emotional toll can be as real as the physical

symptoms. That's why, in an all new season of Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition from Ruby Studio and Argenics, host Martine Hackett gets to the heart of the emotional journey for individuals living with these conditions. To find community and inspiration on your journey, listen now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hear insightful, entertaining discussions on today's important health and wellness topics on the Health Discovered podcast from WebMD. Through in-depth conversations with experts, Health Discovered covers everything

from tips for healthier living to the latest on therapy and mental health. My goal is to really destigmatize mental health treatment and looking at it from a whole health perspective. Physical health and mental health can be intertwined. Listen to WebMD Health Discovered on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Guys, we are back.

We are so excited. It is season two of your favorite New Girl Rewatch podcast. We have got a new season. We got a new name. We've got some of your favorite people from the New Girl universe. We've got the creator and show runner, Liz Merriwether. We got the Max Greenfield, Olivia Munn. We also have some of your least favorites,

like Jake Johnson. Lamorne. Hannah, what's up? We do have Jake Johnson though. Yeah. Listen to the mess around on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.