The word  "Inventor" often brings images of men such as Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell to mind. And yet, women were responsible for many of the inventions we use daily. Windshield wipers, coffee filters, dishwashers, the circular saw, the language used by modern computers, and even WIFI itself were all invented by women.

February is National Women Inventors Month, an excellent time to honor these women and look at just a few of their inventions.

Those who hate washing dishes by hand can thank Josephine Cochrane (1839 - 1913) for envisioning a machine that used pressurized water to do the job. After being widowed, she supported herself by marketing her invention to hotels. "You cannot imagine what it was like in those days for a woman to cross a hotel lobby alone," she later recalled. "I had never been anywhere without my husband or father. The lobby seemed a mile wide. I thought I should faint at every step, but I didn't-and I got an $800 order as my reward." Exhibited at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, her dishwasher was a sensation and soon found in kitchens worldwide.

Imagine driving in the pouring rain with windshield wipers. That was what Mary Anderson experienced on a streetcar during a visit to New York City in 1902. The streetcar conductor had to open the vehicle's front windows to see through the downpour. Returning home to Alabama, Mary created a device that used a lever inside the car to control a rubber blade on the windshield. Initially, car manufacturers saw no value in her invention, but 20 years later, Cadillac included her windshield wipers on all of their cars. Today no one would think of driving without them.
Trying to brew a decent pot of coffee completely exasperated German housewife Melitta Bentz (1873-1950). Percolators often scorched the drink, espresso machines left grounds in it, and the linen bag filters of the day were unsanitary. Then Melitta thought of taking blotting paper from her son's school notebook and nesting it in a brass pot perforated with a nail. Within a year of patenting her device, she set up a company that manufactured and sold thousands annually. As Bentz improved her filters, they became the industry standard. A century later, her company-the Melitta Group-is still making coffee, coffee makers, and filters.

Whenever we type words for an online search, we can thank Grace Hopper (1906-1992). When this mathematician and US Navy reserve officer began her computer science career, all programs were written in numerical code. In 1953, she proposed writing programs in words rather than symbols. "They told me computers could only do arithmetic," she later remembered. Nevertheless, she continued working on an English-language compiler, resulting, three years, later in FLOW-MATIC-the first computer programming language to use word commands. She also demonstrated how programs could be written in word-based languages other than English. She later co-invented COBOL, the first universal programming language used in business and government.

Who created Wifi technology? The answer might shock you. Read "Brains and Beauty" in this issue of "The Shopper."