43: Did you know a woman invented this?

Celebrating Women Inventors: Pioneers of Change

In this episode, we delve into the remarkable contributions of women inventors who revolutionized the world. From Mary Anderson’s windshield wiper and Josephine Cochran’s dishwasher to the unnoticed yet impactful paper coffee filter by Melitta Bentz, we highlight how these innovations transformed daily life. The episode also touches on the wider social changes brought by bicycles and household appliances, and honors the tireless efforts of influential figures like Sarah Breedlove (Madame C.J. Walker) and the birth control pill's activists. Tune in for an inspiring journey through history's overlooked female trailblazers and their groundbreaking inventions.

Other episodes mentioned: 6.Bessie Blount and 21. Grace Hopper

00:00 Saturday Pajamas and Morning Banter
01:45 A Whistle-Stop Tour of Women Inventors
04:02 The Windshield Wiper: Mary Anderson's Story
09:45 The Paper Coffee Filter: Melitta Bentz's Innovation
14:17 The Dishwasher: Josephine Cochran's Invention
19:42 Introduction to Sarah Breedlove
20:15 Madame CJ Walker's Early Life
22:21 Founding a Haircare Empire
24:46 Philanthropy and Legacy
26:44 Impact of the Bicycle on Women's Independence
29:52 Household Innovations and Women's Workforce Participation
34:55 The Birth Control Pill Revolution
41:30 Encouragement for Future Innovators
42:49 Conclusion and Call to Action

Transcript

audio1767085896: 0:07

Do you wanna see my Saturday pajamas that I've bought? Especially for the occasion? Yeah, you can see them. Oh my God's ghost. That is so cute. They're ghost themed. I love it. Yeah, I absolutely love it. Oh, well this is because, jam has ruined every pair and I was like, I can't. I can't go and puff with these pajamas like holes ripped. Oh my god. And, and the leg. But they're so expensive. And I was like, no, you can't, you can't justify that one's got a knee missing. One's got like the back of the thigh missing. It's just all jam related. All jam related. All jam related. Oh my God. They're, it's so annoying. It's so annoying, isn't it? So I was like, look, go to Asda as just fairly cheap. And I was like, just see what's around. And then they had all the beautiful ones and I was like, Nope, nope. You can't spend 25, 30, 40 quid on some pajamas'cause they won't last long. Yeah. So I've gone for cheap but themed. So I love it. I absolutely love it. Well, there's still time. Maybe I'll try to join you, but in all like I'll be turning up with like a mismatched dog eating. Right. Let's do this. Yes, shall we? So Good morning, Vicki. Good. Are you ready to morning in? Yay. It's morning. It's very rare record in the morning. I kind like it. I know how good skin looks. Oh, I did. I saw myself briefly and thought, no, no, no. Stop it. Stop that. Look so tired. I'm wide awake. I promise you. It's just my face. Stop it. Right. So today we've got something a little bit different, which I hope, uh. You were indulge. Yeah. That's good. Me with, so, uh, my, my mom and I were talking and she was telling me this story about one of our family members who, I'm gonna say it nicely, was not very progressive in her outlook, but my mom and this family member were looking at some machinery, some device or another, and it was just one of these things that was perfectly suited to its task. It was super simple, really elegant. And this family member said to my mom, that must have been invented by a woman. And I thought, oh, that's really interesting. So it kind of, kind of like got some cogs turning in my head and I thought we'd go for something a little different. And instead of a, a deep dive into one lady, I thought we would. Take a little bit of inspiration from you and Simon talking about, uh, lovely Bessie Blunt or mm-hmm. Uh, Grace Hopper. And I've written down those are the sixth and the 21st episode. So if inventors are your thing, check'em out. But today we're gonna go on a little whistle stop tour of some of the ways that the world is better, thanks to women inventors. I'm so excited. Yes. Something different. Let's do it. I thought we would also have a little look at some of the inventions that have made life easier for women. Yeah, so a little bit of, a little bit from both sides. Uh, the sources for today are the National Inventor's Hall of Fame website. The Blog, A Mighty Girl, which everyone I like that blog does and should know. Yeah, it's super, yeah, it's a really good blog, isn't it? Yeah, it's really upbeat and yeah. Super, super. Um, the National Women's History Museum and Silence Daily Magazine websites, the Weisman Institute of Science and the a MA Journal of Ethics. Oh, I found myself dipping into that. Why not? Um, so yeah, after putting you through your paces in Miriam mi zani, there are not many quotes today. So in the spirit of your week off, you, you, you'll get the odd bit, but it's not gonna be like a six page quote about, but I'm gonna learn much, some hyperbolic geometry, So our first stop today is the humble but valuable windshield wiper and, yes. Yeah, this lady's on my list. Oh, yeah. Because, um, it's, it's just, of course, we need a, a windscreen wiper. I know. This is what I, it's crazy these stories, because these women's lives weren't especially well documented in most cases, unlike Bessie Blo or Grace Hopper, these are just like little. A little peek a little window into their world. So I struggled to find a full episode about any one of them, and I thought this was a way to like grab them all, scoop'em all up and bring them all in. So you will know then that the lady in question is named Mary Anderson. Yes. And this is as recently as 1902. Um. Cars were becoming more common. And Mary Anderson, uh, riding along in a street car in the city in a snowstorm, uh, noticed that the driver was having to literally reach his arm out the window, lean his whole body out at times, and scoop the sleet and snow away to allow him to drive safely. So everyone in the streetcar was freezing. He was freezing and wet, and it wasn't especially effective. And so seeing more and more cars on the road, she realized that this problem was pretty universal and she got to work. Mm-hmm. She knew that she needed some specialist knowledge to help her with this task. So she hired a designer and together they came up with a little spring loaded arm that could be operated from inside the car without opening the windows. Really straightforward. I've got a schematic drawing that was part of their patent application. It useful here at that, and you can see just this little lever and it operates a little spring and whoop whoop, there goes the windscreen wiper across, across the windshield. What I found really interesting about this story is that it was a passenger that fixed the problem, like regardless of gender rather than the driver. Like the driver's like, I'm fine, I've got this, some sort, ah, I've got an arm. It'll be fine. Yeah. She maybe she was colder than him. Maybe she was like, why is there a draft? But, and he's concentrating. Yeah, that's it. He's, he's solving the immediate problem of driving safely and she's like, we can make this better. That's a really good point. Was it in New York as, or did I dream it was, yeah, it was in New York. She was from Alabama where they don't get a lot of snow. You may know, but in that moment. Perhaps because it was out of the ordinary for her to see someone driving in a snowstorm. She came up with this solution. Yeah. Uh, she did patent it. Uh, hence the schematic drawing. She tried to sell it under license to a Canadian car manufacturer and they turned her away. They said it was of no value and distract of no value drivers. Sorry. It was gonna make driving dangerous, which is Oh, it was gonna make it worse. Oh my God. It's nuts. It snows so much in Canada. I'm like, what are you even thinking? Ah, but, um, eventually, un unfortunately for her, just after her patent expired in 1920,'cause it was apparently an 18 year to help you with that, Alexis could involved Alexa. Alexa, I dunno what that's about. Alexa, sorry about that. Right. That's a whole other invention angle that we should explore. But anyway, um, her patent expired. Cadillac, who you may be familiar with, then made windshield wipers standard in all of their vehicles. They definitely knew. They definitely knew that that patent was gonna explode. That really piss me off. They didn't me off. Didn't just stumble on it one day. They, we just happened to decide. Yeah. They wanted it. They knew they wanted it. They thought it was a great idea. As did the Canadians, I think. I think she was only told no.'cause she was a woman. And then the second it ran out, they were like, great standard. Oh, that's, that's super progress. Not even like a luxury. They were like, no, this is a necessity. That's so annoying. That's really infuriating. Yeah. She, so yes, she came up with this thing that is still standard safety equipment. Yes. Now largely unchanged. Basically, yeah. The fundamentals is spring. That's kind of still how it works now. She, had her own version of a happy ending, I suppose, because she, um, was a switched on individual and a hardworking person and saw opportunities She owned and managed an apartment building. She operated a cattle ranch. She had a vineyard over in California. So she didn't profit from the invention, but she at least had satisfaction of knowing she was correct and making her success in other areas. Yeah. Um, and she's so entrepreneurial. Like you said, she had her fingers in so many pies. It might not have, I think, affected her in their way. I guess I would, she would still be annoyed, but she's probably like. The greater good, I guess. Yeah. Like, be pragmatic. There's nothing I can do about this one. Move on. But yeah, it's a shame that it came to that. So how long was the patent then? 18 years. That's so 18 years apparently, which is really random, but, um, I expect there would've been an opportunity to renew. I don't know how these things worked. Yeah. And she was like, well, they're saying no. So what's the point? Nobody wants it. Let it go. And then hay pressed and then actually they did want it everywhere. They didn't wanna pay her. Yeah. Gum bags. So the rest of the inventions that we're gonna talk about today had, a happier outcome for their inventors. So we've got our anger out good and early. Um, yeah. Moving away from the windshield wipers, but still in the same kind of time period is, something I rely on for daily life and. I happen to notice when I got this thing out of the cupboard the other day that literally the thing the version we're about to talk about is the version that I buy, and it has the inventor's picture. Her portrait is drawn on the box. Oh, exciting. So I've got a little picture of it there. This is exciting. Uh, it is the humble paper coffee filter, which apparently around 1908 there was a housewife who was making her coffee, a German lady, and she decided that there had to be a different way because the, the way that people were brewing coffee in their homes in those days involved putting, boiled grounds of coffee. A percolator, which would bubble the coffee up and it would leave it full of grounds and it would be quite bitter and over brewed. Mm-hmm. Or they would leave it to, um, sit in a cloth or a linen bag. Yeah. But that wasn't like a Muslim thing, like a Muslim. It wasn't especially hygienic. It often had old, um, kind of, oh, the word rancid is coming to mind and I'm working hard to avoid it, but old spoiled coffee oils and that residue would affect the taste. So, Malita, her name is, had this brilliant, nice is, isn't it? She,, took a piece of blotting paper from her kids' school notebook and a little brass pot. Pinpointed a lot of holes into the paper with a little nail. And then she used that to make a kind of coffee filter. But what I super like, you understand how coffee is made. I don't know why I'm explaining this to you, but we take this for granted now. Yeah. What I think is super cool is that she did this invention and her husband went, yeah, that's pretty good. And the two of them founded this company. Uh, right away they thought we're gonna sell this stuff. They went out with it to trade fairs, they went door to door and sold these things to their neighbors. And like they just really organically, slowly believed in their own product and took any humble win that they could get. And here we are a hundred years later and that company she founded is still a family business. Now it's still her family and her, um. Not ancestors. What's the opposite of ancestors? Her offspring. That, yeah. Runs the place now. Delightful. Happy story. I love that. I thought that was quite cheerful and yeah, the box picture is there with her little face and I'm like, thank you. And people obviously had the same villain about her that the, the. It was a bit weird tasting and she could make it better. Right. I mean, I'm a passionate coffee person, so I'm, I totally get it. If it's not right, like why bother So good for her. And when was this? That was in Germany. In Germany. Germany. Resin in Dresden. So see, I wouldn't have thought that was a German invention either. I was thinking like Italian, you know, like coffee based places. Yeah. But yeah, I know. It's not like, I don't think, obviously Germany doesn't grow and um, roast coffee in, in my head, but it's a massive, drinking coffee is a massive part of the culture. Yeah. So she thought this is just before the war. I guess this could be better. Yeah. Well, not really. Is it 1908? Oh World War, sort of in the runup to the World Wars. But her business, and I mean, being based in Dresden, obviously that would've. Had a significant impact. Yeah, huge impact on her, but the company stayed viable through all those times and didn't change hands. That just goes to show the strength of the idea and the faith that people had in her. Production of it. They come pre perforated now. Oh well. But the fundamentals are, yeah. I insist on pre perforated coffee filters. What can I say? Oh, I love that. And I love that her husband was like, yeah, let's go. Let's do it. This is great. This is a real thing. We're gonna do this and like put her name on it as well. Malita not his name. Isn't that delightful? That's. That is really, really cool. Um, we shouldn't be praising that, but you know, it's the world we live in. But in the time, well, it's, and in that time especially he, a lot of people would've been like, I've got it from here. Oh, isn't that cute? You had a good idea. The family name. I'll take that now. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, we are moving on. We're staying within the kitchen and we are going to talk now about the dishwasher. Okay. Uh, dish washing machine. This is, I think, a little bit less charming for reasons that will become clear. Mm-hmm. But we have a wealthy socialite called Josephine Cochran, and she had lots of lavish dinner parties and she had the damnedest trouble with her servants chipping her China. So I'm immediately, I'm like, let's hound Yuck Josephine. But what she, she, she turns it around. Vicki. So stick with us because. She kind of saw this problem of dishes being chipped and realized I won't be the only one having this trouble. And especially at banquet Halls, hotels, you know, massive restaurants. This is gonna be an issue. Expensive replacing stuff, isn't it? It is. And if it's something special. So she thought, okay, there has to be a safer way to do this. Other people will want this too. So she had this really clear idea there. There should be, there must be a machine where you can secure dishes in a rack and spritz them with water until they're clean. And she sort of. Couldn't believe it didn't exist already because it was so obvious that it would be. Mm-hmm. It would solve the problem. And I guess, uh, the quote that she has is that she told her friends, if nobody else is going to invent this dish washing machine, I'll do it myself. And she did. No, to me it is so like, wacky races, you know, I mean like, or like, um, those cartoons where like Wallace and Grommet, where it's like an arm that comes out Oh, like a Groove Goldberg machine? Yeah. All this crazy contraption. Yeah. Well, in my head, that's what it should be. I kind of think that's how it went down, because she, so she herself being, you know, a socialite with no hands-on experience of engineering or building anything, or even washing dishes. She didn't even know how to wash dishes. Isn't that interesting yet? She was like, this is a need. Yeah. Yeah. There's gotta be a better way. So she didn't have the insights that would make her mm-hmm. Able to build that kind of contraption. But what happened was her husband sadly died, right. And she found herself in debt. Mm. And thought, this is my hail Mary. This is the thing that could solve this issue. I have this idea. I'm gonna hire a mechanic called George Butters. And George Butters and Josephine went out to the shed behind her house and they built, that's soy. This contraption they like you're talking about wacky races. This situation, they got wires and bits of steel and they, you know, like old corsetry, they built this stuff up into racks that would hold her plates. Mm-hmm. She measured them all cup saucers, everything. Put that inside of. Like a truck wheel, which then went inside of a copper boiler. And then he hooked it all up to a motor that could turn the wheel while this hot soapy water sprayed up from underneath to get at the dishes. Oh. And by the time she raised a patent, there's a photograph here of the device that she came up with. Oh my God. It's lovely. It's so, it's so, um, decorative. And where does this soap art novo, it comes in from underneath, I think you feed it into a little trap door underneath things. Okay. So it's just, again, not a million miles away from what we are using today when we use a dishwasher. Well, I have never owned a dishwasher, Cara. This is, oh, well this is new territory for me, dishwasher life. But one thing I have looked into is like, countertop. Dishwashers. That's what she talking there. But they weren't like that. That's what they do. Yeah, that is, you have to hook it up to the tap and whatever. I can see that shape of one in your kitchen. Actually, that is very elegant. The time is now. I could suit you. Yeah. It's a sign. So unlike our, poor, unfortunate inventor of the windshield wiper, Josephine got a patent filed and her company was successful at both manufacturing and selling the dishwashers. Uh, mostly for commercial use at the time. Mm-hmm. People weren't buying this kind of thing for the home for reasons we'll sort of talk about in a bit. But, her company rode that wave of commercial. Success and carried on into the times when domestic use of appliances like this became prevalent and is now the company we know as KitchenAid. So if you go into their, I'm sorry. Seriously? Yep. Yep. They, they formed out of a couple of different groups, but her company was one of the founding, one of the, one of the founding partners. So she is, that's exciting. She's listed as a founder in their documentation. Oh, that's so cool. Recognition and success in this case, which is lovely to see. And again, business minded. She is like, okay, well I need to leverage other people then I need to work as a team here. Oh, very cool. Absolutely. I, there are skills I don't have. Yeah. I'm going to go out and get them. Um, keep that in your mind, that spirit of what I can do, what I can't do, being business minded and astute because we're now moving, um. Into a different area entirely. Mm-hmm. Um, with a lady called Sarah Breed Love. That was her, her born name. Is she familiar to you? Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. On the list. I love it. Love it, love it, love it. Because there was a film about her as well recently, I think. Oh, delightful. I think so. I did not know that. Oh, he's that lady? Octavia. Octavia Spencer. Oh, how cool. I think she plays her. I love her. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And she, you know, she's amazing. Oh, that's a good fit. That's a good fit on that. I'm gonna have to check that out. You will know then that,, Sarah Breedlove was born just shortly after the abolition of slavery in the American states and, had a really tough life. She was orphaned super young. She moved in with her sister and was working in cotton fields from childhood, despite slavery being abolished, these awful work conditions persisted. She ended up marrying when she was 14 to get out of her sister's house because her, her sister's husband was abusive. It's just a terrible start.. Her husband died. So she was widowed, super young. Young. She had a tiny baby, a 2-year-old daughter. And between the physical and emotional strain of the life she'd had to that point, she in common with a lot of African American women, had hair, hair loss, and hair damage. Oh. So it was stress related. In her case, that was a factor in a lot of people's cases, a lack of running water, a paucity of decent products. There was all these chemical factors that were happening with Afro hair, which is already quite sensitive, where women were experiencing hair breakage and hair damage. She ultimately went to, work for. This company called the great, wonderful Hair Grower, which was just so of the time, like so of the time can imagine the font, the snake oily kind of vibes. Yeah. I think the thing is though, it seems like it worked because she used it, it worked for her. She went to work for the company. And the company in of itself was pretty unique because it was founded by a black owner and they made a real point of wanting to have a sales team that was comprised of black women because they were like, you know what works? People will believe you. You're the best person when you say, this worked for me. Let, let's go out there. Already, you know, something really interesting taking place and really, really special taking place. Sarah Breedlove then married a guy, called Charles Joseph Walker, and as you've said, she rebranded herself to Madame CJ Walker. It's genius. It is absolutely lovely genius. It adds a little bit of je se quo. It's it specifically qua because it is that like French, European, elegant sounding product name. Right. And CJ love that. Love that. Yeah. Rolls off the guitar. He's an ad exec, so I think she's gone. Oh, interesting. Oh, I can every show. I can j this up a little bit. And then she divorced him, which, you know, yes, queen, take, take what you need and leave the rest is I suppose, what's coming in here. But, on she went, she decided to found her own product, her own wonderful hair grower, and started up a manufacturing. She was competitor of her previous employer? Yes. I think she found a product that was okay and some principles that she liked and she thought, I can do, I can do more. I can do better. So there's a tin here with a picture of her on the tin. I love it. Amazing. It's a lot of detail as well for this. She's um, um, someone who not only is an inventor of. A successful product, but who found an ethical business, which, you know, having a values driven business, I'm thinking at that point turn of the century. It's not necessarily the first thing on every new capitalist's mind, but she wants a business to support black people, specifically black women, to be independent financially. So she would train and support her sales team. She gave them really generous commissions, which her competitors weren't necessarily doing. Yeah. And in the end, the article I read says she hired over 40,000 different African American employees and built a personal net worth of over a million dollars making her America's first self-made millionaires. Wow. Amazing. Wow. Wow, wow, wow. Wow.. She must have sold so many. That's insane, right? Like how much hair products would it take? Oh, is she producing? But it must have been good'cause people won't keep buying something that doesn't work. So she did, she did the thing. And as she personally profited, she also wanted to share that out. So her philanthropic work, her kind of political work, expanded alongside her. She gave to the YMCA, she paid scholarships for students to go to the Tuskegee Institute, black students. She supported the NAACP's efforts to end lynchings, which in the wake of slavery was the kind of next, next most, pressing legal matter. she eventually. Died, but I didn't even know this was a thing. She willed two thirds of the future profits of her company to the charities that she supported. So even after leaving this planet, two thirds, two thirds of her company's profits continued to support her beliefs. Why don't we do that now? We should do that like today. It's, it's, it's an incredible and beautiful thing to have done. Yeah. Good for her. So. Having taken that little whirl through women, that's an amazing story. Yeah. Uh, I mean, it's, it's so cool that these were women who are on your radar. Um, yes. Hopefully able to kind of bring them. I didn't know too much about them, but you, you hear stuff, don't you? And Yeah. You know, especially when you're interested in this kind of stuff anyway, but that, those details are, ah, yeah. And I, again, so astute man, so, um, forward, forward thinking sounds so gross, but like, um, no, but see, but it is that isn't it gap and going for it, it's so LinkedIn, but like, I like to leverage gaps in the market too. Oh yeah. No, no. Okay. So those were some of the inventions that came up when I was looking at things that women, women inventors did, and cool women inventors in general. Very cool. Now. A couple of points about inventions that change things for women. The first one that I wanted to land on, which I think probably resonates pretty strongly with both of us because we are both super active, busy, lots of on the go, da dah dah, dah. And the idea of having any kind of loss of independence is something that like makes me come out in a cold sweat. So imagine, if you will, the absolute joy when the bicycle was invented and yeah, again, there was a world without a bicycle. You forget there was a world without a bicycle. There was a world where your options as a woman in the home were. To only go places you could walk to safely in Lins and corsets, or perhaps to be lucky enough to be wealthy enough to have access to a carriage and horses and to have the permission that it would require to borrow them from your husband to go out into the world. Because it's withering heights, isn't it?. Yeah, it's, your world would be your home and your whatever that may look like. So, I have a quote. Vicki, do you remember quotes? I've got a quote for free to read. I'm, this is American Suffragette and Social Activist Susan B. Anthony speaking about bicycles. I think the bicycle has done more than emancipate women than any one thing in the world. I rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a bike. It gives her a feeling of self-reliance and independence. The moment she takes her seat and away she goes, the picture of untrammeled womanhood. I love it. So that's nice. You feel the energy and that. Women disappointed women in the way these things happen. It kind of begets more changes because bicycles became popular and that in turn had an impact on fashion. People couldn't easily ride a bicycle with long flowing skirts. It was unsafe. So clothes for women became more comfortable and more practical. Shorter skirts, uh, bloomers and ultimately modern trousers draw a line directly back to women needing to get from A to B on a bike love. And then, yeah, it's like a virtuous cycle because then you are free and able to do more in your everyday life. So having kind of, yeah, I've never associated it with joy either. Like of course it's joyful, That you get to be free. But you just never, particularly if photographs and imagery at the time, it's all very serious, isn't it? It's already like, oh yeah, that was that actually the look. That was the trend, wasn't it? And then actually, of course it's joyful. And of course, like I rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a bike. What a happy, it's just delightful. Keep in keeping with that spirit of the kind of wider social change that comes from seemingly quite small inventions and building on our earlier thoughts about the dishwasher, the washing machine and. We know that until very recent history, and in some places even now, the cleaning of clothing and housework in general is understood to be women's work. So. It is so important and it's essential obviously in every life that things get, things get cleaned, it's relentless, it never stops. But it's so time consuming when you're having to do this in a hands-on un mechanized way. Mm. The labor involved, even just in sourcing clean water when running water isn't available, let alone cleaning things, let alone drying them. Mm-hmm. Um, so with that in mind, it's gross. Uh, it would've been, it's your whole day basically. It's just your whole day. And it's not even that effective. Like No, at the end, it's not what we would call clean, isn't it? No, no, we are, it's like bashed stiff with brush and stuff. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So along came a man called Alva Fisher in 1908 and he invented the electric washing machine and, as these inventions that made cleaning in the home, um. Became more widely available. Mm-hmm. The impact of that is the whole economy and the workforce tilted on its, its axis. So I've got a little quote here from an economist from the 1950s if you're happy to read it. In 1913, the vacuum cleaner became available in 1916. It was the washing machine. In 1918, it was the refrigerator. In 1947, the freezer, and in 1973, the microwave was on the market. In 1900, 5% of women had jobs. In 1980, that number had jumped to 51%. These innovations changed the lives of women. Although it wasn't a revolution per se, the arrival of this technology in households had an important impact on the workforce and the economy. I mean, it's true, isn't it? The efficiencies are like off the scale. Um, but yeah, what happened? What drove that innovation period that re'cause it's intense, like 13 17, 16 47 73. It's not long. So I think it's a speed it up chain of events that starts with the industrial revolution and the availability of products and this wildfire interest in innovation and technology. So things become cheaper and easier and, you know, more possible to build. Um, I'm just looking up the name of something because I wanna check I've got it correct. It's, yeah, Moore's Law, which is the way that every couple of years you get this doubling of the capacity of technology. Um, oh, okay. Moore's Law. I wonder if it's a. I'm probably wildly understating and oversimplifying, but that rapid cascade of inventions that allows things to be built cheaply enough to be purchasable and brought into the home that allows them to be safe and, robust enough for daily use, the materials being available cheaply enough and so on. It all kind of came about at that same point in the early 19 hundreds into the middle of the 19 hundreds. A phrase I like compounds, doesn't it? Okay. Sounds so, so long ago. But yeah, you get this kind of like absolute,, incredible. Speed it up, timeline of things going from nothing at all to something. And we are living through that in a technological, you know, in an electronics, in a digital way Yeah. Sense in a digital way and, and with AI and so on. Yeah. But that's true. They're living with it in a way that allows mechanical, yeah, mechanical advancements. And there are of course, huge swathes of the world. Where even these innovations are not so widespread., Indoor plumbing, again, I briefly mentioned it, but that is such a, a life changing thing for women in particular. You know, the initiatives in India where safe toilets in a community, safe wash facilities in a community, the difference it makes to people's lives not having to walk hours to get clean water. It's the women who do that work and yeah. So the impact on them and then the consequent impact on the workforce and the economy is, is vast. Fascinating. I love that. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we have reached the last stop on our tour today, and that is mm-hmm. This one's kind of a twofer because it's, an invention that. Obviously dramatically impacted the lives of women, but it's also an invention that wouldn't have been possible without key women players in the story. So this is the good old birth control pill. And I, yeah, in, in the 1960s. As recently as that, after decades of research and unsuccessful attempts, the first effective birth control pills were made available to the public, and they were developed by Dr. Gregory Pin and Dr. Min Chiang from the Institute for Experimental Biology, which sounds so sketch, but they knew what they were doing. So male scientists working on this. But women were also crucial to the advancement. So I've got a quote here. At the urging of activist Margaret Sanger Aris, catherine Dexter McCormick provided the critical financial support for this breakthrough research. McCormick was aired to the agricultural equipment company, international of Fortune, and one of the first women to graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT. So a lady funded this research off the back of, like activism. Yeah. Yes. So the activist in question Margaret Sanger is some, somebody I definitely think we should cover in the future. Oh yes. She was so interesting. Super, super cool. But in short, she. Was born at a time when contraceptives in America were criminalized. So, okay. She saw the social consequences of that both personally and in her society, and she went, this is wrong, this is wrong. And she spent her entire life in the pursuit of legalizing birth control and making it universally available. So when she found this science-minded, a RS who'd been to MIT obviously was quite switched on herself and Rich as Methuselah. Mm-hmm. She said, let's do something, let's fund this unpromising, project at mm-hmm. The Experimental Biology Institute because birth control pills for all sorts of biochemical reasons are actually quite difficult to make. Your, your stomach does not want those chemicals and will destroy them before they could ever be effective. So they pushed it forward, and the efforts work. I, I was reading this article and it said. The kind of ubiquity and importance of the birth control pill is clear when you realize that if I say to you the pill, you don't think, ooh, which pill? You know, everyone knows what you're talking about. Yeah. It's so strong. Yeah. It's so strong. And the sort of social impact of that. Taking people out of the health and social consequences of unwanted pregnancies. Yeah. Driving the sexual revolution and feminism and spurring the ability of women to take work roles outside the home because Yeah. Much like divesting them to technology of the, of the tasks of maintaining the home. We are now taking women out of the. Defacto obligation to raise an entire troop of children unless they wanted to. How do I wear this carefully? I think there's a lot more opportunities for the billionaires that we have today to be doing more things like this. If you have billions of dollars, Taylor Swift, Kylie Jenner, Beyonce, whoever you are, like, I hope to God you're funding some of this stuff and you're not talking about it. I think that's what's happening. Because like you said, that has just gone, the funnel just went so wide there with the social life changing impact because that woman was like, all right, you can have my money. Yeah. And that's the only way to freedom, isn't it? Is finance, because it is then what you do with the finance, like, it's so like, oh God, it's mind blowing. The, the ripple effect of society, isn't it? Yes. Yeah. Yes it is. And in some ways I hope they're doing some stuff like that and they're just not saying it. The bar is comparatively quite low because we are not talking about necessarily needing the innovation of a biochemical delivery mechanism for hormones that are easily destroyed in the stomach. We're talking get running water into houses and countries where that isn't the norm. Like this isn't, you know, you don't even have to innovate right now. You just have to invest. So, yeah. I, I, so, so just that thing with the el wasn't it, that he was like, if someone gave me plans to solve world hunger, God fund it, and then the World Help organization was like, here you go. Yeah. And he never did anything. Yeah. Oh yeah. Okay. So, but it's amazing. Let's not, let's not dampen Margaret and No, no. We're, we're fabulous stuff. We're gonna end on a bit of a high, I mean, there, we could fill, we could fill an entire season of podcasts with innovations and investments. Yeah. Like innovations is such a masculine invention. Sorry. It's such a masculine phrase. And it's, it doesn't, it's not, is it, to me, I, it feels very masculine. It's the association that you've got. Yeah. And it, it can be feminine. It really isn't. And I think that's so important because all it takes really is, seeing something and thinking, oh, you know, like Mary Anderson sat on that streetcar and thinking, oh, that's, that's not very good. We could do better. We can do better. We can do better. And that, that isn't a masculine urge. That is something we all experience every day. And a lot of inventions, like the, the rubberized outer pant of a baby diaper just came about because a woman went, oh, this sucks. What could be better? And this is why those initiatives to make sure that hiring in say, tech companies is, you know, equally distributed because we don't all have the same. View of the world. Obviously we see different gaps, but we do share in common with lots of other people the perspective that we ourselves have. So those innovations do not come about unless everyone's at the table. Yeah. In the planning phases, you know, it's, it's so, so important. Um, I'm like, what can we invent? We should be inventing something. Yeah. We gotta we gotta get on this, get on this. Well, if you're considering invention as a future enterprise, let's end on a quote here to give you a bit of a shot in the arm. And this is from an inventor who we're all super fond of these days after the Barbie movie. It's Ruth Handler, the founder of Mattel. So would you close us out? It was in the Barbie movie, or was her daughter in the bar? It was, there's some cameo. It at the, uh, her character is, is at the very end. I think that's a little spoiler. I love if you haven't seen it yet. Sorry. Sorry about that. That's not Spoiler heaven sake. It's been three years. Okay. Don't be afraid of hard work. Nothing worthwhile comes easily. Don't let others discourage you or tell you that you can't do it. Yes, Ruth. Yes. Yeah. She you can. She did. We Will people have, how about that? Yeah, that's the, yeah. This is the social brief, isn't it? People have, people definitely have made an impact on the world. Oh, okay. I feel quite fiery. What are we gonna do? Let's, are we gonna put this energy, let's those stop things that are bit just not quite good enough and sort out. Let's go sort it. Excited. I like six patents. By the end of the week, we'll be on it. Thank you. Thank you, thank you. Oh, I loved it. Amazing. Oh, thank you so much.

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