March is Women's History Month and at DPPL we are celebrating by honoring women inventors!
Quick! Name the first inventor that comes to mind…. Was it a woman inventor?
Women haven’t always had equal opportunities to be inventors but have overcome obstacles to create inventions that change our lives every day!
Picturing Women Inventors, a poster exhibition celebrating the innovations of 18 American women, is on display in DPPL's north hallway throughout the month of March.
Stop by and learn about Admiral Grace Hopper, one of the first women programmers at Harvard.
In 1952, she invented pioneering “compiler” software that translated human programming instructions into computer code.
Marilyn Hamilton
Or Marilyn Hamilton.
After a hang-gliding accident in 1978 left her paralyzed, she was determined to continue her active lifestyle, but her heavy wheelchair made that difficult. Drawing inspiration from the materials used in hang gliders, she worked with two friends to invent a lightweight wheelchair that was easy to maneuver.
And 12 year old inventor Alexis Lewis.
In 2011, Alexis was inspired to invent after reading about children who became lost when families fled the famine in Somalia. So she adapted a traditional Native American sled, called a travois, by adding wheels to create a simpler way to transport families and their belongings. How’s that for creative innovation!
Learn about them in #PicturingWomenInventors, a poster exhibition from @sitesExhibits & @SI_Invention!
About Women's History Month
In 1978, a group of women in Santa Rosa, California founded the National Women’s History Project after noticing the lack of women in school textbooks.
That project grew into what we know as Women’s History Month.
President Carter was the first president to acknowledge the importance of sharing women’s stories and signed a proclamation in 1980 designating the celebration.
Grade school students in the twentieth century doing book reports about women found few biographies available at the time.
Florence Nightingale, Harriet Tubman, Susan B. Anthony, Helen Keller, and Mother Theresa were some of the few choices.
Thankfully, the list of options has expanded over the decades as opportunities, awareness and interest has grown.
Here are resources to learn more about the extraordinary - and often overlooked - accomplishments of women:
"This book reveals the real-life stories of 19 successful modern-day women inventors-stories that describe the hard work, frequent struggles, and indomitable spirit with which they have never given up on their ideas. For many, it will present a revealing look at these women's respective journeys-from their ideas first being sketched on napkins to the creation of multimillion-dollar companies. In addition, Ms. Tolchin includes sound advice and guidance from accomplished invention service providers to further help future women inventors reach their fullest potential"
"The nineteenth century was a transformative period in the history of American science, as scientific study, once the domain of armchair enthusiasts and amateurs, became the purview of professional experts and institutions. In Mischievous Creatures, historian Catherine McNeur shows that women were central to the development of the natural sciences during this critical time. She does so by uncovering the forgotten lives of entomologist Margaretta Hare Morris and botanist Elizabeth Morris-sister scientists whose essential contributions to their respective fields, and to the professionalization of science as a whole, have been largely erased. Margaretta was famous within antebellum scientific circles for her work with seventeen-year cicadas and for her discoveries of previously undocumented insect species and the threats they posed to agriculture ... Margaretta's older sister Elizabeth preferred anonymity to accolades, but she nevertheless became a trusted expert on Philadelphia's flora, created illustrations for major reference books, and published numerous articles in popular science journals ... Alongside the lives of the Morris sisters, McNeur traces the larger story of American science's professionalization, a process that began, she shows, earlier in the nineteenth century than is traditionally thought"
"The ... memoir of a scientist coming of age as an immigrant in America who finds her calling at the forefront of the AI revolution. Known to the world as the creator of ImageNet, a key catalyst of modern artificial intelligence, Dr. Li has spent more than two decades at the forefront of her field. But her career in science was improbable from the start. As immigrants, her family faced a difficult transition from China's middle class to American poverty. And their lives were made even harder as they struggled to care for her ailing mother ... Fei-Fei's adolescent knack for physics endured, however, and positioned her to make a crucial contribution to the breakthrough we now call AI, placing her at the center of a global transformation. Over the last decades, her work has brought her face-to-face with the extraordinary possibilities--and the extraordinary dangers--of the technology she loves. [This book] is a story of science in the first person, documenting one of the century's defining moments from the inside"
"How Victorian male doctors used false science to argue that women were unfit for anything but motherhood--and the brilliant doctor who defied them. After Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman to graduate from medical school, more women demanded a chance to study medicine. Barred entrance to universities like Harvard, women built their own first-rate medical schools and hospitals. Their success spurred a chilling backlash from elite, white male physicians who were obsessed with eugenics and the propagation of the white race. Distorting Darwin's evolution theory, these haughty physicians proclaimed in bestselling books that women should never be allowed to attend college or enter a profession because their menstrual cycles made them perpetually sick. Motherhood was their constitution and duty. Into the midst of this turmoil marched tiny, dynamic Mary Putnam Jacobi, daughter of New York publisher George Palmer Putnam and the first woman to be accepted into the world-renowned Sorbonne medical school in Paris. As one of the best-educated doctors in the world, she returned to New York for the fight of her life. Aided by other prominent women physicians and suffragists, Jacobi conducted the first-ever data-backed, scientific research on women's reproductive biology. The results of her studies shook the foundations of medical science and higher education. Full of larger than life characters and cinematically written, The Cure for Women documents the birth of a sexist science still haunting us today as the fight for control of women's bodies and lives continues"
"A luminous chronicle of the most famous woman in the history of science, and the untold story of the many remarkable young women trained in her laboratory who were launched into stellar scientific careers of their own"
"Rosalind Franklin knows if she just takes one more X-ray picture--one more after thousands--she can unlock the building blocks of life. Never again will she have to listen to her colleagues complain about her, especially Maurice Wilkins who'd rather conspire about genetics with James Watson and Francis Crick than work alongside her. Then it finally happens--the double helix structure of DNA reveals itself to her with perfect clarity. But what happens next, Rosalind could have never predicted. Marie Benedict's next powerful novel shines a light on a woman who died to discover our very DNA, a woman whose contributions were suppressed by the men around her but whose relentless drive advanced our understanding of humankind"
Winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award A Washington Post Notable Book One of the Best Books of the Year: NPR, Entertainment Weekly , Ann Patchett on PBS NewsHour , Minnesota Public Radio, PopSugar , Maris Kreizman, The Morning News Winner of Ploughshares' John C. Zacharis Award Winner of a Whiting Award A Belletrist Amuse Book At first glance, the quirky, overworked narrator of Weike Wang's debut novel seems to be on the cusp of a perfect life: she is studying for a prestigious PhD in chemistry that will make her Chinese parents proud (or at least satisfied), and her successful, supportive boyfriend has just proposed to her. But instead of feeling hopeful, she is wracked with ambivalence: the long, demanding hours at the lab have created an exquisite pressure cooker, and she doesn't know how to answer the marriage question. When it all becomes too much and her life plan veers off course, she finds herself on a new path of discoveries about everything she thought she knew. Smart, moving, and always funny, this unique coming-of-age story is certain to evoke a winning reaction.
The only legitimate child of Lord Byron--the most brilliant, revered, and scandalous of the Romantic poets--Ada was destined for fame from the moment she was born. But her mathematician mother, estranged from Ada's infamous and destructively passionate father, is determined to save her only child from her perilous Byron heritage. Banishing fairy tales and make-believe from the nursery, Ada's mother provides her daughter with a rigorous education grounded in mathematics and science. Any troubling spark of imagination--or worse yet, passion or poetry--is promptly extinguished. Or so her mother believes. When Ada is introduced into London society as a highly eligible young heiress, she at last discovers the intellectual and social circles she has craved all her life. Little does she realize how her exciting new friendship with inventor Charles Babbage--the brilliant, charming, and occasionally curmudgeonly inventor of an extraordinary machine, the Difference Engine--will define her destiny.
Based on the true story of actress Hedy Lamarr, both a Hollywood glamour icon and scientist whose groundbreaking invention helped fight the Nazis and revolutionized modern communication
"A playful, witty, and resonant novel in which a single mother and her two teen daughters engage in a wild scientific experiment and discover themselves in the process, from the award-winning writer of Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty Jane is a serious scientist on the cutting-edge team of a bold project looking to "de-extinct" the wooly mammoth. She's privileged to have been sent to Siberia to hunt for ancient DNA, but there's a catch: Jane's two "tagalong" teen daughters are there with her in the Arctic, and they're bored enough to cause trouble. Brilliant, fiery, sharp-tongued Eve is fifteen and willing to talk back to the male scientists in a way her mother is not. And sweet, thirteen-year-old Vera, who seems to absorb all the emotional burdens of her small family, just wants to be home in Berkeley, baking cakes and watching bad tv. When Eve and Vera stumble upon a 4,000-year-old baby mammoth that has been perfectly preserved, their discovery sets off a chain of events that pit Jane against her colleagues, and soon her status at the lab is tenuous at best. So what does a female scientist do when she's a passionate devotee of her field but her gender and life history hold her back? She goes rogue. As Jane and her daughters ping-pong from the slopes of Siberia to a university in California, from the shores of Iceland to an exotic animal farm in Italy, The Last Animal takes readers on an expansive, big-hearted journey that explores the possibility and peril of the human imagination on a changing planet, what it's like to be a woman and a mother in a field dominated by men, and how a wondrous discovery can best be enjoyed with family. Even teenagers".
"Sarah E. Goode was one of the first African-American women to get a US patent. Working in her furniture store, she recognized a need for a multi-use bed and through hard work, ingenuity, and determination, invented her unique cupboard bed. She built more than a piece of furniture. She built a life far away from slavery, a life where her sweet dreams could come true."
Hedy Lamarr became a movie legend, but her true loves were always science and engineering. During World War II, Hedy collaborated with another inventor on an innovative technology called frequency hopping. It was designed to prevent the enemy from jamming torpedo radio signals and commanding weapons to go off course. Frequency hopping is still used today to keep our cell phone messages private and defend our computers from hackers. In this biography, meet the real Hedy Lamarr : not only a beloved film star, but a visionary scientist who helped create the world we live in today.
