Though little is known of the details of her life, we do know that Mary Dixon Kies was born in 1752 in  Killingly, Connecticut to John and Janet Dixon, Irish immigrant farmers. She grew up and married without much fanfare but after her first husband died, she got remarried to a man named John Kies. We also know that, at that time, straw hats were important to women and field workers who wore them for protection from a brutal sun, and most of these hats were imported from Europe. Around the early 1800’s, Napoleon was coming into power in France and was starting wars with his neighbors. Since the U.S. didn’t want to be drawn into these conflicts, the U.S. government started to halt importation of European goods (including hats) in an attempt to maintain neutrality.  So to fill the void of European goods, the U.S. government encouraged more robust domestic manufacturing and by the time President James Madison came into office, he was looking for American industries to replace the lost European goods. As it turned out, the timing was perfect for Mary Kies’s new invention, and she became an excellent role model for the new push for American home-grown industry.  In 1790, Congress passed the Patent Act, allowing anyone, male or female to patent an invention or process.  But though another woman named Betsy Metcalf had earlier invented a method of braiding straw into hats, she didn’t bother to patent her process.  This opened the door for another new braiding method to obtain a patent, and on May 15, 1809, Mary Kies and her innovation stepped right through.Mary’s product was unique because she used silk thread instead of another piece of straw to hold the cross hatching together.  Her method made very study hats, made it possible to make the hats faster, was cost effective, and was adopted by the New England hat-making industry. Kies’s process made it possible to mass produced hats—by 1810 in Massachusetts alone, about $500,000 worth of hats were manufactured. In fact, there was so much money, that New England’s hat industry was one of the few which continued to prosper during the war of 1812.

As for Mary Kies, after her husband John Kies died in 1813, she went on to live many more years with her son, Daniel, in Brooklyn.  So next time you see a straw hat, think of Mary Kies, the first American women to receive a patent.

Photos:
http://www.americaslibrary.gov/assets/jb/nation/jb_nation_maryk_1_m.jpg
https://www.brentblack.com/images/_process/Hat_Edge_Weaving_5631.jpg
Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Dixon_Kies
http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blkeis.html
https://lemelson.mit.edu/resources/mary-kies
http://patriciahysell.wordpress.com/tag/mary-kies/

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Over the years, there have been hundreds of women who have invented all kinds of things.  Things like windshield wipers, colored flares, the automatic dishwasher, the typing correction fluid Liquid Paper (once as indispensible as the delete key on your laptop), Scotchgard, Barbie dolls, the dye laser, and the “stronger than steel” material Kevlar.  All of these and many, many others were either created or improved by women.  And, I’m not even counting the tremendous innovations in the medical field, like the medical syringe in use at every doctor’s office and clinic, and Nystatin, the anti-fungal drug used to cure many disfiguring, disabling fungal infections.

But, one female inventor caught my imagination, mostly because I’m an old movie buff.  When I read that Hedy Lamarr, an actress I’ve watched many times, was also an inventor, I just had to find out more.  It turns out that her real name was Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler and she was born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary in 1913.  As a model, her tremendous good looks (she was called the “most beautiful woman in Europe”) landed her a role in a European movie called Ecstasy, which became a big hit and catapulted her career to Hollywood.  Throughout the ’30s and ’40s, she became a huge star, appearing in such movies as “Boom Town” with Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy and Cecil B. DeMille’s “Samson and Delilah.”

But, unbeknownst to most people, while she was acting in all of those movies in the 1940s (and raising two children), she was also busy inventing.  And, not your everyday ordinary stuff – but super-spy-type stuff.  It turns out that she was a mathematical whiz who co-invented a torpedo guidance system for the Navy.  And, not just any torpedo guidance system, but a “frequency-hopping, spread-spectrum” guidance system.  WOW.

During World War II, radio controlled torpedoes were in full use by the US and Allies.  The problem was that if the Germans could identify the frequency the torpedo was being controlled on, they could jam it and make it miss its target.  What Lamarr and her partner realized was that if the torpedo could randomly change its frequency, then someone trying to jam the signal wouldn’t know which frequency it was on.  The key was to make both the transmitter and the receiver simultaneously jump from frequency to frequency – a difficult effort at best. But, they worked on an invention based on a player piano music roll and eventually invented a guidance device machine that could modulate its frequency at will.

Today, frequency hopping is used with wireless phones, GPS, many military communication systems and the principal anti-jamming device used in the U.S. government’s Milstar defense communication satellite system.  Unfortunately, Lamarr and her partner never got any of the credit (or money) from their idea.  They had signed away the patent rights to the Navy, who engaged the Sylvania Electronic Systems Division, in Buffalo, New York, to develop the idea into what it is today.

So, while most people will probably only remember Hedy Lamarr as the fabulous beauty in those old movies we watch on cable TV, you and I will know differently.  We will know that she was an inventor as well.

SOURCES

http://www.inventions.org/culture/female/index.html

http://www.inventions.org/culture/female/lamarr.html

http://science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/inventions/10-things-that-women-invented.htm#page=2

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hedy-lamarr-movie-star-inventor-of-wifi/

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