Women Inventors

If you look around you will see them. They are revolutionary inventions that in some cases have saved lives and others have made it better. This is the inventions created by women from different times that you maybe didn't know who was the inventor. 

Helen Free created the urine test strips that are used around the world to diagnose diseases, detect pregnancy and to monitor diabetes. It consists of narrow strips impregnated with chemistry substances. When we have a pathological change in our organism, it makes the composition of our urine also change. For example the concentration of glucose. The strips are sensitive to this kind of stimulus and in depend on of this concentration the strip will mark one colour or another. This kind of strips has allowed us to improve our urine and blood analysis in a fast an effective way. 

All the new discoveries that allow us to improve in the medicine field are often those we consider most important. So we can say that the medicine against leukaemia is one of the important and it was invented by Gertrude B Elion. This medicine is known as 6-mercaptopurina and it blocks the body's rejection of foreign tissues making easier the kidney transplants. But this is not the only contribution to medicine that the pharmacologist Gertrude Elion made, she also lead the group that carry out the medicament to treat gout and the antiviral to fight against the herpes virus. 

Imagine you are in your car and suddenly a seagull shits on your windshield. Yes, disgusting. Well, imagine now that you have to get off the car and clean the shit by yourself. No exactly for this reason but for something similar, Mary Anderson invented the windscreen wiper. She was travelling in a tram to New York and she noticed that the drivers had to open  their windows very often to be able to see and sometimes they had to stop the tram and clean the window because the snow or the rain didn't allow them to see properly. It was when Mary Anderson think in a kind of controlled from inside the tram to clean the window without having to go out and stop the train. And in 1903 born the first windscreen wiper of the history.

   

This may be one of the important machines in the USA. I'm talking about the machine for make paper bag. Bags had been consolidated as another "typical" of the United States. We can recognise them in all the films and TV series, they are part of the USA! So this machine was created by Margaret Knight. In an automatic way, her machine cut the paper, folder it and then stick it to create a the famous bags. Before the Knight machine, the paper bags only could be made by hand and they carried a high cost.

 

The investigations made by Katherine Blodgett were the beginning of a new scientific discipline with monolayers. Monolayers are an organic layer with a single molecule thick. This kind of monolayer had had applications in a huge number of different fields as the conversion of solar energy or in the manufacture of integrated circuits. Blodgett goes into detail about their job and she could create nonreflective multilayer of multiple glass layers. In other words, she was the first who was able to create the first 100% transparent glass of the world. This new kind of glass eliminated the distortion created by the reflected light in optical equipment like sunglasses, telescopes, microscopes, cameras and projectors. It means that the investigations of Blodgett have help to improve the science and other fields indirectly through the improvement of the glasses and optical materials. For all of this, Blodgett is also know because she was the first women to get a doctorate in physics from the Cambridge University.