Listen: Clodagh Finn on the female inventors who improved our daily lives

When Danish-British writer and comedian Sandi Toksvig was at university, an anthropology professor held up a photo of an ancient bone with 28 incisions carved on it, and said: “This is often considered to be man’s first attempt at a calendar.”

The lecturer paused as everyone dutifully wrote down her words, before dropping the bombshell: “My question to you is this — what man needs to mark 28 days? I would suggest to you that this is woman’s first attempt at a calendar.”

Toksvig recalls the experience as a moment that changed her life. 

“In that second, I stopped to question almost everything I had been taught about the past. How often had I overlooked women’s contributions?”

Too often. Just as all of us have done. We know that only too well, although things are changing.

I was chuffed to be sent an Instagram reel by a pal recently which listed some of the ways female inventors have improved our daily lives.

As well as being instructive and funny, the fact that such reels even exist is proof of a real shift. 

Now, anybody mindlessly scrolling on Instagram is likely to come across Josephine Cochrane, the American woman who invented the first practical dishwasher in 1886.

She worked on a design in her garden shed, measuring dishes, then building wire compartments to hold them. 

They were laid flat inside a wheel which was sprayed with soapy water as it turned. 

She even went further and set up a company to manufacture and market her design.

Around the same time, Margaret E Knight, of Maine and New Hampshire, was working on a machine that could mass-produce flat-bottomed paper bags.

Her achievements are even more extraordinary given that she left school at 12 to work in a cotton mill to support her widowed mother. 

Despite the long hours, she still found time to create. 

The kites and sleds she made as a child were said to be the envy of the town’s boys, according to engineering writer Henry Petroski.

She used her gift for invention at work too. 

Troubled by the number of factory accidents, she came up with a restraint system that made factory looms — with their steel-tipped flying shuttles — much safer.

Knight went on to work in lots of fields, from printing to upholstery, but made her name after joining the Columbia Paper Bag Company in Massachusetts. 

She designed a flat-bottomed paper bag which was far more user-friendly than the paper cones then used to carry groceries.

She patented her design, but was challenged by Charles Annan, a man who claimed she had copied his work. 

In court, Annan boldly asserted that a woman could never design such a machine, but he had picked the wrong woman to tangle with. 

Knight showed the court her detailed drawings and designs and exposed him as a charlatan.

In her lifetime, Knight went on to patent over 20 inventions, including a numbering machine, a window frame, skirt protectors, and machines that were used in shoe manufacturing.

There were so many other female inventors whose designs have made daily life safer and easier.

Anne Connelly invented an early fire escape in 1887. With a name like that, she must have an Irish connection although all available accounts say little is known of her early life in Philadelphia. There’s a project for a would-be historian.

In 1903, property developer and rancher Mary Anderson came up with a windscreen wiper that could be operated inside the vehicle. 

Five years later, German entrepreneur Melitta Benz invented the paper coffee filter. No more spitting-out of coarse grinds.

Few of these early inventors made money from their inventions, with the happy exception of Marion Donovan who made a cool $1m for her game-changing 1951 patent — the disposable nappy.

Her mind was always whirring, dreaming up new inventions. 

She designed a new kind of dental floss and a pull cord to make zipping up a dress easier. 

She was always drawing or working with materials — wire or plastic or nylon or paper, her daughter Christine recalled.

“The kitchen was often where Mom was, and something was always cooking, but not food — heating irons and sealants and so on,” she said.

Closer to home, anyone who includes the humble potato in a meal should recall the groundbreaking work of Irish botanist Phyllis Clinch.

More discoverer than inventor, she was the renowned botanist who revolutionised the potato industry by pinpointing damaging viruses in potatoes.

She later focused her attention on tomato and sugar-beet pathogens, paving the way for the introduction of disease-resistance crop varieties.

Too often we look back on the early years of the Irish State and remember how difficult it was for women. 

It certainly was, but there were so many accomplished women making their mark too. Such as Professor Phyllis Clinch who was awarded her PhD in 1928, at the age of just 27.

A career of many firsts and high accolades followed.

In 1943, she was awarded a prestigious DSc, or Doctor of Sciences, for her published work. 

Six years later, she was one of the first women elected to the Royal Irish Academy (RIA) and, in 1961, she became the first female professor of botany at University College Dublin.

In the same year, she became the first woman to receive the Boyle Medal (awarded for scientific excellence) from the Royal Dublin Society.

A Vera Klute portrait of her now hangs in the Royal Irish Academy, alongside the other early female members; art historian Françoise Henry, mathematical physicist Prof Sheila Tinney, and “pathbreaking” researcher of classical Irish literature, Eleanor Knott.

The portraits are part of ‘Women on Walls’, a campaign by Accenture and the RIA to make women leaders visible.

It pleases me no end that the project acronym is WOW. 

If that’s a word which applies to our innovative female forebears, it is also very relevant today.

That was clear last Thursday night when University of Limerick student Evanna Winters won this year’s Mary Mulvihill Award, a competition for third-level students that commemorates the legacy of science journalist and author Mary Mulvihill (1959-2015).

She won the top prize for “an evocative, beautifully illustrated essay, A Walk in the Woods. 

It explores the workings of the ‘wood wide web’, the subterranean fungal network that extends beneath the forest floor.”

If you have time, look her up. 

Seek out Róisín Ferguson’s "highly commended" work, too, not to mention that of Abeba Birhane, the internationally recognised researcher of the implications of AI, who presented the awards.

Given all that has happened — and is happening — it is now near impossible to ignore the long line of female inventors and innovators who have improved our everyday lives. 

Wow, is right.