Patent-wielding women changed the face of the built environment
By Stephanie Basalyga
BridgeTower Media Newswires
PORTLAND, OR — For more years than most of us have realized, the world has benefited from a continent of women who have given us inventions — from paper bags to coffee filters to windshield wipers — that we use to make our daily lives easier.
The built environment hasn’t been immune to the ideas, influence and impact of women looking to solve a problem or find a better way of doing things. From a hydro-powered circular saw to a fire escape structure, women have pursued patents to turn their ideas into reality, usually with the goal of trying to improve the lives of others.
While their efforts spurred talk and headlines when they were first shared with the public, most of the women’s names faded from the public eye and were largely lost in the shuffle of time. In recent years, though, as a result of efforts to increase the number of women in nontraditional jobs, from the trades to engineering and architecture, those patent-wielding women are emerging from forgotten corners to claim their place in history, starting with an Oregon woman named Frances Gabe.
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The hooey of housework
If 21st-century women who have better things to do with their waking hours than devote them to housework are in search of a heroine, they might do well to look to Frances Gabe.
During her lifetime, which lasted 101 years, Gabe obtained nearly 70 patents for inventions that she incorporated into the world’s first — and quite possibly only — self-cleaning house.
Born in 1915, Gabe grew up with a father who was an architect and builder. A graduate of the Girls Polytechnic High School in Portland, she married and eventually moved to Newberg, where she and her husband started a family. Even in those early days, Gabe was no fan of housework.
By the time the 1970s rolled around, Gabe was trying to fit washing dishes and mopping floors in between raising two children and (according to at least one account) running her husband’s roofing business. She reportedly reached the breaking point one day when she noticed a spot of fig jam on the wall. According to the story that Gabe told to a writer with the New York Times, instead of grabbing a washcloth or sponge, she reached for a garden hose. As the water sloshed away the sticky mess, Gabe began to dream of using a similar approach to clean not just a wall, or even a room, but an entire house.
Over the course of the next 10 years or so, she fiddled and fixed and invented. She pursued — and obtained — patents for systems for cabinets that would double as dishwashers and floors that would drain after water from the ceiling rained down to clean them. Then she set about installing those same systems in her own house, a 1,000-square-foot cinderblock structure on seven acres in Newberg that The Daily Mail called a “giant dishwasher.”
Gabe wasn’t the only woman who tried to come up with a way to reduce the amount of time that had to be spent — usually by women — on household chores like washing dishes and cooking meals. In the early 1900s, for example, an architect named Alice Constance Austin was hired to design a cooperative kitchen for Llano del Rio, a commune being developed in Southern California. With an eye toward reducing the amount of time that would have to be spent on domestic chores, Austin designed kitchen-less living quarters for commune residents that also featured built-in furniture, rollaway beds and heated tile floors. Underground tunnels allowed hot meals to be quickly carried from the communal kitchen to individual units.
A lack of easily accessible water and capital led to the abandonment of Llano del Rio before Austin’s ideas and designs could fully be put into place. Although the architect would go on to write and promote ideas about how design could be used to reduce the amount of time that women had to devote to housework, her designs never gained widespread adoption in real-world projects.
Gabe also envisioned a world of communities that would feature her ideas, entire cities and towns where the houses, hospitals and schools were all self-cleaning. She promoted the idea in newspaper and magazine interviews and in lectures she gave at universities and women’s clubs around the country.
But also like Austin, Gabe’s dream never made it into the mainstream world of how houses are designed and built. With limited money, Gabe wasn’t able to renew patents for her inventions. And although she reportedly charged admission for people to tour her self-cleaning house, she found it tough financially to keep up with the maintenance the house required.
Even after her celebrity status had faded, Gabe continued to live in her house — although many of the self-cleaning features had ceased to function — until family members forced her to move to a nursing home. The house eventually was sold, reportedly with none of the self-cleaning features in working order. The world’s first — and probably only self-cleaning house — disappeared from the public’s eye.
Still, shortly after Gabe died in 2016 at the age of 101, the New York Times and other newspapers turned a spotlight on the inventor and her self-cleaning house once again. Included in one of the news stories was a tribute that Judy Wajcman, a professor of sociology at London School of Economics, penned to Gabe in 1991.
“(Frances) Gabe was ridiculed for even attempting the impossible,” Wajcman wrote, “but architects and builders now admit that her house is functional and attractive.”
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What goes around
Like Frances Gabe, Tabitha Babbitt was driven to try to improve the world around her. Unlike Gabe, though, Babbitt never pursued a single patent.
A weaver who came up with a double spinning head that allowed users to double the amount of wool they could spin, Babbitt was watching two men use a long saw to cut down trees and saw lumber one day when it struck her that the two-person saw — which could only cut in one direction and required huge amount of energy — was inefficient.
She began fiddling with a small blade that was on her spinning wheel, and soon realized that it could be used efficiently to cut thin materials such as roof shingles. She eventually developed a larger circular saw that was powered with water, allowing her community to begin cutting wood with the first water-powered circular saw ever used in a saw mill.
For Babbitt, knowing that she had made life better for others in the Massachusetts Shaker community where she was a member was all the reward she needed. Her mindset left the door open for others who were more than willing to lay claim to her ideas.
Three years after people started using Babbitt’s hydro-powered circular saw, two Frenchmen read about it in a newspaper. They immediately obtained a patent for it.
Unfazed, Babbitt continued to invent, eventually receiving recognition for a better way to make false teeth and sharing credit with Eli Whitney for the invention of cut nails.
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A great escape
Unlike Tabitha Babbitt, Anna Connelly had no qualms about laying claim to her invention. In the late 1800s, fires in New York City’s tenement buildings and factories in urban manufacturing districts took a toll on human lives. After a major fire in 1860, the city of New York passed a law that required all multi-floor buildings to have exterior stairs running up the height of the structures.
Landlords balked, saying the cost would be too high. The outcry was enough to send inventors scurrying to find affordable ways to help evacuate people from buildings during emergencies. The patents issued at the time ranged from reasonable inventions (roll-out ladders) to the outlandish (a head-mounted parachute that would allow the wearer to float to the ground). Among the patents issued was one to Anna Connelly.
Connelly knew that moving to the top of a building was often the only option for people caught in a structure where fire was consuming the lower floors. So she designed an iron-railed bridge that connected the rooftop of one building to the rooftop of a neighboring building. People who were able to make it to the roof of a burning building equipped with one of Connelly’s bridges would then be able to make an escape to safety.
Connelly and her patented invention were in good company. From 1877 to 1895, 32 other women also obtained patents for their inventions to try to help people safely escape fires in the city’s tenement buildings.
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The Sun Queen Cometh
When it came to making hay while the sun shines, Maria Telkes took the saying to heart. Her role as one of the founders of solar thermal storage systems earned her a nickname as “the Sun Queen.”
Born in Budapest, Telkes received a doctorate in physical chemistry before coming to the United States in 1925 to visit her cousin. She decided to stay in the country after the Cleveland Clinic Foundation offered her a position as a biophysicist.
She eventually became involved in solar research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1939 to 1953. While at MIT, she is credited with creating the first thermoelectric power generator and the first thermoelectric refrigerator.
In the 1940s, Telkes joined with architect Eleanor Raymond to build the first solar-heated house. The five-room structure in Dover, Massachusetts, used a chemical that crystalized and retained heat, and then released it.
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All work and no play
Last, but not least, a nod needs to be given to Elizabeth “Lizzie” Magie. While Magie’s invention is linked to the built environment in theme only, it’s worthy of mention if just for the reason that all work and no play makes architects, engineers, builders and developers dull girls and boys.
Magie was a fan of a system of taxation advocated by Henry George. In order to promote George’s single-tax movement, Magie created The Landlord’s Game. The goal of the board game, according to a description provided to players, was “not only to afford amusement to players, but to illustrate to them how, under the present prevailing system of land tenure, the landlord has an advantage over other enterprisers and also how the single tax would discourage speculation.”
Playing the game apparently was about as enjoyable as reading the instructions. Magie obtained a patent for the first version of the game, which failed to catch on with the public. So she went on to improve the design, obtaining additional patents. But those versions didn’t fare much better.
It wasn’t until Charles B. Darrow, an engineer from Philadelphia, stumbled across Magie’s patent and proceeded to make even more improvements — including changing the name to Monopoly — that the game gained ground.
While Magie’s version of the game never passed the “go” stage, she did better than collecting $200, but only slightly. After Darrow sold Monopoly to Parker Bros., the company tracked down Magie and paid her $500 for her part in creating the now-popular board game.
