This article is part of OverlookedA series of death reports about remarkable people whose dead, starting in 1851, was not reported in time.
From the time Beulah Henry was a child in the late 19th century, she dreamed of ways to make life easier. That impulse would eventually give her to protect dozens of patents and would earn a nickname: Lady Edison.
When she died in the early 1970s, she held much more patents than any other woman, according to the patent and trademark office of the United States, and in 2006 she was included in the National Inventors Hall of Fame for her contributions to technological innovation.
“I think because I can't do anything about it,” she often said. “New things just put themselves on me.”
Her first prototype, when she was 9, was a mechanism that would enable a man to give his hat to a passer -by while held a newspaper at the same time.
The visions kept coming. In 1912, while she was at the university, she received her first patent (no. 1.037.762) for an ice maker who functioned with at least ice, something that was scarce at that time. It was not a commercial success, but that did not stop her from coming up with other innovations.
Patent no. 1,037,762
'Ice Cream Freezer'
Everything and everything seemed to be interested: toys, typewriters, sewing machines, coffee pots, hair curls, tin openers, envelopes. Her achievements were all the more remarkable because she had no knowledge of mechanics and missed the technical vocabulary to describe what she was trying to do.
Working from a series of hotel suites – a reporter who visited, described what he saw as a Boudoir more than a business place – she hired model makers, concept people and patent lawyers to realize her visions. Sometimes she sold her ideas to manufacturers who then register their own patents.
Henry could see the end product in her head, she said, “As clearly when you see a book or a photo or a flower in front of you.” Her challenge was to communicate that vision clearly enough so that others could bring it into reality.
“I say to the engineers, build me so and so on, and they say to me:” Miss Henry, it could not possibly work, “she told the Winston-Salem Journal and Sentinel in 1965.” And I say to them: “I don't know if it will work, but I look at it,” and that's how they build it and it works. “
Beulah Louise Henry was born on September 28, 1887 in Raleigh, NC her father, Walter R. Henry, was an art connoisseur and collector who was active in local democratic politics. Her mother, Beulah (Williamson) Henry, was an artist. Her brother, Peyton, was a songwriter.
Henry claimed to lose weight from Benjamin Harrison, the 23rd president of the United States, and of the revolutionary war hero Patrick Henry.
In interviews she said that her ability to find out may have been influenced by a neurological disorder called synesthesia, in which not – related senses are linked – certain sounds or tastes can think of certain colors, for example. “I have a million percent,” she would say.
After graduating from Elizabeth College, in Charlotte, NC, she moved to New York City with her mother to pursue her invention career.
One idea concerned a parasol with snap-on covers in different colors that can be changed to match a woman's outfit. It was not an easy sale.
Patent nos. 1.492.725 and 1,593,494
'Parasol' and 'Runner Shield Attachment'
One after the other, the experts told her: “It can't be done,” she said in the Raleigh News and Observer in 1923. “But I knew it could be done.”
The end result, described in the press as 'a miracle for the smart milady', was so popular that she founded the Henry Umbrella and Parasol Company to create her creation and bring it to the market. Lord & Taylor showed the parasols in his windows and they sold thousands.
For a while Henry put her energy in reinventing children's toys, mainly dolls. She used feathers and tubes to make them kick, blink and cry; She put a radio in one. Her most popular creation was the Miss Illusion Doll, with eyes that changed color to match his wigs. She also created a plush toy cow named Milka-Moo, who visited milk and had a secret compartment for a bar with soap.
Later she turned into typewriters. Of the approximately 10 -related patents she received, the most impressive perhaps the “Protograph” (no. 1.874,749), a confirmation that produced multiple copies of a document without carbon paper.
She would “just look at something,” said Henry, “and thinks,” There is a better way to do that, “and the idea comes to me.”
In 1941 she looked at sewing machines for a long time and invented the double chain stitch sewing machine (no. 2,230,896), which functioned without the bobbins that had to stop and change seamstresses.
She also found a way to make cooking easier. For years she said: “The percolator on the coffee pot said to me:” Do something with me, “but I didn't know what. And then one day when I was a roasted clever, I knew what to do with that percolator.”
She continued: “I worked out a device that percoles the juice in a coffee roaster and continuously expresses the meat itself.” She received the patent for it in 1962.
Reporters portrayed her out of extensive terms: she was 'an excellent, commander figure', noticed one; “Stylish dress,” said another – “delicious, almost theatrical female” and “more as an operator than an inquisitive scientific person.”
Those who visited her at work in her hotel room often discovered a touch of incense and called her pink lampshades or the large telescope she placed by a window so that she could stare at the night sky. Then there were the pets: at different times she held small turtles, a parakeet, a tropical oriole, different pigeons and cockatiels and a cat called Chickadee.
Henry was active in the American Museum of Natural History, the National Audubon Society, the New York Women's League for Animals and the New York Microscopical Society, among others. She's never married.
Her distant inspirations were a mystery for her mother, who often lived with her.
“I don't know what to make of her,” her mother said in 1923. “She gets up at night and left with experiments with the electric lights and the water system, or hunting for sheets of brown paper to put on or cut.”
Henry offered a mystical explanation for her coercion.
“I started to believe in spiritual control,” she told the News Tribune, in Tacoma, Wash., In 1939. “And I am sure that the ideas that come into my mind in the early hours of the morning are reports of a leading spirit.”
She was 85 when she died in February 1973, with her 49th and last patent – the nature of it was lost for time – in treatment.
