Harriet Hosmer
American sculptor and innovator
Category Archives: Inventor
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Hertha Ayrton
Hertha Ayrton was an engineer and mathematician. She was awarded the Royal Society’s Hughes Medal, and is well known as a suffragette.
Hedy Lamarr
Hedy Lamarr was an Austrian-American actress and inventor who pioneered the technology that would one day form the basis for today’s WiFi, GPS, and Bluetooth communication systems. As a natural beauty seen widely on the big screen in films like Samson and Delilah and White Cargo, society has long ignored her inventive genius.
Florence Lawrence
As one of the first motion picture stars, Florence Lawrence was known as “The Biograph Girl.” Throughout her career she appeared in almost 300 films and became one of the first women to lead a US film studio. She was also an inventor and was credited as the inventor of the turn signal and the brake signal for automobiles.
Dr Patricia Era Bath
Cataract surgery pioneer Patricia Bath was the first African-American to complete a residency in ophthalmology, after obtaining her MD at Howard University and her fellowship in ophthalmology at Columbia University.
Angélique de Coudray
In 1759, French king Louis XV launched a project to reduce infant mortality in the country and commissioned Parisian midwife Angélique du Coudray to train peasant women as midwifes. From 1760 to 1783, she trained approximately 10,000 women across France, visiting poor women in rural areas and sharing her extensive knowledge with them. Presumably the women she taught also passed those skills on to outhers in following years. Du Coudray also invented the first lifesize obstetrical mannequin, so the women could practice mock births, and published a popular midwifery textbook, Abrégé de l’art des accouchements (The Art of Obstetrics, 1759). Due to the lack of accurate data collection, it is impossible to quote statistics about infant mortality rates (which were frequently underreported in the 1700s and earlier), but it seems inarguable that du Coudray must have directly and indirectly saved countless lives, of both mothers and children.