LADY HENRY

Design is no man’s game.

But you would never know that from the textbooks.

We are all familiar with the names of Bell and Edison and Fulton and Watt, but not of Lillian Gilbretli, Margaret Knight, or Beatrice Hicks.  Or the thousands of other inventive women who have somehow slipped through the net of history, probably because it has largely been woven by men.

Of all the modern designers who also happened to be women, one name that should not have slipped through is that of Beulah Louise Henry.  She was so prolific that the best praise her sexist era could come up with was to call her the Lady Edison.

Beulah Henry was born in 1887 in Raleigh, NorthCarolina to a distinguished and notable family.  She was a direct descendant of Patrick Henry, and granddaughter of a governor of North Carolina.  Her father was an art connoisseur and lecturer, her mother an artist; her only brother, Peyton, became a songwriter.  She began inventing as a small child, sketching mechanical gadgets that the adults around her could barely fathom. 

Henry got her first patent in 1912 for an ice cream freezer with a unique vacuum seal.  By 1924, she had a number of patents in four different countries, including one for an umbrella with detachable,
snap-on covers of various colors that became a best-seller (40,000 units sold in the first sixty days) and which gave her enough money to set up her own business.  Unlike many of her counterparts, Henry was not only inventive but also market savvy.  By 1930 she had sold 40 of her inventions to large corporations.

Eventually, like Edison himself, she had a large laboratory with a staff of mechanics and model-makers to realize her ideas. Though she never had technical training, Henry amazed scientists and patent officials with the number, variety, and mechanical sophistication of her creations.  Her roughly 110 inventions and 49 patents included a telephone index that attached to a phone, an electric-fan shield that was packable in a trunk for traveling, a rubber reducing garment, a machine for automatically fastening snap fasteners on clothing, a "Kiddie Klock" for teaching time, an educational game about railroads, “Dolly Dips" soaps with built-in sponges for children, a line of action dolls, a duplicating attachment for typewriters, a football inflating device, a bobbinless sewing machine, and plenty more.

Yes this impressive list of inventions is the clue to why her name has been lost to us.
Beulah Henry was an inventor for ordinary life, for home life, for the real life of families, for children.  At least during her own time, this was not considered a particularly serious area of invention by her male counterparts.  All that has changed.

Nowadays we know very well that ordinary life is where we live, and that the home is where the hope is.  The name of Beulah Henry, who devoted her creativity to that, should be dutifully enshrined there.