Beatrice Kenner and Midred Smith: Sister Inventors

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.

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Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and I'm Holly Frye. Holly, you've been on kind of an inventor kick lately, I have, and I'm joining you now.

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Speaker 1: Welcome, Welcome to.

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Speaker 2: In today's episode is actually on two sisters, Mary Beatrice Davidson Kenner and Mildred Ethel Davidson Austin Smith. Beatrice's inventions were focused largely on making life easier and less annoying for herself and the people around her, including inventions related to something I personally find pretty annoying, which is our periods. Uh. Mildred's invention was more about family, and that invention grew from her disability after she developed multiple sclerosis. This is one of those subjects where there are just little bits of misinformation and inaccuracies that have become incredibly widespread and are now kind of taken as fact because different writers have all been sourcing the same work and also sourcing each other. So I've tried to sort out as much of that as possible, but there are definitely still some gaps. Also, there is a photo that is purportedly of Beatrice as a young woman, that is just all over the place, including as of when we recorded this, things like the Wikipedia article about her. I'm ninety nine percent sure that photo is really of Mildred. There's not really as much recent writing about Mildred, but the photo that is sometimes used for her is again I'm like ninety nine percent sure that's really of Beatrice. And the reason that I think this is that there are also some publicly available photos of each of them from later on in their lives, like one of b Beatrice that was included alongside an obituary, and one of Mildred that was in a nineteen eighty two article about her. That photo of the older Mildred looks more like the photo that's usually used on articles about Beatrice, and then the photo of older Beatrice looks more like the one that is sometimes used for Mildred. I also found a photo in newspaper coverage of Mildred's career as a singer in the thirties that very strongly resembles that photo that's usually used for Beatrice today. That's just a thing to be aware of if you go google these women and see the photos that are being used. I will talk about the odd giggle this whole thing gave me in behind the scenes on Friday, Okay. Mildred and Beatrice came from a family of inventors. Their maternal grandfather, Robert Pink Fronbarger, worked for a railroad company. In nineteen fifteen, he and William Floyd Byrome were issued US Patent one one three four eight seven one for a current supply system for electrical railways. According to interviews that Beatrice and Mildred gave later on in their lives, their grandfather also invented a tricolor signaling system for trains, but he didn't get the patent on that one. Fronberger was black, and he demonstrated his invention to some white railroad men before he had applied for a patent on it. They stole that design from him, and because of the entrench systems of racism that he was living and working in, there really wasn't anything he could do about it. Mildred and Beatrice's father, Sidney Nathaniel Davidson, was a Baptist minister, and several of his brothers were ministers as well. Sydney had a close pressing business and also owned a funeral home, and he invented things that were related to both of those professions. In nineteen fourteen, he was awarded a patent on a close presser that could fit in a person's luggage, as described in US Past at one zero eight eight three two nine quote. The object of this invention resides in the provision of a trouser's creasing device, wherein trousers may be disposed in a flattened position to be pressed and creased. This device had multiple hinged leaves with rounded ends, so that the parts of the pants that were supposed to be creased stayed creased, but the presser did not make unwanted creases where the legs of the pants needed to be folded to fit in the luggage. Beatrice and Mildred later gave interviews in which they talked about what happened with this invention. Apparently a company in New York was interested in bringing it to market, but, possibly influenced by his father in law's experience, Sidney tried to put it into production himself with the help of one of his brothers. According to Beatrice, he and a brother only managed to make one presser, which they sold for fourteen dollars. According to Mildred, Sidney wanted to develop it with his brothers, but he couldn't get their interest, and ultimately he sold the rights to the design for much less than she thought it was worth. Later on, Sidney Davidson was also issued US patent two six zero seven one zero three on what he called a body lifter. This was meant for mortuary staff to use to move people's bodies, and it could also serve as a mortuary table. It was designed to be easy to slip under a person's body, and it could be used like a stretcher to carry living people who for whatever reason couldn't be moved with some other type of stretcher. He also designed a long handled brush that could dispense water that was to be used for washing trains, although I wasn't able to find a patent for that one. Mary Beatrice Davidson was born in Monroe, North Carolina, on May seventeenth, nineteen twelve. Her name appears in multiple ways in newspapers and other written documents from her lifetime, sometimes as Mary Beatrice, sometimes m Beatrice, and sometimes just Beatrice. Later on in her life, people called her aunt. B Monroe is considered part of the Charlotte metropolitan area today, and Mildred Ethel Davidson was born in Charlotte on January thirty first, nineteen sixteen. Beatrice and Mildred also had two brothers, Perry, who was the oldest, and Leyton, who was born between Beatrice and Mildred. The family lived in a predominantly white part of town, and when the children reached school age, they had to go to private school because there wasn't a public school in the neighborhood that would accept black children. When Beatrice was five and Mildred was an infant, Beatrice was seriously burned. Perry and a cousin had been told that if they raked leaves, Santa Claus would be good to them, and Beatrice thought that if she helped, he might be good to her as well.

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Speaker 1: The boys had raked the lead into two piles, and she decided to combine them, not realizing that they had just set fire to one of those piles. She grabbed an armful of leaves from that pile, and by the time she realized they were burning, some of them were sticking to her clothing.

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Speaker 2: Beatrice's burns were mainly around her mouth and chin, and the doctors who came to see her did not expect her to live because of the smoke and flame that she had inhaled. At the time, the only hospital in the Charlotte area that accepted black patients didn't have a lot of experience treating burns, so her mother, Nelly, and her paternal grandmother, who worked as both a midwife and a veterinarian, cared for her around the clock themselves for weeks.

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Speaker 1: Beatrice recovered, but she had scars around her lips and chin, which she was teased and bullied over. Even adults told her that she would never amount to anything because of the scars on her face. This is another reason why it seems like those photos are probably miss attributed. There is no suggestion of a scar in the photo that is usually used to represent her. Beatrice described herself as becoming more and more determined to make something of herself every time someone said something like this to her.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, the photo that's usually used for Beatrice is like a really pretty clear, straightforward view of her face, and the ones that I think really are of Beatrice are more like low resolution scans of things that ran in newspapers, and so the photos are not as clear as the one that's typically used for Beatrice that I think is really of her sister. Beatrice also described herself as mechanically minded. The first time she tried to invent something, she was six years old. One of their doors had a squeaky hinge, and after somebody oiled it, it would not take very long for it to start squeaking again. She told her mother that there should be a self oiling doorhinge, and she had an idea for how to do this. She worked on that idea until her hands hurt, but she never quite nailed it.

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Speaker 1: Another idea she.

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Speaker 2: Had as a kid was a convertible roof that could be used to protect the people who were riding on the rumble seat of a car. And she designed a sponge tip for the end of an umbrella so that when you closed the umbrella and left it upside down after you'd used it, the water would collect in that sponge rather than pooling on the floor.

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Speaker 1: I think that's so ingenious. In nineteen twenty four, when Beatrice was twelve and Mildred was eight, the family moved to Washington, d c. Their mother Nelly had a sister who lived there and had fallen in love with the city while visiting. This opened up some new educational opportunities for the children. Paul Lawrence Dunbar High School was the first public high school for black students in the United States, and it had developed a reputation for academic excellence. Washington, d in the nineteen twenties, was also a much bigger city than Charlotte, and that brought some other opportunities for the siblings. While their father was an inventor, their mother loved art and music, and in the early nineteen thirties, Perry, Beatrice, and Mildred formed a musical trio. Sometimes it was called Spade Flush and sometimes Perry and his sisters. They started performing publicly and on the radio, and they got some interest to get a music deal, but Mildred was still a minor and she would have needed their father's permission to sign any kind of contract. Sidney would not give that permission because he was concerned about what it would look like for a minister to allow his children to perform in public, even though two of the children were effectively adults by that point. He also did not think that the jazz music they were singing was appropriate. While Sydney had owned multiple businesses in Charlotte, after the family he moved to Washington, d C. He had trouble finding work. According to an interview that Beatrice gave in the nineteen nineties, he left Washington to conduct their oldest brother's funeral, and he didn't come back but for a while afterward. He did send money from time to time, but that doesn't seem correct. The youngest of the Davidson siblings, Leyton, died in nineteen twenty six at the age of eleven after an accidental injury, and he was buried back in Charlotte. But Perry lived until nineteen fifty six, when his sisters were in their forties, and his funeral was held in Washington, d C. When Sydney died, he was also living in d C, and according to his death notice, he was minister at Washington, d C's Guildfield Baptist Church. So it's possible that Beatrice misspoke during this interview, or that the interviewer misunderstood her, or that there's just some other explanation for this confusion. Beatrice and Mildred both graduated from Dunbar High School, and as they became adults, their lives started to diverge a little bit.

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Speaker 2: And we will take a quick sponsor break, and after we get back we will focus more on Beatrice for a little bit. We said earlier that Beatrice Davidson started thinking of inventions when she was still a child. After the family moved to Washington, d c. She started visiting the US Patent and Trademark Office and learning how that process worked and researching whether other people had already patented any of her ideas. She also volunteered at a hospital, and she wanted to train to become a nurse. She said that she planned to go to the Tuskegee Institute and that her father had said that he would pay for her to go, but that money never materialized. It is very possible that this was just because of what was going going on in the world when Beatrice would have been ready to go to nursing school. She graduated from Dunbar in nineteen thirty one, so that was during the Great Depression. Beatrice kept trying to invent things, and she took on various jobs to try to earn enough money to cover the cost of patenting them. She also liked to cook and play the piano, and she really liked to go out and see plays and other performances. Eventually she got a job with the federal government. Various sources say she started at the Census Bureau in nineteen forty one and later moved on to the General Accounting Office now known as the Government Accountability Office. This is the independent, nonpartisan agency sometimes known as the investigative Arm of Congress, which has existed to do things like audit government agencies, investigate allegations of fraud and waste, and provide reports on government efficiency since nineteen twenty one. For more than one hundred years.

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Speaker 1: The GAO has done this through actual accounting, audit, and nuns investigatory procedures, not by feeding things into a large language model and using its output to decide what to cut and who to fire. Several articles about Beatrice say that during World War II, in addition to volunteering as a nurse with the Red Cross, she worked as a dance chaperone. Although she was unmarried at this point, she would have been in her thirties.

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Speaker 2: A couple of sources say that she met a soldier at one of these dances, fell in love with him, and got married, with that marriage ending in a divorce five years later. I could not find confirmation of this marriage or who it was to, and Beatrice does not mention it in the interviews that I had access to. But her sister Mildred did get married in nineteen thirty eight, and Mildred's husband did serve in World War Two, and that marriage did end in divorce. So it is not fully clear to me whether this is just another point of confusion between the two sisters, or if Beatrice had a man marriage in the forties that she just did not want to talk about later. We do know that Beatrice married James Kenner, known as Jabbo, in nineteen fifty one. Jabo was one of the founders of the Black Police Boys Club, a precursor to the Metropolitan Police Boys and Girls Club. He had also been a professional boxer with a promising career, including winning the Middle Atlantic Coast Black Heavyweight Championship. His boxing style is where the name Jabbo came from, but his boxing career had been derailed when he contracted tuberculosis in nineteen forty three. That was the same year that the antibiotic streptomycin was first isolated, which was the first really effective treatment for TB. We covered streptomisin's development on the show back in twenty thirteen. Jabo was treated at Glendale Tuberculosis Sanitarium in Glendale, Maryland, and it took years for him to fully recover. After that, he focused on working with youth, including becoming director of the Boys and Girls Club. A nineteen forty seven article on him describes him as a hero to the area's youngsters. As a little snapshot from their married life, Beatrice loved to find four leaf clovers out in their yard, and there was one patch of grass that she would not let him cut so that she could hunt for clovers there. When she found one, she would make a wish on it and then she would press it in a book. She and her husband worked together on youth programs and they eventually became foster parents and they adopted at least one son from foster care. Beatrice was awarded her first patent in nineteen fifty six. That was US Patent two seven four five four oh six sanitary belt. This is something she had been working on and improving since she was a teenager, and it is her most well known invention today, so to talk about it, we need to talk a little bit about the history of menstrual protection. Generally speaking, in the very very distant past, it's likely that people's menstrual periods were lighter and that people had fewer of them because they were pregnant a lot more often and also didn't have the robust nutrition that most of us, at least here in the US have today. The first written references to some kind of menstrual protection are pretty recent relative to how long people have been having periods. According to a number of sources, it is the story of Hypatia throwing one of her menstrul rags at a man who would not leave her alone. We talk about that in our episode on Her that ran as a Saturday Classic on January twentieth of twenty twenty four. Hypatia lived around the fourth century, but this story about her throwing her rags at someone that first appeared in writing around the tenth century, So there's some speculation that hundreds are maybe more like thousands of years ago. People might have just bled into their clothes, especially since in a lot of cultures it was and in some cases still is expected for people to isolate themselves and rest when they were menstruating. At some point people started using some kind of absorbent material to try to contain the blood during their periods, and historically there has been a lot of ingenuity and problem solving involved in dealing with menstrual bleeding. The kinds of materials people have used have depended on where they lived and what was available there, so rags, moss, wool paper, cotton, animal furs or skins, and dried dung wrapped in cloth are among the many options. A lot of times writing about this is really focused on how some of these seem like they wouldn't work very well, but like people were also figuring it out. Yeah, were solving problems and discovering solutions. A lot of these are also still in use in various places around the world, and in some cases homemade homegrown products work fine. A lot of them are definitely more sustainable than most of today's mass produced tampons and pads, which can create a lot of plastic waste. But for a lot of people, options like rags or moss or animal dung just aren't very comfortable or effective. Combined with stigma around menstruation and a lack of access to reliable menstrual products and to bathrooms and to clean water. All that together is a source of systemic sex based disadvantage known as period poverty. This includes kids in some parts of the world missing school during their periods or dropping out of school entirely after they start menstruating, and that brings us back to Beatrice Kenner's invention. By the nineteenth century, people in Europe and North America were mostly using some kind of pad made of flannel or woven cloth, often homemade, which was meant to be washed and reused. Then, in the late nineteenth century, companies started making and selling disposable pads.

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Speaker 1: One of the first was released by Johnson and Johnson in eighteen eighty seven, and it was called Lister's Towels Sanitary Napkins for Ladies. Joseph Lister did not have anything to do with this. His name was just associated with hygiene. This pad had loops at each end that could be threaded through a belt to hold it in place. Even with the Lister name, though, these did not sell very well, and that's attributed to how much stigma there was about menstruation and people's reluctance to buy something that was obviously for use during their periods.

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Speaker 2: For decades after this, commercially made pads followed this same basic model. There was something absorbent that would be attached to a belt with loops or clips or buttons or hooks. That absorbent material improved during World War One alongside wound dressings that were being used on the battlefield. Some sources attribute part of this evolution to nurses using these dressings as pads. A big innovation during this time was cell you cotton, which was a cottony material made from cellulose. So the shift to disposable, commercially made pads around the turn of the twentieth century was simultaneously driven by the hygiene movement, industrialization, and warfare.

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Speaker 1: While these pads were usually more absorbent than layers of flannel or another cloth, they were still a lot bulkier than most of today's commercial pads, and the belts had a number of issues. Many of them were similarly bulky and just uncomfortable to wear. Some of them were sold by size, and they weren't really adjustable, so they could become too big or too small if somebody's weight fluctuated during their period, which is absolutely normal in the case for a lot of people. A lot of designs also didn't really work well if someone was moving around a lot. The pad was sort of suspended in the same place all the time, regardless of whether someone was standing or sitting or bending over, so when a person moved in the pad didn't, it might not be in the right place to absorb the blood anymore, and it could also just bunch up uncomfortably under a person's clothing.

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Speaker 2: Beatrice's invention addressed a lot of these issues. It was, in the words of her patent quote, extremely simple and construction, easy to use, adjustable for various sized persons, well adapted for its intended purpose, and very inexpensive to manufacture. It was so compact and so inexpensive that it could be included along with the pad in the dispensers in public places. In addition to being adjustable, it included adhesive portions for attaching the pad, and it was designed so that the pad could slide back and forth, so it held the pad snugly against the body, and as the wearer moved around, the pad would slide along the middle part of the belt and move with them so it stayed in the right place. According to Beatrice's interviews, there was a company interested in bringing this sanitary belt to market. Various articles say it was the sun nap Pack Company. That first part is spelled s NN, but this is probably a misspelling. It's a name that only seems to exist in articles about Beatrice Kenner.

00:23:26
Speaker 1: On the other hand, san Nappack spelled sa N and later called Doe Skin Products was a real company that made things like facial tissue and cellulose sanitary napkins. In Beatrice's account, someone from the company came to meet with her and was obviously startled when they realized she was black, and at that point they immediately lost interest. In nineteen sixty nine, Beatrice was awarded US patent two eight eight one seven six' one for an improvement on this. Design it still featured an adjustable waste belts and attachments that allowed the pad to move around with the. Wearer the improvement was the attachment for the. Pad this time it was a moisture proof pocket to help prevent. Leaks neither Of Beatrice kenner's sanitary belt designs was ever brought to, market and her patents expired in nineteen seventy. Three in nineteen seventy, six a number of sources kind of make it sound like manufacturers just jumped on her design once her patents had, expired but that's not really the. Case by the nineteen, seventies manufacturers were moving away from sanitary belts thanks to the development of adhesives that could keep a pad attached to a person's underwear without damaging that underwear when the pad was. Removed the first adhesive pads were introduced in nineteen sixty, nine And kenner's first patent did involve an, adhesive but the adhesive itself was not described in that.

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Speaker 2: Patent by the time her patents, expired there were also other, modern commercial made options for menstrual, protection including tampons and menstrul. Cups both of these had already existed in some form before, that but they were introduced as manufactured consumer products in the nineteen. Thirties tampons took a while to catch on because of concerns about safety and, hygiene and stigma and misconceptions around the concept of, virginity but by the seventies tampons were widely available and they had become a lot more. Popular menstrul cups also didn't really catch on, immediately but they have had a resurgence in more recent. Years Beatrice kenner's next patent has a connection to her. Sister so we're going to take another sponsor break and then hop over To mildred's story for a. Bit, earlier we talked about, how while still a, Teen Mildred davidson had started performing as a singer with her. Siblings she described singing as being in her. Blood after she graduated From Dunbar High, school she wasn't really sure what she wanted to do with her, life and she took a little time trying to figure it. Out after she decided to make music her, career she enrolled At Howard University school Of, music which is now part Of Howard's CHADWICK. A Bosman college Of Fine. Arts she studied there for about two and a half, years and while she was still in, college she also started touring as a. Singer as we mentioned, earlier On january twenty, ninth nineteen thirty, eight just a couple of days before her twenty second, Birthday mildred got married To Ralph Edward, austin and they had two, Sons ronald And Ralph. Junior Ralph senior was a, minister and he seems to have had similar opinions About mildred's musical career to the ones that her, Father sidney. Had mildred was offered the chance to audition for the role Of carmen in an all black staging of that, opera But ralph objected to the idea of her playing that, role basically Describing carmen as having low. Morals So mildred didn't do, it and that was something she expressed regret about. Later at some, Point mildred And ralph, divorced and by the time her father died in nineteen fifty, six she had Married Ray. Smith that marriage eventually ended in divorce as. Well mildred did keep, singing though in addition to her solo performances she performed with The National Negro Opera. Company she also sang in a number of church choirs and eventually became choir director At Tabor Presbyterian church In, washington d.

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Speaker 1: C like her, Sister mildred was a federal, employee also working at The General Accounting. Office she left THE goo in nineteen sixty one at the age of forty, five because she was experiencing disabling physical symptoms that were affecting her ability to, work and these symptoms also affected her musical. Career she was diagnosed with multiple spleurosis in nineteen sixty.

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Speaker 2: FOUR ms is believed to be an autoimmune. Disease it involves the body's immune system attacking the milind sheath that protects the nerve. FIBERS a person's exact symptoms depend on which nerves are, affected so these symptoms can include things like numbness and, tingling a lack of, coordination blindness and other visual, disturbances, dizziness slurred speech and, mood and cognitive. Changes most people WITH ms have a type known as relapsing, remitting in which a person experiences cycles of symptom flare ups followed by periods of relative, remission and this was the case For. Mildred after her, Diagnosis mildred became a spokesperson for people WITH, ms holding educational lectures for women's clubs and other groups about the. Disease she also worked with The outreach chapter of The National Multiple Sclerosis, society which had been established as advancement of research on multiple. Sclerosis in nineteen forty, six she also did one on one outreach to other people WITH ms and their. Families As MILDRED'S ms, progressed she started using a walker for, mobility and in nineteen seventy, six her Sister beatrice was AWARDED us patent three nine five seven zero seven to, one which was. QUOTE a carrier attachment including a rigid tray section and a pocket section is suspended by connecting straps from one side of the top. Frame the tray section can be swung to operative position above and supported by the top frame. Member this was both a pocket and a. Tray the background section of this patent notes that while walkers provided a stable supporting structure and valuable mobility assistance to people who used, them their shape and their structure also limited a person's ability to hold and carry things that they might. Need so this device worked with a structural frame design that was really commonly used among most of the walkers of the, era and it provided both a way to carry things and a flat surface to put things on when. Needed by this point In beatrice's, life she And jabbo had moved To McLean. Virginia beatrice had left her job with the federal government after a series of experiences in which white people with less experience were promoted over. Her she had opened her own flower, shop eventually operating five of them in and around The, WASHINGTON dc. Area this is something else that the sisters had in. Common mildred had also run her own flower, shop and later in, life ran the flower shop for her, Church Shiloh Baptist, church which named her Its woman of The year in nineteen eighty. One mildred started developing her invention around the same time That beatrice was patenting that walker carrier. Attachment during a particularly BAD ms, Flare mildred wasn't able to leave her, bed and she said that during that time she thought a lot about her family and how good they had been to, her and also what a big family it, was and how hard it could be to keep up with how everyone was related to everyone. Else this became the inspiration for a board game Called Family. Traditions Family traditions involved a set of playing, cards each of them labeled and illustrated with a family member or a family. Relationship cards were shuffled and dealt to the players who used sets of three cards to fill in family relationships on a game, board such as my mother's son is my, brother but also more distant relationships like third and fourth. Cousins players got points for each relationship they created on the, board with different family members and relationships earning different numbers of, points but they lost points for any cards left over in their hand at the end of the. Game mildred was AWARDED us patent for two three zero three two one on this game In october of nineteen eighty and she also trademarks the name and logo and registered the copyright on the game. Rules mildred borrowed some money From beatrice so that she could publish this game, herself selling out of the first printing of one hundred. Copies she followed this with another run of five hundred more copies of the. Game she also created a braille, edition and in nineteen eighty, two she told a reporter that her dream was for her game to become as big As monopoly and allow her to start a company of her own that she would staff with other disabled. People On october nineteenth of nineteen eighty, Two beatrice was AWARDED us patent four three five four six' four to three bathroom. Tissue holder this was a device that could attach to a person's existing toilet paper holder on, the wall which would always keep the free out of the toilet, paper available so you didn't have to spin the roll around hunting. For it this looked a.

00:32:59
Speaker 1: Little like a short ladder with hooks at, one end which could attach to the rod on. The holder the free end of the toilet paper would then be threaded through the bottom two rungs of. The Ladder on, december thirteenth nineteen, Eighty three, Beatrice's husband jabbo died after retiring as director Of the Boys And. Girls club he had continued to volunteer with young People, in washington. D c and in the other places where He and. Beatrice lived there are still youth leagues and facilities in the area named after. Him today in nineteen, Eighty four beatrice became ill and she needed. An ambulance she was living In the kingshill Area, Of, williamsburg virginia where She and jabo had moved a few years before. His death she was, ultimately fine but it took a while for the ambulance to get to her because of. Traffic congestion around The Nearby bush gardens, theme park and this prompted her to write a letter To The Newport News daily press proposing a solution that an emergency lane be built in the grassy media Area of, route sixty which Ran Past. Bush gardens she wrote that this would allow emergency vehicles to respond faster and also prevent lawsuits against the county in the amusement park if people died or lost their homes to a fire because emergency vehicles couldn't. Get through she handed her letter to the, EDITOR quote i am aware that this has been recognized as a. Problem, area however recognition solves no problems and saves.

00:34:26
Speaker 2: No lives in nineteen, Eighty seven beatrice was issued another patent number four six nine six zero Six eight shower wall and bathtub. Mounted backwasher this is a pad of foam covered in terrycloth mounted to a rigid plate that could be stuck to the shower wall with. Suction cups it had a pouch for a bar of, soap quote so that a person taking a shower or bath can position their back or any other inaccessible area of their body against the surface of the terry cloth or other fabric cover by my removing the body area engaged with the cover provide a washing or massaging function on the surface area of. The body the fabric elements of this invention were all removable so that they could. Be laundered it's not documented anywhere whether the backwasher and the toilet paper holder came About because beatrice was trying To make mildred's home, more accessible but it's certainly within the realm. Of possibility sometime after this last patent, Was awarded beatrice also finished writing, an autobiography which she Titled It Burned my body but Not My soul And to tracy's knowledge, in mind this was. Never PUBLISHED. Mildred e smith died At, her washington. D c Home on, january thirtieth nineteen, ninety three at the age of. Seventy seven beatrice kept inventing things to the rest of, her life although she didn't patent any. Of them in, her eighties she worked on a protective device for seat belts that She called nicholas to keep the belt from biting into a. Person's neck she said she really needed this because she was.

00:36:02
Speaker 1: So short. SHOUT out i agree with HER because i have the. Same problem some of the inventions she talked about in the last couple of decades of her life sound a bit more fanciful than the practical ones that she was issued, patents on like a portable car garage and a passenger airplane design that would eject debris away from the passengers in the event of.

00:36:21
Speaker 2: A Crash beatrice kenner Died on, january thirteenth two thousand, and Six At sibley Hospital, in WASHINGTON. D c at the age of.

00:36:31
Speaker 1: Ninety three various Sources Say beatrice kenner was awarded more patents than any other black WOMAN in, us history but that's almost impossible, to substantiate since patent applications don't include a disclosure of a. Person's race in, some ways this leveled the playing field for, black inventors who could file patent applications themselves or with the help of attorneys at a time when racism would have kept them from accessing. Other institutions at the, same time the patent process was still influenced by the same systemic patterns of discrimination as everything else In The. United states patenting and invention still, cost money and so did defending a patent, in court and there's been racial bias in the courtroom for the entire history Of The. United states it, is, clear Though that Mildred and beatrice were, both creative innovative women who both were very savvy about protecting their inventions, through, patents trademarks. AND copyright i.

00:37:30
Speaker 2: Kind of love both.

00:37:31
Speaker 1: Of, them yeah they're. Pretty.

00:37:33
Speaker 2: GREAT uh i kept just stumbling onto new THINGS that i, Was, like oh.

00:37:38
Speaker 1: THAT'S delightful.

00:37:41
Speaker 2: I also have listener mail about something, else delightful which.

00:37:44
Speaker 1: Is, Pens, oh pens we. Love.

00:37:46
Speaker 2: You yeah this Came. From trish, TRISH wrote i love listening to, your show especially the episodes about people and TOPICS that i would never look. Into myself my favorite shows are the ones that dig into topics that are often considered boring to and make. Them interesting you do that very well and make my days much. More interesting i've developed a habit of spouting random bits of trivia. And. CONVERSATIONS though i was so happy when this week's topic, was pens even if the focus was. BALLPOINT pens i decided to start Journaling in december of. Twenty nineteen this turned out to be a. GOOD idea i started going through so many, pens gelpins MOSTLY that i felt guilty about the. Plastic WASTE when i search for something more, ENVIRONMENTALLY friendly i fell down the rabbit hole of fountain pen. Collection culture you can spend a lot of money on. One pen luckily, for me you can also get some decent ones for less than twenty. FIVE dollars i grew up down the road from one of the main cross pen Factories In, rhode island and my dad carried one of their fountain pens every day for as LONG as i. Can remember when he retired a little early in, twenty twenty he gave me that pen EVERY time i, use it which is pretty much EVERY day i think. OF him a good fountain can last. For generations as, a tip if you don't live near one of the few places that still specialize in fountain pens and have trouble WITH, the nib a jeweler can often help. Fix it, pun intended. Not sorry thank you again for finding and sharing all the interesting things behind. Everyday topics as a, pet tax here is My, dog penny who seems to have melted in, the heat and my feisty but Dumbed, turtle gulliver who sometimes tries to get off her rock in the wrong direction and needs to. Be. Rescued trish thank you, So much trish for this email and for. These pictures we.

00:39:37
Speaker 1: Have a picture of.

00:39:38
Speaker 2: A turtle this turtle appears to, be sideways not quite the direction that the turtle should. Be oriented, and, also yes a puppy dog doing the thing where they stretch out with as much of them, as possible touching the floor where. It's cool the. Swoop yep thank you So much trish for. This Email maybe i'll give fountain pens another go someday and SEE if i can find one with a nib that does not feel unpleasant to me to, write with because that was my big. Stumbling block if you would like to send us a note about this or any, other podcast We're At history podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com and you can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app and. Anywhere else too late to get. Your podcasts stuff you Missed In history class is a Production. Of iHeartRadio for more Podcasts, from iHeartRadio visit the, iHeartRadio App, apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your. Favorite shows