Salute to Women Inventors
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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too, and we're just going to play a rousing version of Yankee Doodle Andy or something like that in the background of this stirring episode. You got a piccolo?

No, I'm just going to go like this. I'll record a track of... And we'll play that on a loop underneath us talking. Jerry said she can do it with editing. I'm sure this would be an all-time great. Okay. The reason I want to do that is because as I was reading this, I was...

What's the word I'm looking for? I'm toying with enthused. That's not it. That sounds like the opposite of how I feel. It is inspiring, but also rousing. Like, it's just cool that there's this un-

Well, in a way, it's not cool. It's cool to discover this whole group, this whole cadre of inventors that just are overlooked. That's the uncool part. They've been overlooked for so long. But there's a bunch of women inventors here in America and around the world, presumably. But we're just talking about American ones today that really made some amazing contributions.

And especially at first, for the first significant amount of time, they really had an uphill battle to get their invention out there because...

because of just how generally mistreated women were. Yeah, absolutely. Here's a fairly horrifying stat because it was not that long ago, but in the late 20th century, only about 10% of all patents were awarded to women and their inventions. And we're going to talk about some of the reasons before we get going on highlighting some of these great inventions and some of these great women. But one reason, obviously, is just

A lot of times, if you're a woman and you had an invention, you had to file it, at least the patent, under your husband's name or your brother's or your father's name or any man in your life that was willing to sign on the dotted line saying, yeah, that's my idea because you can't grant intellectual property or a patent to my sister or wife or daughter. Right.

Yeah.

And that was a huge deal for a while. In addition to that, because women were just generally mistreated, they also didn't have access to schooling or education, especially technical education, that would kind of help those who were already inventive by nature to actually like blossom. Yeah. And what incentive is there too, if you know that you can't get a patent for something, it's

It's going to dull your inspiration to go out and try and invent something to begin with because what's the point? I mean, sure, there's a point to inventing things because you might make the world better. But I think a lot of the drive for invention is also to do with like having something in your name and making money on it. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Yeah, but yeah, having something in your name, I think, is a more sentimental way to put it for sure. But it does deter, and I'm sure that was part of the whole thing. I mean, at the very least, women weren't seen as a group that needed, that should be encouraged to pursue these kind of things, if not actively discouraged. And some women faced that. There was actually, I didn't know about this, but at the Seneca Falls Convention and then the suffrage movement that followed, there were a couple of competing groups.

groups that were like, we really need to put all of our time and effort behind suffrage, like giving women the right to vote. That needs to be our focus. We need to stay laser focused on that because that's important. That's the one you think of when you think of the women's rights movement of the 19th century. But there's another group, economic feminists, that were like, hey,

You can have all the voting rights you want in the world, but if you don't have any means of being self-sufficient, if you need to be, it doesn't add up to a hill of beans. I think that was their slogan. Yeah. There was a woman named Charlotte Smith who, like you said, she was like, you know, if we want to make real advances, then how about – and she eventually came to the invention part of it. But how about property rights and intellectual property rights instead?

And then starting in 1875, she really focused in on inventors and invention and getting patents and getting the patent office to just simply recognize

The fact that women were starting to get patents was took nine years. It was in, I believe, 1879. She moved to D.C., started hassling the patent office to say, hey, here's all I want. Just give me a list of women inventors, period.

I think it could inspire other women. We could publish it. So if you could just put together that list, you got the list, put it together for me. And they said, sure. Nine years later, they came back with women. Well, I think she packaged it, but women inventors to whom patents have been granted. And in 1888, she published it, 500 copies worth. And that I'm sure was a big game changer as far as like, hey, look, it's happening. It's possible. You can do it.

Yes. And while that did kind of open up the floodgates to women inventors seeing like, I can do this. There is like a path for me here to take toward inventing. There were women who did have patents in their name prior to this. It was just extremely rare. Oh, yeah. I mean, well, there were how many were there? I thought there was a list here.

Yeah, the only one that I've come across, I never saw the list of women inventors to whom patents have been granted. But I did see one. I think the first American woman to earn a patent in her name was named Mary Dixon Keys, K-I-E-S. Yeah, she was the first one about 90 years earlier, but it supposedly took four clerks 10 days to put this list together. So.

You know, that was a great thing that Charlotte Smith did. She had a vision that this could be a game changer, and it seems like it probably was. Yeah. She was like, you can't hide the truth any longer with your walrus mustaches and your arm garters. Give me that list. And they did. So should we highlight some of these? These are pretty great.

Yes. All right. Let's take a break after this first one, maybe, because I'm eager to talk about Marie Van Britten Brown. She was awesome. She was born in 1922 in Jamaica, Queens, New York City. An African-American woman who worked as a nurse and oftentimes was working, you know, late night shifts coming and going at odd hours. Her husband, Albert Brown, was a an electronics technician and.

He had odd hours of work, too. So how that shakes out is a lot of times Marie Van Britten Brown would be at home or come home late at night, be a little worried. And, you know, what was a rough neighborhood at the time as to who may become a knocking on her door. So she invented, along with her husband's help, a what ended up being kind of the first closed circuit TV system and home security system in the 1960s.

Yeah, it's pretty amazing. It was a bunch of different systems that they put together to create this one complete system, pretty much out of the box. It was like a complete security system, but they really had to work with a lack of technology at the time. Like there was no way to pan the video camera that the whole thing was based on.

So instead, they had four separate peepholes and you could raise or lower the camera to the correct peephole depending on the height of the person on the other side. I find that ingenious. Great idea. I said CCTV, so there were television monitors. This camera fed into these monitors. So the idea is that you didn't actually have to go to the door. And even looking through a peephole,

can be dangerous. If someone knows you're just on the other side of the door at that peephole, they can get you. That's what it says in the patent application. That's what it said. So she had a remote control that would let her unlock the door from a distance away and an emergency button a distance away that would alert the police or security in the apartment building

Uh, you had these four peep holes, the sliding camera and a two way microphones. So she could actually say like, who's, you know, basically what we have now with like ring doorbells and nest doorbells. Yeah. Um, she thought of this idea and her husband helped her pull it off in 19, what? 66. Yeah. And the idea of just how ubiquitous this has become, this is like such a commonplace everyday thing now, um, is kind of a testament to, to what she invented because at the time, um,

This was completely revolutionary. There was nothing like this at the time. And she and her husband just invented it from whole cloth. And I think they got patent number 3,482,037. That was the U.S. patent for their closed-circuit television security system. That's right. She also got an award from the National Scientist Committee. She was recognized in The Times, the paper of record.

Sadly, she passed away in 1999 at the age of 76. But it was such a good idea that 32 subsequent patent applications referenced her original invention and their patent application. So, in other words, great idea. Yes, indeed. You want to take that break now? Let's do it. Okay. We'll be right back. ♪

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Come on in, grab a cold one, get fitted by a pro, and shop the latest dials. Visit decovas.com. That's T-E-C-O-V-A-S dot com. And don't go gently, y'all. Okay, Chuck. So up next, we're going to talk about a woman named Josephine Cochran.

who kind of bucked the trend of inventors and was a wealthy socialite. And supposedly, the origin of her invention, the dishwasher, the first actual useful dishwasher, came from a dismay that her servants washing her fine china that had been in her family since the 17th century, that it was getting chipped.

And so at first she's like, give me that. I'll do this. And then she was like, oh, doing the dishes really sucks. There's got to be a better way. And she put it off to the side for a while. But then her husband died and left her and her family in debt. And she decided to bring that idea off of the shelf and invent her way out of debt. And that's exactly what she did. Yeah, for sure. You mentioned this was the first sort of really practical, usable dishwasher. There had been other attempts, but

But, you know, they're a little clunky, literally clunky. They were the kind of thing where, like, you turn a crank on the side and the dishes are jumbling around. They just break? Yeah, well, they would break and chip. And she was like, listen, this is my original problem is that I have chipped dishes here. So why don't we do something mechanical that you don't crank and move those dishes around? She very smartly, at least for her, because she was making something for herself, she measured her dishes.

And made sure that each compartment fit the dishes very well and stayed in place. Like I said, I don't know that she had the idea that this was going to be a big mass marketed product yet. She was just trying to solve her problem. And she had a motor, a motor powered wheel above a boiler, spraying soapy water on dishes and got a patent on December 28th, 1886. Yes.

And can't you just imagine the person who came up with that hand crank dishwasher demonstrating it? You can just hear all the dishes breaking inside. And they keep cranking it. They're like, I'm sure they're fine in there. It's just what it sounds like when they're being washed. It rarely happens that way.

So the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, the white city where the devil in the white city is set. That was a huge kind of like introduction of women inventors in the United States to the world. And Josephine Cochran was one of them. She debuted her dishwasher at the 1893 World's Fair and actually won a World's Fair award. So I abbreviated this.

And I don't remember exactly how it goes, but it has to do with mechanical construction, durability, and adapted to its line of work. Oh, great. So she knocked out all four of those boxes.

Or to put briefly, best mech construct durable and adapt to its line of work, end quote. Looks strange on a trophy, but hey, she earned it. She earned it. And this little company that she established ended up becoming KitchenAid. It was after she died in 1913. But hey, pretty, pretty big feather in the in the old burial cap, I guess.

Hotels and restaurants were the first ones to use it because even though it was super handy as a thing, houses didn't have hot water heaters that could kind of sustain that level of output at the time. So you had to have these big giant boilers and hotels and stuff that could handle that. But her time would come. And by the 1950s, when those hot water heaters got better, they—

The home dishwasher became a pretty great thing. And I think anyone who ever has lived in a small apartment or is apartment searching, a dishwasher was always very high at the top of my list because you didn't always get them. Yeah. So hats off, Josephine Cochran. You know, sometimes you rent a vacation house. They got two of those things.

Oh, yeah, like two dishwashers, like full-size dishwashers. Yeah, if you rent like a house on the beach where, you know, they want those houses to sleep like 20 people. I got you, sure. They'll have like sometimes two stoves, two dishwashers, or two sets of washers and dryers and stuff. It's pretty amazing. We got one of those ones that's like one full-size washer but broken into two drawers so you can run your dishwasher like pretty frequently. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I like those. It works really well. Yeah.

I like them too. And we can thank Josephine Cochran for that. She originated that in a pretty direct way. I wonder who came up with the drawer style. I don't know. I just don't know. Yeah. Do you want me to look it up? No, that's okay. Okay, good. Because we're going to talk about diapers, right? Yeah. We're going to move on to an inventor named Marion Donovan.

who has a bunch of inventions to her name, but the one that she's most famous for is disposable diapers. That's right. You know, a lot of times necessity is the mother of an invention. And at the time, Mary Ann Donovan was working at home, working

As a homemaker, and this is after graduating from college and working for Vogue magazine and after inventing things even as a kid. I think in elementary school, she came up with a tooth powder that improved dental hygiene. So, Mary and Donovan just had one of those inventor's brains. Right. But while she was working as a mom and at home, she was –

Putting her little babies down right after she changed that diaper for a little nappy time. And that baby would just be so happy. They would peel over the place. And with those cloth diapers at the time that you safety pin, that would leak out onto the bed sheets. So now she's got a wet baby or poopy baby. And you've got a wet or poopy diaper. And then you have wet or poopy sheets. And that is no good. And she said, there's got to be a better way.

Yeah, and at the time there were something called rubber pants already, which is like a diaper made of really thick material that didn't breathe. So you would just pee yourself and your neglectful parent would leave you to wallow in your own urine and get diaper rash because that stuff wouldn't leak out. Yeah, I think they went over the diaper. It was like a little pair of pants.

Exactly. Yeah. But it would prevent those leaks from happening, but that didn't mean you didn't still pee yourself. So you would get diaper rash as a result. Yeah. They'd probably cut off some circulation to the calf and the waistline. Yeah. And then they would take you out in one of those death strollers that we were raised in. That's right. And you'd spend some time on the jungle gym that was also related to death because not only were there like rusty edges, you'd

There are also hornet's nests in the end of every single one of those. That's right. So all you have to do is not vibrate those things and you're fine. Those hornets are going to stay in place. Yeah. If you just hang from the monkey bars without moving. Dead still. Like a bat. You'll be fine. So she said nuts to all this, ran and grabbed a shower curtain, cut it actually to size and was like, this isn't just a big pair of rubber pants.

And sewed it on the outside of the cloth diaper, added some snaps so you didn't need those safety pins. And all of a sudden you had your cloth diaper that could fit inside of a fitted shower curtain, basically.

Yeah, I think that's what she started out with was a shower curtain, but she landed ultimately on something like nylon parachute material. It could generally keep leaks in, but it was much more breathable. And so this is not necessarily the disposable diaper. This is the thing that led to the disposable diaper. She marketed and called it boaters. To her, they looked like boats. I looked at these things. I did not see it, but that's what they were called. It's a catchy, cute little name. Yeah.

And what it was was like an improved rubber pants, right?

or rubber-like diaper cover because you still use the cloth diaper in there, but it would prevent leaks, but it was breathable enough that it didn't cause diaper rash. So this caught the attention of a lot of people. Apparently, it started being sold at Saks Fifth Avenue in 1949, and the Kiko Corporation came knocking and said, we'll give you $1 million for this idea. And Marion just laughed all the way to the bank. Yeah.

Yeah, because she said, you know what, that's 1949. And when these two dopes podcast about me in 2024, that's going to be like 13 million bucks. Yeah, which is pretty sweet for a woman who just invented something out of necessity. Yeah, I mean, it meant she was rich immediately. She got a patent for those boaters, 1951, and then went to work on what you were talking about, the disposable paper diaper, and did that, and it worked.

pretty well, but it wasn't a big commercial success because the diaper industry didn't get behind it. Why? Because they were like, hey, you know, this is pretty good, but all it really is doing is keeping you from having to wash cloth diapers over and over, and we don't see the value in that. Right. It's an unnecessary convenience. Yeah. Get back to work. Exactly. It took 10 years, and finally Procter & Gamble saw the usefulness in this and came up with Pampers. Yeah.

And the landfills of the world just shuddered in expectation. That's right. I said that Marian Donovan also invented some other stuff, too. She invented something called the Zippity-Doo. Very cool. Very cool. So it's like an elastic extension that you put onto a zipper so that you can zip your own dress much more easily. Yeah. There's also something called the Big Hang-Up. I love that thing. Which came out in the late 60s or 70s based on the font used in the advertisement. Yeah.

But it essentially took your clothes and turned them the opposite way that you would normally hang them.

From a hanger. So you would hang it like a rack from the... What is the thing that you hang the hangers on in a closet? The rail? The pole? The rod. Thank you. And you would take those clothes and turn them the opposite way so you could fit more clothes front to back and side to side. It was an enormous space-saving measure. Yeah. I mean, it was basically a grid, like a metal grid. And you could hang anything. So...

It used paper, not paper clips, clothespins. Right. So you could hang your belts. You could hang a hat. You could hang a pair of boots. You could hang whatever you wanted. What else? And more. Lots of things. But the point is, this one grid could hold like four pair of pants, two pair of boots, seven belts. Are you sure you can hold a pair of boots up with some clothespins?

That's what the ad said. All right. They must have been lightweight boots back then. Like maybe they're talking about like Aladdin shoes. Yeah. Well, I think it speaks to the clothespins too. Sure. They're not like these woke clothespins these days. So one other thing about Mary and Donovan, if you weren't already smitten with her enough, at 41, she went back to school and received a degree in architecture from Yale and then used it to design her own house in Connecticut. Amazing. Agreed. Should we take another break?

I think it's time. All right. We're going to come back and talk about grocery sacks right after this. Hi, icons. It's Paris Hilton. Check out my new single, Chasen, featuring Meghan Trainor. Out today.

I feel so lucky to collaborate with Megan and how perfectly she put my experience into words. Listen to Chasen from my new album, Infinite Icon, on iHeartRadio or wherever you stream music. Don't forget to visit InfiniteIcon.com to pre-save my album. Sponsored by 1111 Media.

In every pair of Tecova's boots, you can expect handmade quality, first-wear comfort, and timeless Western style. Tecova's boots are always made from premium bovine and exotic leathers, and with occasional re-solving, they will last a lifetime. The best way to shop for boots is at your local Tecova's store, where you'll be greeted by the smell of fresh leather and a friendly smile.

Come on in, grab a cold one, get fitted by a pro, and shop the latest dials. Visit Decovas.com. That's T-E-C-O-V-A-S.com. And don't go gently, y'all. Hey, guys. Rob Parker here to tell you that the national sales event is on at your Toyota dealer.

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All right. We promised talk of grocery sacks and you might be thinking, well, did someone invent the grocery sack? And was that person a woman? And why is that a big deal? Because it's just a bag.

No, that's not what we're going to tell you. We're going to tell you what a historian named Henry Petrosky told you in an article called The Evolution of the Grocery Bag. And a woman named Margaret Knight, who was another one of these kids who was inventing things from a very, very preteen age. Yeah, she got a job at 12 at a fabric factory, textile mill.

That's what they call it. Cotton mill. And when you're weaving using a loom in an industrial setting, there's these little torpedo, heavy wooden torpedo things with the steel tip on the end that you use to basically separate the fibers as you're weaving. And the whole thing moves very fast. And if you lose your grip on it, that thing that is called a shuttle can go flying and injure your neighbor at the next loom, right? Right.

So Marion Knight got a job at one of these mills, saw this, how dangerous this could be. And before she turned 13, invented a way to prevent steel tip flying shuttles from flying off of the loom and injuring somebody that became distributed industry wide at all textile mills. It became like a standard part of any loom. She wasn't even 13 yet.

Yeah. Also preteen, the age of 12, she got a patent for a device that automatically just stops an industrial machine if something gets caught up in it. So, I mean, that every industrial machine on the planet now,

stops when your arm gets caught or when something goes wrong and something gets caught in the machinery, they all stop. And that is because of Margaret Knight. Yep. So we finally, after years and years of this, of coming up with great ideas and implementing them, she's like, I should start to look into patenting these things. And she got a job ultimately at Columbia Paper Bag Company in Springfield, Massachusetts.

And this is where her greatest patent came along. There were paper grocery sacks already, but they were kind of envelope-like. They didn't do the job very well. Like, you know when you buy a greeting card and they put it in that bag that doesn't really do anything? It's just an envelope. It's like a cover for your greeting card to go home with. Okay, yeah. You know what I'm talking about? Sure. Yeah.

Okay, that's what grocery bags were like, paper grocery bags. And she said, we can do way better than this. If we just make a square bottom grocery sack, it'll stand up on its own. And as you put stuff into it, the weight will be distributed and you can carry so much more stuff. Yeah, people were putting canned goods

In basically envelopes. Like total morons. Like total morons. She came along and not only figured out that that was a good idea, figured out how to do it. In 1870, she built a wooden machine that would cut and glue, fold and glue these things and manufacture them. She was working on a heavier duty or prototype made out of iron. And some jerk comes along.

And boldface steals her idea. Yeah. Like he had seen this thing before. His name was Charles Annan, A-N-N-A-N. And he had seen it a few months earlier, went to file a patent. She filed a claim against him, a patent interference suit. And he was like, there's no way that this lady came up with this thing. And she came into court with...

just reams of the most detailed blueprints and spelled out exactly how and when she invented it. And they went, you're wrong and she's right, buddy. Yeah. That thieving SOB Charles Annen, I couldn't see anything about what became of him aside from losing that patent suit. Um,

And something – he should have gotten some sort of comeuppance. He shouldn't have just been let off the hook for, like you said, bald-faced stealing an idea or an invention. That shouldn't be unpunished, you know, but I guess –

We'll have to go dig them up and have a talking to with them. That's the best we can hope for at this time. We can besmirch his name. I guess we kind of are, but we're not besmirching. I think besmirching indicates a certain level of like exaggeration or, you know. Oh, okay. I didn't know that. That's just my interpretation. I don't know if it's correct or not.

I've never read the definition, so you're probably right. So she won that patent claim and won the patent for the device in 1871 and went on to be awarded more than 20 patents in her lifetime. Amazing again. Way to go, Margaret Knight. Boo, Charles Ann, and boo.

So let's move on to the windshield wiper because this is a pretty fun one. It was a woman from Alabama. Her name was Mary Anderson, born in 1866, a long, long time ago, long before the car came along. She was visiting New York City and she was on the I guess they were they were streetcars.

And she's like, these guys are driving around in rain and snow with their head out the side window because they can't see. They look like Ace Ventura, pet detective. And they would have to stop.

and get out and wipe the snow off of the trolley windshield like every so often. That was part of the trip. That was part of driving a trolley at the time. And she said there has to be a better way. So she took this experience back to Alabama, and she invented the first windshield wiper, essentially. It was pretty clever, as a matter of fact.

Yeah. She said this thing wipes windshields. I just don't know what to call it. So there was a spindle, right? So like kind of like a spool, but with a point on it sticking out of the windshield and attached to it was an arm with a squeegee on it. And the other side of the spindle that went into the car was attached to a cord that had a handle in the car. And when you pulled the handle, it operated this spring mechanism that made that windshield wiper go back and forth and

And it would reset. And the next time you needed to clear off your windshield, you just pulled it. No stopping. No getting out. No sticking your head out of the car like Ace Ventura. It could all be done within the car. And in, I think, very short order, Cadillac, I think 10 years after she got the patent for this, Cadillac started making windshield wipers standard on their cars starting in 1922. So that was all Mary Anderson.

Yeah, absolutely. It was more like 20 years, but still, it was the first thing to roll off the line as something you didn't have to ask for. What do they call those, options? Yeah, it wasn't an option. It was standard. That's right. 19 years later.

And she also would go on to build and manage an apartment building in Birmingham, made some good money doing that, and said, I'm going to California. And she went out to Fresno and operated a cattle ranch and a vineyard in her later years. Unfortunately, though, on the way out there, she got a punch in the nose and it started to flow. She thought for a second that she might be sinking, but she made it out okay. Yeah.

Oh, man. It's on the tip of my tongue. Led Zeppelin. Okay. It was one of those. It was like it was rattling in my head and I heard it and I heard it. Oh, God, that's frustrating when those never come, you know? I'm glad that it came then. I just saw this weather person who...

Does the weather on the news. Sure. And I guess is a Pearl Jam fan and inserts Pearl Jam lyrics into his weather report. Oh, yeah? On the reg. It was pretty fun. What news? National? Local? I think it was a local news. I didn't catch the city. I mean, maybe Seattle. Oh, gotcha. So you saw this on like the internet. Yeah, yeah. It was on the internet. I wasn't just watching the news. I didn't know if you were like talking about an Atlanta news person. I'm like, why aren't you telling everybody who?

No, no, no, no. I don't, as we know, I don't watch the local news, but what I do enjoy occasionally on tour is watching local news wherever I am. If it happens to be on. Sure. I don't seek it out, but it's kind of fun when you hear about, you know, what's going on. Car wrecks that happen nearby. Exactly. A car wreck in Boston. Very fascinating. Right. Everyone was okay though. That's good. That's usually how it pans out on the news. Can we talk about car heaters?

Yeah, Chuck, I think this might be the last one, right? I think so. Okay. Well, let's talk car heaters because Margaret Wilcox, Margaret A. Wilcox, my apologies, invented the car heater. As you know it today, the car heater, decades before there was such a thing as cars. What? Yeah. She invented the car heater for railway cars because when she came along and reached, I think, her late 20s, this would have been the 1850s, 1860s,

Rail travel was still pretty no frills for most people. Like you see that one rail car that the millionaire has and it's like all outfitted and beautiful like velvet and there's oil lamps and everything.

Most people's experience was nothing like that. And in fact, especially during cold months and cold climates, you would be freezing in the railway car. And Margaret Wilcox once stood up and said, enough, enough of being cold. Let's get warm, everybody. And they said, invent it, Margaret. And she said, I will. I'll be right back. Yeah.

They said, what is warm even? We forgot. This was in Chicago. So, you know, she had plenty of experience in the cold. I cannot imagine how cold it was. Oh, man. I mean, it's like now, but maybe colder with no break. No heat. You just stayed cold. Yeah. I mean, people's roofs collapse in Chicago in the winter because it gets so snowy. And that would indicate it gets pretty cold.

Yeah, absolutely. So she's like, hold on a minute. I know that they're shoveling coal up there. Those guys are sweating up there in the engine room. We're freezing our took us off back here. What do we got to do to get some of that heat back here? And shockingly, no one had ever thought of that. The fact that there was heat on board that train in spades.

And all you had to do was send it back to the, what do you call them? Passenger cars. Yeah. That's essentially what she did. She figured out how to pipe engine heat back to the passengers and

There were some problems with this invention, the train car heater. One was there was no way whatsoever to regulate this heat. I mean, I imagine you could open the windows when you needed to, but it would just get hotter and hotter and hotter in the rail car. And that was kind of a problem, but I think it was still preferable to the cold.

Yeah. And now is where I introduce you to my first car as a 16-year-old. I talked about it before, 1968 Volkswagen Beetle. Sure. And if you ever rode in those old Volkswagens, you know they had heat that I like to refer to as the ankle burners. Right, I remember that. Same concept as Margaret Wilcox's heat idea. Those old VWs would just pump heat straight from that rear engine out to these little vents on the floorboard right by your ankles and...

There was at least in the 68 that I had, there was no way of regulating it. I think at a 75 later on that had like a little lever that you could, you know, bring in a little bit of the cool air too. It just opened the passenger door. Yeah, exactly. But I had a hole in my floorboard too, so that helped. Yeah. I'm sure you said that and I'm sure when you've told me that before, I told you that my dad had a hole in his floorboard of his Malibu when we were kids. So reckless. Yeah.

Just sit there and watch the world go by under your feet. That's right. So Margaret Wilcox's idea was implemented in train cars. More importantly, when automobile engineers came along and started enclosing cars, because, you know, the first cars were all open. There was no roof. Yeah. As they started to enclose them, they're like, we can control the climate in here. We need some sort of climate control mechanism. And they looked around and they found Margaret Wilcox's patent.

for transmitting engine heat to the passenger compartment. And over time, they kind of refined it and it got more and more advanced to where now there's hot coolant that's heated by the engine that transfers that heat to the cabin air. When you turn the heat on, even more amazingly, you can adjust the heat, the temperature, by letting in colder outside air without even opening your window.

That's right. And she got a patent for this thing. 1893, she received a patent. Obviously, women were able to get patents by that point, and she was on a pretty short list. At least 100. Was there 100? Yeah, remember 100 women who had the list of 100 women who were inventors that had patents that the patent office created in 1880? Was it called 100 Women?

I guess not. No, you're right. I wonder what the list was. I got to get that list. I mean, it had to be decent size. It took four clerks 10 days to compile the list, but I don't know how many were on it. Yeah, but they had to go through all the patents, period, though, to get that list. Yeah, yeah. Who knows? I don't know.

Well, anyway, she was on that list eventually. That's right. Or actually, that's not even true either. The list came out a couple of years before she got her patent, five years before. So it's completely moot. But there is one other mention about her too that I love. She had some other ideas that she patented, unfortunately not in her name because this was before women could have had property rights before.

for a combination clothes dishwasher. Oh, yeah, yeah. I don't know if it was the same time, maybe the same time. If so, that is really gross. Yeah. But it's still also very clever. Yeah. Like you don't want your champagne glass being washed next to your bloomers. No, especially if they're soiled because you drank too much champagne. Oh, gosh. You got anything else? I got nothing else. Are you sure? Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. Well, since Chuck affirmed that he has nothing else, I think everybody, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this misunderstanding from episode titles. Okay. And I should say that we had a wonderful young woman in maybe D.C. I think it was D.C. That said that she was a bird enthusiast.

And that she was all excited about the cranes episode and then realized it was construction cranes. That's why we've titled things like our Nirvana episode. I think it was Nirvana, not the band. Sure. So we do stuff like that. We try to be clear, but not always. Sometimes we're purposely obtuse. Yeah, because, like, you might want the bird crane and then be delightfully surprised or disappointed. Right, exactly. Hey, guys, I'm in and out, but OG.

All the time, Stuff You Should Know has stayed with me as a weekly listen ever since I heard the Jellyfish ep. I consider myself well-versed in the English language and American pop culture, but every now and then, titles of the episodes set me up for quite the surprise. I should probably read the descriptions for the episodes, yes, but I'm going to listen regardless, so what's the point? For example, hobo signs. I thought it was about handwritten signs that hitchhikers make or someone saying, we'll work for food or the end is messed up.

What? I think it was probably supposed to be the Indus Nier. Yeah. And it was some weird AI. Auto-correct. Auto-correct. I like the Indus mess, though. That should be a t-shirt. Sure. I like that. To my delight, as a UX designer, it was about iconography and communication. Even better than those cardboard signs. The last episode about conductors... Oh, I know what's coming.

Thought it was about train conductors and the tagline "What the heck is going on there?" was referring to their mindset when they're patrolling in the aisle and train station. Like an American equivalent of the British "What's all this then?" I was also hoping that it was not about electric conductors because I really wanted a train episode.

Turned out I was wrong once. Thanks for all the great knowledge. That is from Morten Lagerud in Norway. Great name, Morten. Thank you for listening to us all these years. Yeah. Have we done one on just trains? I don't think so. No. That seems like a big, big one. Yeah. That's a big ASMR sigh, too. Oh, sorry, everybody. Hopefully not a misophonia sigh. Yeah.

Yeah, well, we could try to do one on trains sometimes. We just have to figure out how to condense it. Can't get into electric trains, I'll tell you that, by God. No way. Well, if you want to be like Morton and let us know some hilariousness that comes from our titles or something we said or just something you thought of, we love hearing stuff like that. You can send it to us in an email to stuffpodcast at iheartradio.com.

Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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