348 WOMAN IN SCIENCE 



washing and cleaning, attachments for bicycles and type- 

 writing machines, art, educational and medical appliances ; 

 for these things are in keeping with their proper metier; 

 but it is surprising for those who are not familiar with the 

 history of modern inventions to learn of the share women 

 have had in inventing and improving agricultural imple- 

 ments, building appurtenances, motors of various kinds, 

 plumbing apparatus, theatrical stage mechanisms, and, 

 above all, countless railway appliances from a coupling or 

 fender to an apparatus for sanding railroad tracks, or a 

 device for unloading boxcars. 



Those who are still of the opinion of Voltaire and Proud- 

 hon and their name is legion respecting woman's inver 

 tive powers, might be willing to accord to her the capacity 

 to design a new form of clothes pin, or hair crimper, or 

 rouge pad, or complexion mask, or powder puff, or baby 

 jumper; but they would limit her ability to contrivances 

 of this character. But what would these same people say 

 if they were told that over and above the things just men- 

 tioned for which many women have actually received 

 patents, the much depreciated female sex had been granted 

 patents for locomotive wheels, stuffing boxes, railway car 

 safety apparatus, life rafts, cut-offs for hydraulic and other 

 engines, street cars, mining machines, furnaces for smelt- 

 ing ores, sound-deadening attachments for railway cars, 

 feed pumps and transfer apparatus for traction cars, ma- 

 chines for driving hoops on to barrels, apparatus for de- 

 stroying vegetation on and removing snow from railroads, 

 coke crushers, artificial stone compositions, elevated rail- 

 ways, new forms of cattle cars, dams and reservoirs, weld- 

 ing seams of pipes and hardening iron, alloys for bell 

 metal and alloys to resemble silver, methods of refining 

 and hardening copper, processes for concentrating ores, 

 improvement in elevators and designs for raising sunken 

 vessels? And yet, incredible as it may appear to these 

 scoffers at woman's genius, patents for all these inventions, 



