WOMEN AS INVENTORS 351 



few of them have been able thereby to accumulate comfort- 

 able fortunes, besides developing industries that have given 

 employment to thousands of both sexes. 



Thus the straw industry in the United States is due to 

 Miss Betsy Metcalf, who, more than a century ago, pro- 

 duced the first straw bonnet ever manufactured in this 

 country. Since then the industry which this woman origi- 

 nated has assumed immense proportions. The number of 

 straw hats now made in Massachusetts alone, not to speak 

 of those annually manufactured elsewhere, runs into the 

 millions. 



Scarcely less wonderful is the industry developed by 

 Miss Knight, already mentioned, through her marvelous 

 invention for manufacturing satchel-bottom paper bags. 

 Many men had previously essayed to solve the problem 

 which she attacked with such signal success, but all to no 

 purpose. So valuable was her invention considered by 

 experts that she refused fifty thousand dollars for it 

 shortly after taking out her patent. 



Often what are apparently the most trivial inventions 

 prove the most lucrative. Thus, a Chicago woman receives 

 a handsome income for her invention of a paper pail. A 

 woman in San Francisco invented a baby carriage, and 

 received fourteen thousand dollars for her patent. The 

 gimlet-pointed screw, which was the idea of a little girl, 

 has realized to its patentee an Independent fortune. Still 

 more remarkable is the Burden horseshoe machine, the in- 

 vention of a woman, which turns out a complete horseshoe 

 every three seconds and which is said to have effected a 

 saving to the public of tens of millions of dollars. 



The cotton gin, one of the most useful and important of 

 American inventions a machine that effected a complete 

 revolution in the cotton industry throughout the world is 

 due to a woman, Catherine L. Greene, the wife of General 

 Nathaniel Greene, of Revolutionary fame. After she had 

 fully developed in her own mind a method for separating 



