This article is part of MissingA series of deceased for remarkable people whose deaths, starting in 1851, did not mention the Times.
Since Beulah Henry was a child in the late 19th century, he dreamed of ways to make life easier. This impulse would eventually lead her to secure dozens of patents and won her a nickname: Lady Edison.
When she died in the early 1970s, she held much more patents than any other woman, according to the United States patent and trademarks, and in 2006 she was introduced in the National Inventor of the Reputation for her contributions to technological innovation.
“I have left because I can’t help it,” he said often. “The new things just pushed myself.”
Her first prototype, when she was 9 years old, was for a mechanism that would allow a man to overthrow his hat in a passerby while at the same time holding a newspaper.
Visions continued to come. In 1912, while in college, she received her first patent (No. 1,037,762) for an ice cream manufacturer operating with minimal ice, which was in a short period of time. It was not commercial success, but that did not prevent her from dreaming of other innovations.
Patent Diploma no. 1.037.762
‘Ice Cream Freezer’
Anything and everything seemed to be of interest to her: toys, typewriters, sewing machines, coffee pots, hair curves, open canned, mail envelopes. Her achievements were even more remarkable because she did not know engineering and did not have the technical vocabulary to describe what she was trying to do.
Working on a number of hotel suites – a journalist who visited described what he saw that looks like a boudoir more than a business site – hired model manufacturers, authors and patents to realize her visions. She sometimes sold her ideas to manufacturers who then applied for their own patents.
Henry could see the finished product on her head, said: “As you clearly see a book or a photo or a flower held in front of you.” Its challenge was to clearly communicate this vision so that others could actually bring it.
“I tell the engineers, to build me that and they say,” Miss Henry, he couldn’t work, “he told Winston-Salem Journal and Sentinel in 1965.
Beulah Louise Henry was born on September 28, 1887, in Raleigh, her father, Walter R. Henry, was aware of the art and collector who was active in local democratic policy. Her mother, Beulah (Williamson) Henry, was an artist. Her brother, Peyton, was a songwriter.
Henry claimed to have come down to Benjamin Harrison, the 23rd President of the United States and the revolutionary war Patrick Henry.
In interviews, he said that her ability to invent may have been affected by a neurological condition called sensitivity, to which the irrelevant sensations are linked – some sounds or preferences may remember with specific colors, for example. “I have a million percent,” he would say.
After graduating from Elizabeth College in Charlotte, NC, she moved with her mother to New York to pursue her career.
An idea included an umbrella with snap-on covers in different colors that could be changed to match a woman’s uniform. It wasn’t easy sale.
Patent Diplomas 1,492,725 and 1,593,494
“Parasol” and “Runner Shield Attachment”
One after another, experts said, “It can’t be done,” she told Raleigh News and the observer in 1923. “But I knew it could be done.”
The end result, described in the press as “a miracle for smart miles”, was so popular that it established Henry Umbrella and Parasol to make and market its creation. Lord & Taylor showed the umbrellas in his windows and are sold by the thousands.
For a while, Henry put her energy to discover children’s toys, mostly dolls. Use springs and pipes to make them kick, flash and cry. Put a radio in one. Her most popular creation was the Miss Illusion doll, with the eyes that changed the color to match her wigs. He also created a luxury toy cow called Milka-Moo, which distributes milk and had a secret apartment for a soap.
Later, he returned to typewriters. Of the about 10 patents he received, the most impressive was “Protograph” (No. 1,874,749), a attachment that produced multiple copies of a carbon -free document.
He will “just look at something,” Henry said, “and thinks,” there is a better way to do that “, and the idea comes to me.”
In 1941, he looked at the sewing machine and invented the double sewing sewing machine (No. 2,230,896), which operated without the bobbins that sewing had to stop and change periodically.
He also found a way to make cooking easier. For years, he said: “The expulsioner in the coffee maker said to me,” Do something with me “, but I didn’t know what. And then one day, when I hurt a roast, I knew what I had to do with this diogo.”
He continued: “I worked a device that handles the juice to a barbecue and dipped the meat constantly on its own.” He received the patent for this 1962.
The journalists depicted her in irritating terms: it was “a wonderful, administrative figure”, he noted. “Elegantly dress,” said another – “pleasantly, almost theatrical feminine” and “more like an opera star than a studied scientific person.”
Those who visited her at work in her hotel room often detected an incense novel and reported her pink lampshade or the big telescope she put near a window so she could look at the night sky. Then there were pets: at various times he held small turtles, parrots, tropical oriole, various pigeons and cocktails and a cat called chickadee.
Henry was active in the American Museum of Natural History, the National Society of Audubon, the New York Woman for Animals and the Tiny New York Society, including organizations. He never got married.
Her distant inspirations were a mystery for her mother, who lived with much of the time.
“I don’t know what to do about her,” her mother said in 1923. “She gets up at night and falls around the experiments with electric lights and the water system or hunting for sheets of paper to get or cut.”
Henry offered a mystical explanation for her coercion.
“I have come to believe in the control of the spirit,” he told The News Tribune, Tacoma, Wash., 1939. “And I’m sure the ideas that flock to my mind in the early hours of the morning are messages from a guiding spirit.”
She was 85 years old when she died in February 1973, with her 49th and final patent – her nature is lost in time – pending.
