Top 10 Women's Inventions That Were Credited to Men

Mary Anderson
Not only did she not get credit for her invention, she didn’t make a dime off of it. While touring New York City during wintery weather, Anderson noticed that her driver had to stop and clean off the windshield with his hands. This gave her the idea for her “window cleaning device,” – an arm with a rubber blade that basically works like a modern wiper. She patented it in 1903, but never found a buyer, and some people believe it’s because no one took her seriously. Instead, a company called TRICO bought a wiper design patented by John Jepson in 1916 and went on to become one of the largest wiper manufacturers in the world.

Lizzie Magie
An outspoken feminist and progressive, Magie was ahead of her time. She invented “The Landlord’s Game” as a tool to teach people about the dangers of concentrating wealth in a few hands, and got a patent for it in 1904. In the 30s, unemployed salesman Charles Darrow learned about the game from friends, and began selling his own copies under the title “Monopoly.” He sold his design to Parker Brothers in 1935, claiming it was his own invention. Magie was furious at Darrow’s theft. She went to the newspapers with her story, and Parker Brothers eventually bought her patent rights for a mere $500. Darrow, on the other hand, went on to make millions in royalties. We don’t blame Magie for being angry.

Alice Ball
Both the first woman and the first Black American to earn a master’s at the University of Hawai’i, Ball became a chemistry lecturer in 1915. At the time, people with leprosy were doomed to a slow and painful death. The best treatment available was an oil made from a tree found in India, but it didn’t actually work very well. By modifying the compounds in the oil, Ball developed an injectable version that revolutionized leprosy treatment. However, she died suddenly at the age of 24 before she could publish her method. Her former advisor later published the work without giving her credit, and even named the technique after himself. Although a colleague eventually tried to correct the record, Ball’s contribution went mostly unrecognized for decades.

Margaret E. Knight
You probably use her invention at least once a week. Back in the late 1800s, mass-produced bags were flimsy and couldn’t stand upright. Knight, who had started inventing things as a child, created a machine that produced sturdy flat-bottomed bags like those we use today. Machinist Charles Annan saw her design and made the mistake of stealing it and filing for a patent himself. When Knight sued him, Annan tried to argue that Knight couldn’t have invented the machine because “she could not possibly understand the mechanical complexities." Knight then presented the court with pages of detailed blueprints, journals, and witnesses who confirmed she’d been working on the machine for years. The court ruled in her favor, and she got her patent.

Caresse Crosby
This wardrobe staple has existed in some form for thousands of years. But corsets were basically the only option in the early twentieth century. When Crosby was only 19, she became frustrated with her bulky corset while dressing for a ball. Using two handkerchiefs and a ribbon, she sewed a new garment that was light and comfortable. It immediately became a hit among her friends. Crosby patented her design in 1914 and later founded the Fashion Form Brassière Company. However, her new husband Harry soon talked her out of pursuing her own business, and she sold her patent to The Warner Brothers Corset Company for just $1500. Warner’s sales skyrocketed, and for years, few people associated Crosby’s name with the invention of the bra.

The ENIAC Programmers
During World War II, the American Army had to calculate thousands of missile trajectories using differential equations that took hours to work by hand. These women programmed the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer – or ENIAC – to do the math in just seconds. They worked completely from scratch, with no instructions, no pre-existing programming languages, no precedent to help them. But their contributions were ignored for decades. They weren’t identified in publicity photos, and weren’t even invited to the 50th anniversary celebration of the ENIAC in the 90s. It wasn’t until historian Kathy Kleiman stumbled onto their story that they started to get the recognition they deserved. Remember their names: Kathleen Antonelli, Jean Bartik, Betty Holberton, Marlyn Meltzer, Frances Spence, and Ruth Teitelbaum.

Katherine Johnson
Her contributions to NASA and the field of space travel are almost immeasurable. She not only plotted the trajectory for the moon landing – she also calculated Alan Shepherd’s first space flight, a safe return path for the failed Apollo 13 mission, and more. Johnson talked her way into meetings and onto projects that had previously included only men. But it was standard practice at NASA – and pretty much everywhere else – not to formally recognize the women computers who did most of the math. Instead, the names of male engineers went onto the reports and into the history books. It’s partly thanks to the 2016 book and movie “Hidden Figures” that the work of Johnson and others like her is finally being recognized.

Ada Lovelace
The daughter of a celebrated poet and a gifted intellectual, it’s no surprise that Lovelace had a brilliant mind. She loved mathematics, and jumped at the chance to work with Charles Babbage on his analytical engine, the precursor to the modern computer. During their collaboration, she created a program to calculate Bernoulli numbers, a sequence well-known in the field of analysis. That program is widely considered to be the first computer algorithm. Throughout the 1900s, scholars argued that Lovelace wasn’t sharp enough to write such a program, and that it must have actually been Babbage’s work. More recent research has shown that not only did Lovelace write the program, she understood the computer’s potential to do much more than math – even better than Babbage himself.

Chien-Shiung Wu
While working on the Manhattan Project, she developed the process that made it possible to produce enough uranium to build a bomb. But it was her 1956 experiment that earned Wu a place on our list. At the time, the law of conservation of parity was accepted as fact. However, physicists Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang theorized that it might not apply in all cases. They asked Wu to test their hypothesis, and she designed a complex experiment that involved cooling radioactive isotopes to near absolute zero. She proved them right, simultaneously paving the way for other major breakthroughs. Yang and Lee got a Nobel Prize, and Wu got … nothing. But she would go on to earn many other honors throughout her illustrious career.

Before we unveil our top pick, here are a few honorable mentions.

Male Execs Laughed at Her in the 50s, but Pampers Started Selling a Similar Design in 1961

Men Kept Telling Her That Her Ideas Weren’t Possible & She Kept Proving Them Wrong

Henry Talbot Usually Gets the Credit, but She Finished Her Book 8 Months Earlier Than He Did

This Inventor & Civil Rights Leader Was Almost Forgotten by History

For Centuries, People Assumed Her Books on Women’s Health Were Written by a Man

Hedy Lamarr
If you’re watching this on wi-fi, you have this Hollywood star partially to thank for it. During World War II, she came up with the concept of frequency hopping: bouncing a signal across radio frequencies to prevent an enemy from jamming it. Composer George Antheil developed a way to use it in radio transmitters, and together they presented their idea to the Navy. At the time, the Navy thought it was impractical, but later used it successfully in the 50s and 60s. Her idea eventually evolved into many different technologies, including the ones that make cell phones, wi-fi, GPS, and Bluetooth possible. Despite having a patent, Lamarr and Antheil were never compensated for their invention, and Lamarr’s contribution was mostly ignored until the 1990s.