An ongoing history series

Inventor of the Month

Those who dared to think differently.

Evidence-based educational resources about remarkable people whose practical knowledge changed how everyday work was done, even when recognition and reward did not follow fairly.

August 2026

Inventor of the Month campaign cover for Ellen Eglin, featuring a representative period clothes wringer

Featured inventor: Ellen Eglin

A practical breakthrough. An unequal reward.

Ellen Eglin developed an improved clothes wringer from knowledge rooted in demanding domestic work. The surviving record also documents the racial prejudice that shaped what she received for it.

Read Ellen Eglin's story

July 2026

Verified historical portrait of Josephine Cochrane seated at a desk

Featured inventor: Josephine Cochrane

She built the machine—and the market for it.

Widowed with debts and boxed out of formal engineering, she designed, patented, manufactured, and sold the first practical dishwasher.

Read Josephine Cochrane's story

June 2026

Patent drawings showing Mary Kenner’s wall-mounted back washer

Featured inventor: Mary Beatrice Davidson Kenner

She designed everyday dignity within reach.

A Black woman inventor kept solving intimate, overlooked problems—even after racism closed the door on commercial success.

Read Mary Kenner's story

May 2026

New York Gazette notice announcing Thomas L. Jennings’s dry-scouring patent

Featured inventor: Thomas L. Jennings

He cleaned garments—and challenged the limits of citizenship.

A free Black tailor turned daily expertise into an 1821 patent, then directed his success toward abolition and civil rights.

Read Thomas L. Jennings's story

April 2026

Floor plan of Frances Gabe's patented self-cleaning house

Featured inventor: Frances Gabe

She imagined a house that could wash itself.

An inventor and builder spent decades turning an audacious question into a working home: what if cleaning were built into the walls?

Read Frances Gabe's story