Showing posts with label ironing board. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ironing board. Show all posts

April 26 - A Dressmaker's Invention

Posted on April 26, 2019



Born into slavery in North Carolina, Sarah Marshall Boone and her family went to Connecticut before the start of the Civil War. Boone worked as a dressmaker while raising eight children.

When you are working for pay AND raising eight children, you need all the labor-saving devices you can get. Boone noticed that a normal ironing board was almost impossible to use for women's sleeves, so she invented a narrow, curved ironing board that would work better.



And she even sought a patent for her invention. On this date in 1892, she received a U.S. patent for her improvements to the ironing board.

Not very many African American women of Sarah Boone's time became patent-holding inventors, for sure. Let's celebrate Boone today!!





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May 12 – The Real McCoy Gets Another Patent

Posted on May 12, 2014

Elijah McCoy may be the guy that the phrase “the real McCoy” refers to. He was an inventor with 57 U.S. patents to his name. One of those inventions, an oil-drip cup for lubrication, as popular enough that railroad engineers would ask for it by name. “The real McCoy” means the real thing – so it seems likely that the engineers would ask, “Does this locomotive have the real McCoy system?”


 (But, as in most cases of language evolution, there are other suggested origins of the phrase, too. “The real MacKay” is a phrase used in Scotland in the 19th Century—first recorded in 1856. “The real McCoy” was first seen in print in a Canadian magazine in 1881. As you will see, Elijah McCoy had connections to both Scotland and Canada.)

 McCoy was born in 1884. He was born free in Ontario, Canada, to fugitive slaves who had escaped from Kentucky to Canada via the Underground Railroad. When he was just three years old, McCoy's family moved to back to the U.S., settling in Michigan.

When he was 15, McCoy traveled to Edinburgh, Scotland, to learn to be a mechanical engineer. He served as an apprentice and earned certification. When he returned to the U.S., he worked as a fireman and oiler on the railroads. But his real work – the stuff he is remembered for – was tinkering in his home-based machine shop. And, like I said, inventing ways to do things better.

On this date in 1874, McCoy received a patent for a fold-up ironing board. Most of what he invented had to do with lubrication systems, but he also invented a lawn sprinkler.
Put your inventor's cap on! Check out Kids Invent and iKids. 


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