Quartz Survey Traces 14 Breakthroughs by Women Reattributed to Men, From Monopoly to Apollo 11
A survey conducted by Quartz reveals 14 instances between 1843 and 1969 where inventions by women were mistakenly credited to men. Although U.S. and British patent offices permitted women to file patents, manufacturers frequently declined to license their creations. In 1904, Elizabeth Magie secured a patent for The Landlord's Game, which Charles Darrow later sold in a modified form in 1935. Vera Rubin's work in the 1960s offered crucial evidence for dark matter, which was credited to Fritz Zwicky. In 1956, Chien-Shiung Wu's experiment challenged parity conservation, leading to the 1957 Nobel Prize awarded to Lee and Yang. Margaret Knight obtained her patent in 1871, while Rosalind Franklin's Photo 51 was shared with Watson without permission, resulting in the 1962 Nobel Prize for Watson, Crick, and Wilkins. Other significant figures include Hedy Lamarr, Esther Lederberg, and Katherine Johnson.
Key facts
- Elizabeth Magie patented The Landlord's Game in 1904; Parker Brothers paid her $500 with no royalties after buying the patent
- Chien-Shiung Wu's 1956 experiment disproved parity conservation, but the 1957 Nobel went to Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang
- Rosalind Franklin's Photo 51 was made in May 1952 at King's College London and shown to James Watson without her consent
- Lise Meitner explained nuclear fission with Otto Robert Frisch in 1938; Otto Hahn alone received the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry
- Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil patented frequency hopping in 1942; the Navy shelved it and the patent expired without earnings
- Mary Anderson's 1903 windshield wiper patent lapsed around 1920; she was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2011
- Katherine Johnson hand-verified John Glenn's 1962 orbital figures and authored or co-authored 26 research reports before retiring in 1986
- Vera Rubin, who died in December 2016 at 88, never received a Nobel Prize in Physics
Entities
Artists
- Elizabeth Magie
- Charles Darrow
- Vera Rubin
- Kent Ford
- Fritz Zwicky
- Jeremiah Ostriker
- James Peebles
- Caresse Crosby
- Mary Phelps Jacob
- Herminie Cadolle
- Harry Crosby
- Chien-Shiung Wu
- Tsung-Dao Lee
- Chen-Ning Yang
- Margaret Knight
- Charles Annan
- Rosalind Franklin
- Raymond Gosling
- James Watson
- Francis Crick
- Maurice Wilkins
- Brenda Maddox
- Lise Meitner
- Otto Hahn
- Fritz Strassmann
- Otto Robert Frisch
- Hedy Lamarr
- George Antheil
- Esther Lederberg
- Joshua Lederberg
- George Beadle
- Edward Tatum
- Mary Anderson
- Ada Lovelace
- Charles Babbage
- Lord Byron
- Annabella Milbanke
- Luigi Menabrea
- Nettie Stevens
- Edmund Beecher Wilson
- Thomas Hunt Morgan
- Marion Donovan
- Victor Mills
- Katherine Johnson
- Alan Shepard
- John Glenn
- Ted Skopinski
- Barack Obama
- Margot Lee Shetterly
- Taraji P. Henson
- Mary Pilon
- Ralph Anspach
- Henry George
Institutions
- Quartz
- Parker Brothers
- Warner Brothers Corset Company
- Fashion Form Brassiere Company
- Black Sun Press
- Columbia University
- National Bureau of Standards
- American Physical Society
- Wolf Prize
- National Academy of Sciences
- Royal Astronomical Society
- Palomar Observatory
- King's College London
- Medical Research Council
- Birkbeck College
- Nature
- Nobel Prize
- Manhattan Project
- University of California, Berkeley
- Eastern Paper Bag Company
- Carnegie Institution of Washington
- Bryn Mawr
- Stanford University
- Plasmid Reference Center
- Science
- Saks Fifth Avenue
- Procter & Gamble
- Yale University
- National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics
- NASA
- Langley Research Center
- Electronic Frontier Foundation
- National Inventors Hall of Fame
- U.S. Department of Defense
- MGM
- U.S. Navy
- Anti-Monopoly
Locations
- United States
- United Kingdom
- Atlantic City
- New Jersey
- Boston
- Bridgeport
- Connecticut
- Paris
- France
- Washington
- Liuhe
- Jiangsu
- China
- New York
- New York City
- Manchester
- New Hampshire
- London
- Berlin
- Germany
- Sweden
- Hampshire
- England
- Vienna
- Austria
- Turin
- Italy
- Birmingham
- Alabama
- Coma Cluster
- Andromeda
Sources
- Quartz —