Overlooked No More: Beulah Henry, Inventor With an Endless Imagination

New York Times

14-03-2025

This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
From the time Beulah Henry was a child in the late 19th century, she dreamed of ways to make life easier. That impulse would eventually drive her to secure dozens of patents and would earn her a nickname: Lady Edison.
When she died in the early 1970s, she held far more patents than any other woman, according to the United States Patent and Trademark Office, and in 2006 she was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for her contributions to technological innovation.
'I invent because I cannot help it,' she often said. 'New things just thrust themselves upon me.'
Her first prototype, when she was 9, was for a mechanism that would allow a man to tip his hat to a passerby while simultaneously holding a newspaper.
The visions kept coming. In 1912, while she was in college, she received her first patent (No. 1,037,762) for an ice-cream maker that functioned with minimal ice, something that was in short supply at the time. It was not a commercial success, but that did not stop her from dreaming up other innovations.
'Ice Cream Freezer'
Anything and everything seemed to interest her: toys, typewriters, sewing machines, coffee pots, hair curlers, can openers, mailing envelopes. Her achievements were all the more remarkable because she had no knowledge of mechanics and lacked the technical vocabulary to describe what she was trying to do.
Working out of a series of hotel suites — one reporter who visited described what he saw as resembling a boudoir more than a place of business — she hired model makers, draftsmen and patent lawyers to realize her visions. Sometimes she sold her ideas to manufacturers who then applied for their own patents.
Henry could see the finished product in her head, she said, 'as clearly as you see a book or a picture or a flower held up before you.' Her challenge was to communicate that vision clearly enough so that others could bring it to reality.
'I say to the engineers, build me such and such, and they say to me, 'Miss Henry, it couldn't possibly work,'' she told The Winston-Salem Journal and Sentinel in 1965. 'And I say to them, 'I don't know if it will work but I'm looking at it,' and so they build it and it works.'
Beulah Louise Henry was born on Sept. 28, 1887, in Raleigh, N.C. Her father, Walter R. Henry, was an art connoisseur and collector who was active in local Democratic politics. Her mother, Beulah (Williamson) Henry, was an artist. Her brother, Peyton, was a songwriter.
Henry claimed to be descended from Benjamin Harrison, the 23rd president of the United States, and from the Revolutionary War hero Patrick Henry.
In interviews, she said her ability to invent may have been influenced by a neurological condition called synesthesia, in which unrelated senses are linked — certain sounds or tastes may call to mind particular colors, for example. 'I have it one million percent,' she would say.
After graduating from Elizabeth College, in Charlotte, N.C., she moved with her mother to New York City to pursue her inventing career.
One idea involved a parasol with snap-on covers in various colors that could be changed to match a woman's outfit. It wasn't an easy sell.
'Parasol' and 'Runner Shield Attachment'
One after another, the experts told her, 'It can't be done,' she was quoted as saying in The Raleigh News and Observer in 1923. 'But I knew it could be done.'
The final result, described in the press as 'a miracle for the smart milady,' was so popular that she established the Henry Umbrella and Parasol Company to make and market her creation. Lord & Taylor displayed the parasols in its windows, and they sold by the thousands.
For a while, Henry put her energy into reinventing children's toys, primarily dolls. She used springs and tubes to make them kick, blink and cry; she put a radio inside one. Her most popular creation was the Miss Illusion Doll, with eyes that changed color to match its wigs. She also created a plush toy cow called Milka-Moo, which dispensed milk and had a secret compartment for a bar of soap.
'Simulating Dispensing Device'
Later, she turned to typewriters. Of the 10 or so related patents she received, the most impressive was perhaps the 'protograph' (No. 1,874,749), an attachment that produced multiple copies of a document without carbon paper.
She would 'just look at something,' Henry said, 'and think, 'There's a better way of doing that,' and the idea comes to me.'
In 1941, she took a long look at sewing machines and invented the Double Chain Stitch Sewing Machine (No. 2,230,896), which functioned without the bobbins that seamstresses had to periodically stop and change.
'Double Chain Stitch Sewing Machine'
She also found a way to make cooking easier. For years, she said, 'the percolator on the coffee pot said to me, 'Do something with me,' but I didn't know what. And then one day when I was basting a roast, I knew what I had to do with that percolator.'
She went on: 'I worked out a device that percolates the juice in a roaster and bastes the meat continuously by itself.' She received the patent for it in 1962.
Reporters portrayed her in effusive terms: She was 'a superb, commanding figure,' one noted; 'stylishly gowned,' another said — 'delightfully, almost theatrically feminine' and 'more like an opera star than a studious scientific person.'
Those who visited her at work in her hotel room often detected a whiff of incense and mentioned her pink lampshades or the large telescope she placed near a window so that she could gaze at the night sky. Then there were the pets: At various times she kept small turtles, a parakeet, a tropical oriole, several doves and cockatiels, and a cat named Chickadee.
Henry was active in the American Museum of Natural History, the National Audubon Society, the New York Women's League for Animals and the New York Microscopical Society, among other organizations. She never married.
Her far-flung inspirations were a mystery to her mother, who lived with her much of the time.
'I don't know what to make of her,' her mother said in 1923. 'She gets up at night and prowls around making experiments with the electric lights and the water system, or hunting for sheets of brown paper to draw on or cut up.'
Henry offered a mystical explanation for her compulsion.
'I have come to believe in spirit control,' she told The News Tribune, in Tacoma, Wash., in 1939. 'And I'm sure that the ideas that flock into my mind in the early hours of the morning are messages from a guiding spirit.'
She was 85 when she died in February 1973, with her 49th and final patent — the nature of it is lost to time — pending.