You can thank these five women for making your life so easy.
Next time you’re trying to stay awake in a meeting, remember Melitta Bentz — inventor of the coffee filter!
Frustrated by heavy espresso machines or percolators,
Bentz took a sheet of thin paper, set it over a brass pot and poked holes in it with a nail
to let the coffee drain through. A smoother, less bitter brew was born. Cool beans, Bentz.
Bette Nesmith Graham is officially the patron saint of bad spellers everywhere — thanks
to her invention, Correction Fluid.
Graham was a secretary in the early '50s when she started using white paint to cover
up her typos. She hid this from her bosses for several years before going public in 1956.
Her product, “Mistake Out” is still a staple office supply today. Actually, no, can we do that again?
Today it's called Liquid Paper now.
Oh, and her son is Mike Nesmith from the Monkees. You can thank her for that, too.
Joyner was the first African American woman to graduate from America’s first beauty academy.
She experimented with paper rods that were commonly used for cooking pot roasts.
She figured these same methods would also work for curling or straightening hair — and they actually did.
When you need hair inspiration, don't look at Pinterest, look at your kitchen.
Ice Road Truckers, storm chasers and the movie
“Twister” owe a huge debt to Mary Anderson — inventor of the windshield wiper.
In 1902, Anderson saw a New York City driver having trouble keeping his windshield clear of snow.
Instead of pushing him into a ditch like other New Yorkers, she instead decided
to create an automatic windshield wiper blade.
Cadillac adopted the use of windshield wipers in 1922 — a full two years after her patent expired.
Anderson never made any money off her invention — so, ironically, she could
never make it rain.
Mary Beatrice Kenner is the reason why your bathroom doesn’t look like a horror movie.
Kenner invented both a sanitary belt in 1956 and the bathroom tissue holder in 1982.
The sanitary belt gave women a better alternative for handling their periods, even if it wasn’t
as comfortable as our modern Kotex with wings.
And as for the bathroom tissue holder — it just goes to show that it took a man to invent
a toilet paper roll, but it took a woman to actually put it somewhere other than the floor.
Now if we could only agree on that over-hand, under-hand thing.
Next time you’re driving a car, fixing a typo or, you know, sitting on the john while
drinking morning joe, just remember the women who made your easy life so easy.
And you know, call your mom too.