On this day in engineering history, Mary Dixon Kies became
the first American woman to earn a U.S. patent. A native of Killingly,
Connecticut, Kies
patented a process for weaving straw with silk or thread. Although her
invention was not a great commercial success, First Lady Dolly Madison credited
Mary Kies with bolstering America's
hat-making industry and helping the United States to reduce imports of
European-made goods. During the Napoleonic Wars, a conflict which pitted
Napoleon Bonaparte's France
against shifting coalitions of European powers, U.S. President James Madison
sought to protect America's
neutrality by reducing the young nation's reliance upon European products. Kies'
invention, the Madisons
hoped, would boost American-made manufactures.
Mary Kies patented her weaving process several years after
one of Connecticut's
first cotton-yarn mills opened in her native Killingly. In 1793, England's Samuel Slater had brought the
Industrial Revolution to America
by starting the first successful textile mill in nearby Pawtucket, Rhode Island.
Thirteen years later, Slater's nephew founded a factory in Putnam, Connecticut.
Other New England industrialists soon followed suit, powering their enterprises
with the fast-running waters of the Quinebaug
River Valley.
Soon, the Killingly area boasted both the Danielson Cotton Mill and the
Quinebaug Company Mill. By 1865, southern New England hosted 169 textile mills and
135,000 spindles within a 30-mile radius of Pawtucket,
an area which included Killingly, Connecticut.
Although several industrialists invested in Mary Kies'
straw-weaving process, changing tastes in fashion soon robbed her hat-making
technique of commercial value. Then, a fire at the U.S. Patent Office destroyed
Kies' original patent file. In 1837, Mary Kies died penniless in Brooklyn, New
York. She was buried in the Old South Killingly
Cemetery in a grave that lacked a headstone until 1965, when the local Grange
erected a monument. Today, two samples of the straw fabric covered by her
patent and woven by Mary Kies are on display at the Killingly Public Library in
Danielson, Connecticut. Other samples are on display in
the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford, capital of one
of America's
wealthiest states (based on per capita income) and home to many leading
industrial and service corporations.
Resources:
http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blkeis.htm
http://www.killinglyhistory.org/jol7/page5.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Kies
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleonic_wars
http://www.killinglyconservation.org/maps/mapsHistorical.html
http://www.woonsocket.org/slater.htm
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