March is Women’s History Month and a good time to recognize the important women who have paved the way for progress. While leaders, activists, writers, feminists, and teachers are all being honored, some of the most inspiring women are those inventors and entrepreneurs who broke new ground in the traditionally male-dominated fields of science and technology.
Virginia Apgar
Born in 1909, Apgar became the first female full professor at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. A leader in the field of anesthesia and pediatrics, she is best known for designing and popularizing the Apgar score, a standardized way of quickly assessing the health of a newborn infant.
Scaling from zero to ten, the Apgar score is a mnemonic that looks at five criteria—appearance, pulse, grimace, activity, and respiration. Although different forms of it are used today, Apgar’s work was the basis for rapidly sizing up an infant’s health, helping to decrease infant mortality.
Martha Coston
Coston invented the signaling flare, which is widely used in naval communication. In 1859, she found designs for a nonfunctioning flare in her deceased husband’s notebooks and set out to make them work.
Using pyrotechnics, she was able to design and patent a system of colored flares that allowed ships to communicate at night. The Navy purchased her flare system for $20,000, though she struggled for years to receive the compensation.
Her flare system was also adopted by the U.S. Coast Guard, the U.S. weather service, as well as governments in Europe. The use of colored, durable flares changed naval communication and are still used today.
Harriett Russell Strong
Strong was an entrepreneur, farmer, and engineer. Born in 1844 in New York, she moved to a ranch in California with her husband and became interested in ways to irrigate dry land. This led her to invent and patent a dam and water storage system; her irrigation system is credited with helping Southern California become a major food-producing region. She also developed a process to grow pampas plumes, drilled three oil wells on her property, and at one point had the largest walnut orchard in the nation. After accumulating a fortune, she focused her efforts on women’s suffrage, education, and water conservation.
