11 Commonly Used Things You Never Knew Women Invented

Before her son Mike became a teen idol as a member of The Monkees, Bette Nesmith was a secretary in Texas, where she spent years perfecting the typo-correcting paint in the days before a simple delete key could do the trick. After patenting the product in 1958, she later sold it to Gillette in 1979 for the hefty sum of $47.5 million.

Back in 1868, long before cotton mill worker Margaret Knight designed the rectangular bottom design were used to today, the sacks resembled mailing envelopes and weren't able to hold nearly as much.

Before tackling the idea of disposable diapers, housewife Marion Donovan took a shower curtain and cloth diaper to her sewing machine in 1949, creating create what she called "boaters" to keep the mess inside, rather than on her childrens' sheets.

Despite her success, her later attempts at selling a more disposable invention were rebuffed by the market, but went go on to inspire future diaper designs.

As an actress, Hedy Lamarr made a name for herself in classic films, but the screen beauty was also an avid inventor. With the help from composer George Antheil, she patented some of the first spread-spectrum communication technology, which led the way for things like WiFi and Bluetooth.

Not only did Grace Hopper invent the first compiler to translate written language into computer code — the room-sized Mark I machine used at Harvard in 1944 — she also coined the terms "bugging" and "debugging" when she rid the machine of pesky moths.

The super strong vests protecting our soldiers and officers from bullets were actually an accidental discovery, done by chemist Stephanie Kwolek in 1966 while she was attempting to create a lighter fiber for automobile tires.

In 1885, Sarah E. Goode became the first African American woman with a U.S. patent when she designed the space-saving desk, which could be transformed into a bed. This was roughly 15 years before Murphy beds hit the market.

Most homes today still use the same mechanism perfected by Josephine Cochrane in 1886 to cleanse their dishes after meals.

When Mary Anderson invented the initial hand-powered wipers for vehicles in 1903, the general population balked at the idea. They believed it was safer to drive with the windows obscured by rain or snow rather than brush it away. Unfortunately, by the time the system caught on, her patent had expired.

The automatic version that comes standard in every car now was also invented by a woman, Charlotte Bridgwood.

The members of Tabitha Babbitt's fellow Shaker community didn't approve of filing a patent. However, they were happy to the easier device designed by Babbitt after she created a prototype with her spinning wheel in 1813.

Mary Phelps Jacob, who went by Caresse Crosby after her second marriage, loathed the idea of squeezing into yet another corset before attending a party in 1910 — so much so that she had her housekeeper help her fashion a brassiere out of two handkerchiefs and ribbon.

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