Mary Elizabeth Anderson (February 19, 1866 – June 27, 1953)

The patent office awarded U.S. Patent No. 743,801 to a Birmingham, Alabama woman named Mary Anderson for her “window cleaning
device for electric cars and other vehicles to remove snow, ice or
sleet from the window.” When she received her patent, Anderson
tried to sell it to a Canadian manufacturing firm, but the company refused: The device had no practical value, it said, and so was not
worth any money. Though mechanical windshield wipers were
standard equipment in passenger cars by around 1913, Anderson
never profited from the invention.

Versatile, inexpensive and relatively easy to play, the acoustic
guitar was a staple of American rural music in the early 20th
century, particularly black rural music such as the blues. But
a significant physical limitation made it a poor fit in ensembles
made up of brass, woodwind and orchestral string instruments:
The acoustic guitar was simply too quiet.

The electric guitar—the instrument that revolutionized jazz, blues
and country music and made the later rise of rock and roll possible,
was recognized by the United States Patent Office on August 10,
1937 with the award of Patent #2,089.171 to G.D. Beauchamp for an instrument known as the Rickenbacker Frying Pan.

Inventor G.D. Beauchamp, partner with Adolph Rickenbacher in the Electro String Instrument Corporation of Los Angeles, California,
spent more than five years pursuing his patent on the Frying Pan.

CAMILLE BOHANNON

On March 7, 1876, 29-year-old Alexander Graham Bell received a
patent for his revolutionary new invention: the telephone.

The Scottish-born Bell worked in London with his father, Melville
Bell, who developed Visible Speech, a written system used to
teach speaking to the deaf. In the 1870s, the Bells moved to
Boston, Massachusetts, where the younger Bell found work as
a teacher at the Pemberton Avenue School for the Deaf. He later
married one of his students, Mabel Hubbard.

While in Boston, Bell became very interested in the possibility of transmitting speech over wires. Samuel F.B. Morse’s invention
of the telegraph in 1843 had made nearly instantaneous
communication possible between two distant points.

With the help of Thomas A. Watson, a Boston machine shop
employee, Bell developed a prototype.

Felix Hoffmann
(21 January 1868 – 8 February 1946)

The German company Bayer patents aspirin on March 6, 1899.
Now the most common drug in household medicine cabinets, acetylsalicylic acid was originally made from a chemical found
in the bark of willow trees. In its primitive form, the active
ingredient, salicin, was used for centuries in folk medicine,
beginning in ancient Greece when Hippocrates used it to relieve
pain and fever. Known to doctors since the mid-19th century, it
was used sparingly due to its unpleasant taste and tendency to
damage the stomach.

In 1897, Bayer employee Felix Hoffmann found a way to create a
stable form of the drug that was easier and more pleasant to take.
(Some evidence shows that Hoffmann’s work was really done by
a Jewish chemist, Arthur Eichengrun, whose contributions were
covered up during the Nazi era.)