Mary Beatrice Davidson Kenner, a black inventor, was born in Monroe, North Carolina in 1912. She started inventing while still in her childhood, and she holds more patents than any other African American woman in history.

Schooling

Mary Kenner went to Dunbar High School and then joined Howard University in 1931 to enhance her creative capabilities. She dropped out of the university due to inability to pay the tuition costs.

Career

Once she dropped out of the university, she took on various odd jobs, but later, she became a federal employee; she kept on tinkering during her free time. She was also a professional florist, and her business was in Washington, D.C. Since patents were expensive to file, she had to save enough money to file hers, and in 1957, she succeeded in filing her first patent.

Inventions

When she was only six years old, she wanted to devise a self-oiling door hinge to fix a squeaky door at her house. Though she dropped the idea later, she did not forget about it, and temporarily shelved it to work on other ideas. She drew up models and build would build them to have a real version of her ideas. In 1924, her family’s move to Washington, D.C., gave her a chance to visit the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), to find out if others have patented inventions like hers.

Mary Kenner had many inventions, but the most notable is the sanitary belt – it contained a moisture-proof napkin pocket. It was a precursor to the present sanitary pads women use during their menstrual cycle. Unfortunately, because of racism, her invention was not adopted until thirty years later (in 1956).

Once she invented the sanitary belt, the first company to be interested in it reached out to her to market her product. Once they found out that she was black, they lost interest. Many other companies followed suit until 1956.

However, this did not deter her from inventing many more household and personal products from 1956 to 1987.

She invented a backwasher that extremely popular in the 1980s. The backwasher could be installed on a shower or a bathtub wall; she patented it in 1987. In 1959, she invented a tray and soft pocket to be attached to a walking frame.

Her other inventions include a toilet paper holder, a portable ashtray, a convertible roof for vehicles to protect passengers from weather ailments, and a sponge tip to stop water from dripping from umbrellas to the floor.

An Inventive Family

Due to her family’s inventive background, her quest for invention was nurtured, and she credited her father for her success in innovation. Her father, Sidney N. Davidson, was a preacher, and he used his free time to invent a traveling clothes press that travelers could use in their suitcase while traveling. Her younger sister, Mildred Davidson, was also an inventor; she patented “Family Treedition” that was a popular board game.

Her grandfather, Robert Phromeberger, invented a tricolor light signal.

None of her five patents proved lucrative because she lived a simple life working as a florist in Washington, D.C. However, she once said that through invention she aimed to make people’s lives easier and did not just focus making on money. Mary Kenner died on January 13, 2006.