This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
From the time Beulah Henry was a child in the late 19th century, she dreamed of ways to make life easier. That impulse would eventually drive her to secure dozens of patents and would earn her a nickname: Lady Edison.
When she died in the early 1970s, she held far more patents than any other woman, according to the United States Patent and Trademark Office, and in 2006 she was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for her contributions to technological innovation.
“I invent because I cannot help it,” she often said. “New things just thrust themselves upon me.”
Her first prototype, when she was 9, was for a mechanism that would allow a man to tip his hat to a passerby while simultaneously holding a newspaper.
The visions kept coming. In 1912, while she was in college, she received her first patent (No. 1,037,762) for an ice-cream maker that functioned with minimal ice, something that was in short supply at the time. It was not a commercial success, but that did not stop her from dreaming up other innovations.