The pioneers who shaped today’s motoring world

Bertha Benz

Bertha Benz is one of the most influential women in the automotive world, thanks to her significant contributions in developing a motor car with a gas engine with her husband, Karl. After using her dowry to pay off his debts and business partner, the pair could then focus on working together on the project. At the end of 1879, they got a two-stroke engine to work for the best time, and by December 1885, work on the first horseless carriage was completed.

In January the following year, Karl had patented his motor car, but it was met with uncertainty from the public. Unfortunately, Bertha was unable to apply for the patent alongside her husband, despite her financial and engineering contributions. On the 5^th August 1888, Bertha and her two sons took the motorised vehicle without Karl's knowledge – and without a driving license – for its very first trip. Bertha had planned to visit her mother over 60 miles away, so she left a note for Karl on the dining table, and off they went.

The trio travelled for over 13 hours on unpaved roads, while Bertha had to make several repairs with only the items she had to hand along the way. She used her garter to fix the ignition, and a hat pin to unclog a blockage in the fuel pipe. When the fuel ran low she stopped at a pharmacy and used Ligroin, which served as petroleum fuel.

On the way back, the brake blocks had worn out, so she called upon a cobbler to fit the brakes with leather strips, thus inventing brake pads. During the trip, Bertha and her sons had to push the machine up hills, so she suggested a third lower gear and the new brake pads for Karl's future machines. This pioneering trip is honoured today, with people travelling what is known as the Bertha Benz Memorial Route.

Mary Anderson 

When you’re driving in the rain or snow and are relying on your windscreen wipers to see the road ahead, Mary Anderson is the one you can thank for that. In 1902, in a snowy New York City, Anderson was riding in a streetcar and witnessed how frustrated the driver was with the low visibility.

When Anderson returned her home to Alabama, she began sketching, inventing an effective way to clean a windscreen. She then submitted her application for a patent in 1903 for a wiper blade that could be operated from the inside of the car. 

In November that same year, the patent was approved. However, Anderson found it hard to get companies interested in the production of her invention because few people owned a car, and there was a belief that the movement of the wipers was a distraction for the driver.

By the time owning a car became more the norm in 1920, Anderson's patent had expired and other companies were free to profit off her idea. Two years later, Cadillac started building cars with windscreen wipers as a standard feature, and the rest of the automotive industry followed.  

Charlotte Bridgwood

Another person who helped in the development of windscreen wipers was Charlotte Bridgwood, President of the ‘Bridgwood Manufacturing Company’ in New York. She took the original manual design from Mary Anderson and devised the first electrically operated windscreen wipers.

Bridgwood’s invention used rollers instead of blades, and her patent was approved in 1917. But like Anderson, her design was also not a success, the patent ran out in 1920, and then became widely adopted a few years later by the likes of Cadillac. Along with being an inventor, Bridgwood was an actress and manager for the Lawrence Dramatic Company, where she performed on screen with her daughter Florence, who also makes her way onto this list.

Margaret Wilcox

Many of us have sat in a freezing cold car in the depths of winter, waiting for it to heat up before setting off to work, so if you’ve ever been grateful for your car's internal heating system then you can thank Margaret Wilcox. In her late 20s, Wilcox recognised a problem for people who rode and drove in railway cars (the only 'cars' available at that time): they were suffering from the cold.

Knowing that the engine produced heat, her idea was to run a channel of air through the engine and send it back to the rail car to warm it up. Wilcox got the patent for her idea in November 1883, but the idea wouldn't take off for over 30 years. Some interpretations of her invention were used in 1917, but it wasn't until Ford started installing her system in its 1929 Model A cars that the idea of keeping car occupants comfy really took off.

Katharine Blodgett

A legend in the world of Science and Engineering, Katharine Blodgett was the first woman to be awarded PhD in Physics from the University of Cambridge. After receiving her Masters, she was hired by General Electric and would help us all see the world clearer by inventing non-reflective ‘invisible’ glass.

Before this development, uncoated glass would reflect a significant amount of light, creating glare and distortion. Blodgett’s solution was to coat the glass with 44 monomolecular soapy film layers. The visible light reflected by the layers of film would, in turn, eliminate most of those reflections. Blodgett received a patent for the process in March 1938, and this development led to the anti-reflective coating that now coats windshields, glasses, camera lenses and more.  

Florence Lawrence

Florence Lawrence was a famous Canadian-American actress from the early 1900s and is referred to as the ‘first movie star’. Her love of acting came from her mother, Charlotte Bridgwood, with whom she also shared an eye for invention. Lawrence was an avid car fan but recognised the dangers associated with motoring, not just for the drivers but pedestrians, too. 

She realised that drivers and pedestrians alike were unaware when a vehicle would turn in directions, risking collisions. In 1914, Lawrence developed the first turn signal, naming it the ‘auto-signalling-arm’. Her invention consisted of two manually operated flags on the rear bumper which would move up or down when a button was pressed inside the car. This would indicate which direction the driver would turn.

Lawrence also had a similar idea for a brake signal indicator, alerting fellow drivers when the car in front would stop. When the driver hit the brake, a sign reading ‘STOP’ appeared on the rear bumper. Lawrence never patented her ideas and so unfortunately never received the recognition for her ideas, but her legacy lives on with these inventions that are intrinsic to modern-day cars.  

June McCarroll

A simple bit of paint to separate the road made all the difference for road safety, and that was down to June McCarroll. In California in 1917, McCarroll was driving down the road in her Ford Model T when she rounded a bend and came head-on with a large truck travelling in the opposite direction. Luckily no one was harmed, but due to the time of day the incident happened, the truck driver was unable to see where his half of the unmarked road ended.

Whilst on a later trip, McCarroll had the thought that a line down the centre of the road could prevent many accidents. She spoke with the Riverside County Board of Supervisors about her ideas, only for them to fall on deaf ears. But, armed with a paintbrush and some white paint, she got down on her hands and knees and painted a two-mile long white stripe down the middle of Highway 99 (now Highway 86).

In 1924, The California Highway Commission adopted McCarroll’s idea and painted over 3,500 miles of white lines throughout California. Because of her idea, we now have other coloured lines, stripes and other road marketing on our streets which have all improved greatly motoring safety.  

Dorothy Levitt

Dorothy Levitt was one of Britain’s first female racing drivers, competing in speed trials and long-distance races in the early 20^th century. In 1905, she set the Ladies World Speed record at the Brighton Speed Trials, driving her Napier racing car at 79.75 mph. She was also a fan of Hillclimbs, and at the 1906 Shelsley Walsh Hillclimb she smashed the ladies' record.

Along with being a racing driver, Levitt was also a journalist and became an expert on motoring. In 1909, she published her book The Woman and the Car: A Chatty Little Handbook For Women Who Want To Motor. Here she discussed how to buy, drive and maintain a car, along with handy tips that might be of use.

Famously, she suggested women carry a compact mirror in order to see what was going on behind them, a tactic she employed during her racing career. “The mirror should be fairly large to be really useful, and it is better to have one with a handle. Just before starting take the glass out of the little drawer and put it into the little flap pocket of the car. You will find it useful to have handy, not only for personal use but to occasionally hold up to see what's behind you.”

This was the first known use of a rear-view mirror. Even so, it took another five years before the rear-view mirror was adopted as a standard feature of automobiles.  

Dorothée Pullinger

Dorothée Pullinger started her career in 1910 as a draughtswoman for Arrol-Johnston, the largest manufacturer of motor cars in Scotland. She was following in the footsteps of her father, Thomas, who was a successful car designer for Sunbeam and Humbe before joining Arrol-Johnston. After WWI, Pullinger was accepted into the Institution of Automotive Engineers, becoming its first female member.

After completing her apprenticeship, she returned to Scotland and became the forewoman of the foundry, and then a director of the Galloway Engineering Company, a subsidiary of Arrol-Johnston. With the factory originally built to manufacture aircraft parts during the war, Pullinger convinced her father to keep it open as a car factory and to provide employment to the local women. 

Galloway was set to be no ordinary company. It adopted the purple, green and while colours of the Suffragettes, had tennis courts for its employees, and Pullinger would hold an engineering college there. In 1920, the first plans for the Galloway car began to take shape, with designs influenced by Pullinger’s father and the Fiat 501 model.

With the car designed and made by women, the Galloway was much lighter and smaller than cars of that time. Gears were placed in the middle of the vehicle, the seat was raised, there was additional storage, a lower dashboard, and the steering wheel was smaller. It was also one of the first cars to introduce the rear-view mirror as standard, and it was successful, too – Pullinger took the Galloway to the Scottish Six Day Trials in 1924 and won the event. 

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