This blog post is by Jessica Fries-Gaither, an 2024-2025 Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellow at the Library of Congress. It is one in a series exploring how to analyze primary sources through the three-dimensions of the National Research Council’s A Framework for K-12 Science Education and the Next Generation Science Standards.
If you could invent something to improve your life, what would it be?
This wasn’t a rhetorical question for Beulah Henry (1887-1973). Her first idea for an invention (a way to keep a flag from touching the ground as it was lowered) came when she was six years old; she created her first prototype (a belt with a newspaper holder attached) at the age of nine. A keen observer with a vivid imagination, Henry would spend much of her life identifying needs and developing products to meet them.
Henry was awarded her first patent in 1912 for an ice-cream maker that required less ice and less cranking. Over the next sixty years, she would create more than one hundred inventions and receive 48 more patents. Her prolific work led the media to dub her “Lady Edison” and allowed her to be financially independent.
Henry’s process for creating inventions, including identifying needs, designing solutions, and creating models from household items, makes her an excellent example of someone employing multiple aspects of the engineering design process that K-12 students can learn from. This process, as well as several of her inventions, are described in this 1940 article from Washington, D.C.’s Evening Star newspaper.
Share the newspaper article with students. Invite them to read the article individually or together as a class. Select questions from the Teacher’s Guide: Analyzing Primary Sources to guide students’ thinking about the reading.
After this preliminary analysis, pose guiding questions aligned to the three dimensions of science teaching to help students go deeper with their thinking.
Disciplinary Core Ideas
- How did Henry come up with her ideas for inventions?
- What limitations did she face in creating her inventions?
- How did she know if her inventions were successful or not?
Science and Engineering Practices
- What steps did Henry follow as she was creating her inventions?
- How did she communicate her ideas with others?
- Which other science and engineering practices best describe Henry’s work?
Cross-Cutting Concepts
- Why were models an important part of Henry’s work?
- How did Henry’s models show the crosscutting concept of structure and function?
- How might Henry have used the crosscutting concept of scale when creating her models?
- What causes people like Beulah Henry to invent new objects and technologies?
Learning about Beulah Henry’s work can also inspire students to design and create their own inventions. What is a problem or challenge in their lives that they can solve with an invention? Which everyday objects might they like to improve? How would they do so?
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