Wendy Murphy was watching news of the massive earthquake in Mexico City in September of 1985 when she first thought of the invention that would make her name.
Among the images of devastation, her attention was drawn to something that didn’t look right. It was a stretcher. Murphy — then a Toronto Hospital for Sick Children radiology technician, researcher and the mother of a young son — was troubled by the sight of a tiny baby being pulled from the rubble and strapped awkwardly to an adult stretcher.
“I thought, ‘Oh good God, there has to be a better way than that of moving infants,” says Murphy, whose work at Sick Kids and raising her own son, born one month premature, had given her a clear sense of how to transport a fragile newborn.

She sat down and sketched an idea: It was a long stretcher that could safely carry up to six babies, swaddled securely to it in three fabric “pockets” that could hold two infants each, so they could share body heat.
Then Murphy put the sketch in a drawer and forgot about it.
A couple of years later, a fire broke out at Sick Kids that nearly reached the neonatal intensive-care unit. Had it done so, staff would have had to carry babies out in their incubators. Questions arose about how this could be done safely.
“The chief of pediatrics at the time said, ‘What if we’d had to take the stairs? What would we have done?’ ” recalls Murphy. “I said, ‘I don’t know, I kind of came up with this idea.’ ” She brought him her line drawing of a stretcher that could carry six babies to safety — and was shocked when he asked if the hospital could buy 10.
“I said, ‘I’m not a company, I don’t know fabrics, I don’t have anything right now,’ ” she says. “He said, ‘Go away and work on it.’ ”
Say the word “inventor,” and you might picture a man in 19th-century garb peering through a microscope — not a mom sitting sketching out her ideas after tucking in the kids. Yet mothers have devised inventions as homey as a baby sling and as complex as a nanotechnology device. Some were housewives, only taking up a pad and paper when an idea struck; others were career engineers who happened to have families. For some, children acted as inspiration; for others, the kids had nothing to do with their work — other than, presumably, distracting them from it.
It took Murphy two years to develop her stretcher — which she named the WEEVAC, adorably. Since 1989, she has sold more than 1,000 of the original model, which is still made in Canada, to hospitals across the U.S., New Zealand, Japan and the United Arab Emirates.
For Mother’s Day, the Toronto Star has gathered together some other stories of mothers of invention. Considering the work required to nurture both a new idea and a new person, it wouldn’t be a stretch to call these ladies the most creative human beings in history.
Olivia Poole
In much the same way as Murphy, Manitoba-born Olivia Poole was inspired by her young son when she invented the Jolly Jumper, the bouncing harness for infants. Poole was part Ojibwa, and grew up on the White Earth Indian Reserve. There, the women in her community had an age-old practice of securing their infants to cradle boards in snug packages, or “papooses,” and would occasionally hang them from a sturdy tree branch so the kids could bounce up and down.
In 1910, when Poole had her first son in Ontario, she built him a swing a little like those she had seen, making a saddle from a cloth diaper and hanging it from a bar using a spring. It took her until 1957 to patent the Jolly Jumper, which is still being manufactured in Mississauga today.
Melitta Bentz
Thank a German housewife, her son and his school work for giving us one of the most common ways to make coffee: the pour-over. In the early 20th century, coffee was often made by boiling the grounds in a cloth bag in a pot of water. Dresden homemaker Melitta Bentz took some blank blotter paper from her oldest son’s workbook and placed it in a brass pot that she’d punctured with holes. She filled the paper with coffee grounds and poured hot water over it — and discovered the filtration made the brew taste better. She formed the Melitta Bentz Co. in 1908, and her metal pour-over device eventually became the porcelain version that’s well known in Europe and elsewhere today. The private company Melitta Group logged €1,347 million ($2,023 million) in sales in 2012.
C.J. Walker
When entrepreneur Madame C.J. Walker died in 1919 at 51, her obituary in the New York Times reported she was worth nearly $1 million — making her the wealthiest black woman in New York. Born Sarah Breedlove in Delta, Louisiana, the child of former slaves, she was married by 14 and widowed by 20 with a young daughter to support. She found work as a laundress, but after years of washing clothes, her exposure to harsh chemicals caused her to lose her hair. Inadequate access to indoor plumbing common in early 20th-century made it worse — people washed infrequently, leaving their skin and hair vulnerable to environmental toxins and infections.
The malady turned out to be an opportunity. Breedlove experimented with various salves, eventually hitting on one she claimed restored her hair. She began to sell beauty products, including some of first hair-straightening creams, and she employed her daughter, Lelia, to help. With a gift for marketing, Breedlove took the name of her third husband, Charles Joseph Walker, and styled herself Madam C.J. Walker, forming clubs encouraging women to sell her products across the country. She amassed a fortune, which allowed her to buy property and donate huge sums to the nascent National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
“She said herself two years ago that she was not yet a millionaire, but hoped to be some time, not that she wanted the money for herself, but for the good she could do with it,” read her Times obituary.
Mildred Dresselhaus
Sometimes called the “Queen of Carbon Science,” Mildred Dresselhaus is a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor of physics and engineering, a National Medal of Science winner, a Fulbright scholar, a mother of four and grandmother of several. Her innovations were far from domestic. The Brooklyn-born science legend is renowned for her work researching the structure of carbon. She invented superlattice structures — incredibly thin layers of graphite and other materials — for thermoelectric devices, laying the groundwork for the development of lithium-ion batteries.
Bette Nesmith Graham
Bette Nesmith Graham is almost as famous for being a celebrity mom as she is for inventing a product relied on for decades before word processing: Liquid Paper. The mother of Michael Nesmith, who became the guitarist for the Monkees, Nesmith Graham was a divorcée in Texas with a son to care for. She began working as a secretary at the Texas Bank & Trust in 1951. An avid painter in her spare time, she got the idea of using a thin brush and white tempera paint to cover her typing errors. She called the invention Mistake Out, gradually perfecting the formula in her home and getting her son and his friends to fill the bottles. Fired by the bank in 1958, Nesmith Graham devoted herself to her business full-time, eventually trademarking and patenting Liquid Paper.
Patricia Bath
Born in Harlem, N.Y., in 1942, Patricia Bath is known for many innovations in her field of ophthalmology. Dedicated to helping patients overcome blindness, she came up with her most important invention in 1981 — a device known as the laserphaco probe that revolutionized the way cataract surgery is performed, improving the accuracy of the procedure and decreasing patient discomfort. Faced with sexism and racism in her field in the 1970s, Bath fought to become the first woman to chair an ophthalmology program in America. While raising her daughter, Eraka, she also found time to do a fellowship in corneal transplantation.
Hedy Lamarr
Imagine if Scarlett Johansson had come up with an innovation in drone missile technology and you have a good idea of the versatility of Hedy Lamarr, actress and inventor. Called “the most beautiful woman in the world,” the classic Hollywood femme fatale and mother of three (she married six times) also had a keen interest in weapons technology. Galvanized by the coming of the Second World War, Lamarr and her friend, the composer George Antheil, patented a secret radio communication system for guiding underwater torpedoes. Largely unused during the war, the technique was later adopted by both the military and private companies.
Marion Donovan
That the disposable diaper was invented by a mother is no surprise. Born in 1917, Marion Donovan worked as an assistant beauty editor at Vogue before quitting to raise a family in Westport, Connecticut. She struggled with the problem of many mothers — constantly having to wash soiled cloth diapers and crib sheets. In 1946, she cut up her bathroom’s shower curtains and used the material to design a waterproof, reusable covering for diapers, eventually patenting it in 1951. Though the plastic diaper cover was a sales success, her next invention, a disposable diaper created out of paper, failed to catch on — it was Pampers that brought that idea to market. It took her a while to get recognition for that invention, though she racked up more than a dozen patents on items that solved other domestic headaches, such as an elastic cord that enabled a woman to zip up the back of her own dress (now, why hasn’t that become a household item?).
Ann Moore
While some mother inventors looked to modern space-age fabrics to make child-rearing easier, others were inspired by the traditional practices of other cultures. When working as a nurse with the Peace Corps in Togo, West Africa, in the 1960s, Ohio-born Ann Moore admired the way African women would tote their babies on their backs wrapped in slings. She also noticed the children were calmer as a result of being close to their mothers. On her return to the U.S., Moore had a daughter (named Mandela, after the African leader), and devised her own version of the sling — think of a BabyBjörn, but carried on the back. She called the sling the Snugli. Seven years after it went on the market, the Snugli reached $100,000 in sales and eventually became a multi-million-dollar business, spawned imitators and made the soft baby carrier a standard part of kid-rearing in North America — though Moore always resisted the label of inventor.