Mother of Invention by Katrine Marçal

MOTHER OF INVENTION by Katrine Marçal is a thought-provoking look at “How Good Ideas Get Ignored in an Economy Built for Men.” Marçal, an award-winning writer and journalist, begins her text in 1970 with the adoption of wheels on suitcases, noting “the ‘blindingly obvious’ can stare us expectantly in the face for an eternity before it occurs to us to make something of it.” She further argues that the “we don’t imagine the ‘soft’ (notions of femininity and masculinity) as being capable of holding back the ‘hard’ (constant technological advance),” observing that it was not until the 1970s when more women began travelling alone that suitcases with wheels were more widely used. Marçal shares other stories:  a woman (Bertha Benz) was the first to make a long-distance car trip and the surprising origin of NASA’s spacesuits. There is discussion of disparity in pay (in the 1950s, IBM in the UK calculated salary costs based on “girl hours” due to the abundance of female programmers) and witchhunts due to bad weather hundreds of years earlier. Marçal’s work is entertaining and informative; she includes roughly forty pages of notes and bibliography. She convincingly points out that “when we consider a factor like gender, it becomes clear how technology is constantly being shaped within our preconceived ideas of the world, the economy and ourselves.” MOTHER OF INVENTION received a starred review from Library Journal. And, for an interesting aside to stretch your brain further, consider a question that’s been popular lately on the internet: Are there more wheels or doors in the world?