Ice cream.
Cast your mind back to the hot, sticky summers of yore. Your loyal correspondent can almost hear the dulcet strains of ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’ blasting in cheesy organ tones, pitch rising and falling on endless repeat, as the ice cream truck enticed generations of hot, sun-burnt children. The trucks served their purpose, back when home freezers were smaller than a shoebox. You still hear an ice cream truck occasionally, now about as relevant as a buggy whip.
But that’s my memory. Let’s go a little further back, to the late 18th century and the first years of the 19th century, when mixing salt and ice was well known to freeze cream to form ice cream. Presidents Washington, Jefferson and Madison all served ice cream at the President’s House. The ice cream-making technique at the time was labor-intensive and required a lot of churning and hand scraping.
Enter early Philadelphia inventor Nancy M. Johnson. Ms. Johnson had an idea, an idea to make ice cream. On September 9, 1843 she received U.S. Patent 3,254 for an ‘artificial freezer.’ Her freezer included a wooden bucket to receive ice and salt, a metal cylinder within the bucket for the ice cream mixture, and crank-operated paddles to mix the ingredients as they froze and to scrape frozen cream from the sides of the cylinder.
Ms. Johnson’s invention worked a treat, democratized ice cream, and elements of her invention are still in use 183 years later. But Nancy Johnson was laboring under a disability; namely, she was married. At the time, the law of ‘coverture’ meant that, even in Pennsylvania, a married woman had no legal existence separate from her husband. She could not own property, contract, engage in business, or sue or be sued without the participation of her husband.1
We don’t know whether coverture was the reason that Nancy Johnson did not commercialize her invention, but it’s a likely culprit. She sold her patent to William G. Young, who went on to successfully market ‘Johnson Patent Ice-Cream Freezers.’ How much did Ms. Johnson get for her patent rights? $200.00, which is close to $10,000.00 in today’s money. With her $200.00, Ms. Johnson could have purchased a small house, or a full year of labor from a worker, or several head of livestock. She did OK and made money because of her patent. That’s what’s important.
Nancy M. Johnson went on to teach formerly-enslaved people after the Civil War. She passed away in 1890 at age 94.
1 Coverture in the sense of limiting the rights of married women eroded over the years, but some aspects survived to the latter part of the 20th century
— Robert Yarbrough, Esq.