The Ideas Women Series

As the world marked International Women’s Day, we trained a spotlight on inspirational women whose ideas have changed the world for the better. You can read the full series below.

Bette Nesmith Graham

So many ideas come from two circumstances catalyzing an opportunity. Creativity is often the individual who makes the connection between them. And Bette was one such dot-joiner.

Working as a secretary to the Chairman of the Texas Bank and Trust in the early 1950s, typing errors were a secretarial bane, one error often requiring the whole page to be retyped.

Bette noticed how painters working on designs for the bank’s holiday window displays would paint over any imperfections rather than starting over and imagined applying the same technique to correcting mistakes on typed documents. With the help of a local chemistry teacher, she experimented in her kitchen with various formulae to create the right consistency for her mixture which she dubbed ‘Mistake Out’.

Renaming her product ‘Liquid Paper’ in 1958 really captured her audience’s imagination and by 1968 she was selling one million bottles a year. By 1975, shortly before she sold her business to Gillette, her company had increased production to 500 bottles a minute.

Bette described herself as “a feminist who wants freedom for myself and everyone else” and pioneered the concept of the company as a means to foster the cultural, educational and spiritual welfare of its employees. Furthermore she put her money where her mouth was by establishing two foundations to support women’s welfare and their advancement in business and the arts.

Tragically, Bette died of a stroke in 1980 aged just 56. But, through her ingenuity, in connecting the dots to solve a problem that vexed so many, she inspired countless women to learn from her mistakes. Quite literally.

Hedy Lamarr

People who pivot, switching from one career to another, truly embody the wonder of the creative mind. Hedy Lamarr was one such person. Most famous as an actress, she was lured from Vienna to Hollywood by MGM’s Louis B Mayer and starred in a string of high-profile films such as Ziegfeld Girl, Samson and Delilah, and White Cargo, often as the exotic seductress whose sultry looks enthralled the cinema-going public. Her co-stars included Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Jimmy Stewart and Victor Mature.

Yet Hedy often maintained that acting detracted from her first love: innovation. Inspired by her father, she was fascinated by how things worked, as a child dissembling her music box to understand how the machine inside it functioned. Throughout her movie career, she maintained an interest in invention and, to alleviate the boredom between takes, Hedy was often to be found in her trailer, tinkering.

Her inventive mind attracted a patron in the industrialist Howard Hughes with whom she brainstormed designs for faster aircraft, using her observations from the animal kingdom as inspiration to reduce drag in flight.

Wartime is often seen as a catalyst for new ideas, with necessity often characterized as the mother of invention. And Hedy’s most celebrated idea was a frequency-hopping system to prevent radio waves to torpedo guidance systems from being intercepted. The thinking behind it was subsequently to form the basis for GPS and Bluetooth, resulting in her often being dubbed “the mother of Wi-Fi”.

Hedy believed that all creative people want to do the unexpected. And, in this regard, she was certainly no exception.

Charlotte Mew

Around the corner from our London office, there is a blue plaque on Doughty Street commemorating the poet Charlotte Mew who lived there for the first decade of her life. Her childhood was deeply affected by hardship. Three of her brothers died while she was still young and two of her siblings were committed to psychiatric hospitals, leaving Charlotte and her remaining sister Anne with grave concerns for own their mortal and mental health. The passing of her father in 1898 left his widow and her daughters in a precarious financial position.

Without question, these traumas shaped Charlotte’s literary style and inspired her to write with rawness and reality, and with the fearlessness that typifies those who are unafraid to be judged.

Through her poetry she tackled societal issues that were rarely communicated at the time yet which are commonplace today. Relationships and sex, domestic violence, mental health, nature and the environment were all themes that featured heavily in her writing, presented with such refreshing honesty that she attracted a following that included Siegfried Sassoon, Ezra Pound and Thomas Hardy. Virginia Woolf saw her as “quite unlike anyone else”. Her seminal poem, The Farmer’s Bride, was a no holds barred account of unrequited love which caused a sensation when first published in 1916.

To the male-dominated literary world, Charlotte was a breath of fresh air, a non-conformist widely regarded as a bridge between the buttoned-up conventions of the late nineteenth century and a more modernist approach to ideas. Besides her undeniable creativity, she taught us about the importance of being bold. Confronting challenging issues with confidence. And staying true to ourselves.

Ada Lovelace

Great ideas are often couched in terms of their combination of magic and logic, the ability to capture the heart as well as the mind. In many ways, this personified the talents of Ada Lovelace, daughter of the poet Byron who was acclaimed as being one of the pioneers of modern computing.

Aged just eight when her father died in Greece, Ada displayed a prodigious mind for mathematics, a quality that her mother strongly encouraged, lest Ada adopt Lord Byron’s more wayward tendencies. Herself a poet, her social circle brought her into the company of the luminaries of the day, such as Charles Dickens, Michael Faraday and, most significantly, Charles Babbage. And she enjoyed the debate around the life scientific, particularly research into the workings of the mind.

Whilst still a teenager, Ada began working with Babbage on his Difference Engine, a machine designed to compute complex mathematical equations. Her mentor was so impressed with her analytical capabilities that her referred to her as “The Enchantress of Number” and encouraged her to embrace her ability and buck convention by disregarding “this world and all its troubles and, if possible, its multitudinous Charlatans”. She collaborated further with Babbage on his next generation machine, The Analytical Engine.

Whilst success often has many fathers (or in this case, mothers), Ada was widely credited with writing the world’s first algorithm and initiating the concept of computer programming, though by many in hindsight rather than in her short lifetime, when the prejudice of the establishment still denied female equality of thought, especially in the rational realm of science.

Marjory Stoneman Douglas

If variety is the spice of life, it certainly contributed to the longevity of Marjory Stoneman Douglas who died in 1998 aged 108.

During her lifetime she can credibly be described as a journalist, conservationist, humanitarian, author, playwright, as well as a women’s and civil rights campaigner.

Born in Minneapolis in 1890, Marjory excelled as a student before pursuing a career in journalism with the Miami Herald. As the city’s population swelled, she wrote of the impact of this growth, focusing on women’s suffrage, sanitation, housing and employment before discovering the vocation for which she was perhaps best-known: the environment.

Commissioned to write about the Miami River, she was instead attracted to the significance of the Florida Everglades which she famously captured in her 1947 book, River of Grass, championing the preservation of this valuable ecosystem in the face of those who wanted to drain the land for development. Championing the notion of prevention rather than cure, she firmly believed that “you can’t conserve what you haven’t got”.

Marjory was famed as a communicator, using language with great economy to present her subject matter and spoke regularly in public to promote the causes about which she was most passionate. Besides becoming an authority on the ecology of south Florida, she advocated equally fiercely for women’s rights, supporting the suffrage movement through its formative years and using her journalistic platform to celebrate successful women in business and the arts.

Awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in her 103rd year, this remarkable woman, known by many as the “Grandmother of the Everglades”, was recognised as a true pioneer of environmentalism at a time when many took our precious planet for granted.

Simone Biles

There’s a difference between expertise and creativity. One masters an ability and learns every rule. The other breaks them and imagines new rules, moving us all forward.

On her way to winning four gold medals in the Rio Olympics, Simone Biles rewrote the rules of gymnastics. Not satisfied with mastering the stamina and precision of existing gymnastic routines, she challenged herself to add that extra flip, that additional flip to accepted moves. She asked herself ‘What’s my body really capable of?’ The answer has changed the world of female gymnastics. Simone has added not just one but four new elements to the Women’s Artistic Gymnastic Code of Points. Competitors today train to perform a ‘Biles’ in floor routines, on the vault (she was the first ever woman to complete a Yurchenko Double Pike) and the balance beam. Simone’s story is one of determination as well as creativity. As a junior athlete, she suffered body-shaming, choosing to dress down and hide the muscles built up during intensive training, before finding the confidence to say “I have this body for a reason, and I wouldn’t be able to do the things I do if I didn’t have this body.” That’s the courage in the title of her book: Courage to Soar: A Body in Motion,

Stephanie Kwolek

Creative thinking is the ultimate non-linear activity. That’s why AI programmers struggle to mimic its associative, playful, haphazard ‘rules’ and unexpected results.

Chemist Stephanie Kwolek well understood the random and unexpected nature of creativity, and the happy accidents it can produce. Working at DuPont in the 60s, she was researching lightweight alternatives to steel that could be used in radial car tyres to save petrol. Her experiments to turn a solid polymer into a liquid appeared to be unsuccessful. But where her peers saw failure, Stephanie saw the unexpected. Fibres in the new liquid were five times stronger than steel. She had just invented Kevlar.

Fortunately for DuPont – and for all of those whose lives have been saved by Kevlar – Stephanie was as persistent as she was curious. She had wanted to investigate the cloudy solution produced by her failed experiment, but managers feared it would clog their viscose spinning lab equipment. It was only by persuading a colleague that she was able to isolate and identify the super strong fibres we call Kevlar.

Stephanie’s invention has been used in everything from firefighters’ boots and diving gloves to the Mars Pathfinder spacecraft and, most famously, body armour . To date Kevlar has saved the lives of over 3,000 US police officers, all proud members of the ‘Kevlar Survivors’ Club’.
Stephanie Kwolek died at the age of 90 on 18th June 2014: the very day DuPont celebrated the sale of its one millionth protective Kevlar vest.

Taylor Swift

Creative minds are restless. Where others find success and double-down on the idea that got them there, more curious minds are busy working on their next big thing.

That’s been the story of Taylor Swift. There’s invention. There’s reinvention. And then there’s Taylor. Just when the critics think they’ve got her neatly pigeon-holed, she re-emerges in a brand-new genre.

Until 2012, she was pure Nashville: a rising country music star. Then she rocked those stereotypes with the dubstep and hip hop of Red, followed by the synth-pop of 1989. Wind forward, and Taylor spent lockdown reinventing herself again with the indie and acoustic vibes of her folk albums.

As she’s continued to change up styles, her song writing has evolved too. From the confessional, diary-style lyrics of her early hits to assertive ballads and, in 2020, she wrong-footed pundits again with the fictional escapism of Folklore and Evermore. On the journey she’s been followed by an army of fans – or ‘Swifties’ – drawn to the honesty and imagination of her lyrics, in whatever style they’re expressed.

Country? Pop? Rock? Folk? As Taylor herself says: “I leave the genre labelling to other people.” One thing Swifties can be sure of, the Taylor Swift of tomorrow won’t be the same one as today.

Zaha Hadid

Where do creative minds find their inspiration? The catalyst for new thinking often comes not from the confines of your own discipline, but from somewhere altogether more surprising.

For her inspiration, architect Zaha Hadid turned to the worlds of art and fashion. Looking beyond the four walls of architecture allowed Zaha to create previously unimagined forms and structures. From her Riverside Museum on the Clyde to the Guggenheim in Vilnius, her buildings have become art every bit as much as the exhibits they house and, in turn, catalysts to creative minds way beyond architecture itself.

Zaha found her inspiration not only in the output of other creative industries, but in their tools, materials and technologies too. They gave her a new palette with which she would reimagine the architect’s design process; a process she believed should be invisible in the building itself. Reaching for a simile from another creative field, she claimed “architecture is like writing. You have to edit it over and over so it looks effortless.”

Zaha has left those looking for inspiration – architectural or otherwise – a legacy of buildings from Seoul to Baku to Michigan. She has also left us a valuable lesson in creativity: if you want different answers, you have to look for different input.]

Dr. Kizzmekia S. Corbett

Creativity is sometime imagined as a blank canvas. We are the artists, with every possibility before us, waiting for the muse to strike. In reality, the opposite is true. Creativity thrives on constraints. The problem to be solved. The resources to solve it. The deadline to be met.

After the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a pandemic on March 11, 2020, the constraints facing Dr Kizzmekia Corbett and her team of scientists seemed insurmountable. A new disease. A need for a vaccine that would be easy to manufacture and administer. And just 12 months to invent it, trial it and get it approved by regulators.

At 36, Dr Corbett was already an established coronavirus specialist. That goes some way to explaining the mind-numbingly short time it took her to design the vaccine. She created a modified sequence for Covid-19 in just a few hours. On approval, her code for creating synthetic messenger RNA (which teaches our bodies to recognize and defend against Covid) was shared with Moderna who, along with Pfizer, manufactured the vaccines that would reopen economies and reunite families.

We don’t just have the Covid-19 vaccine to thank Dr Corbett for. She has reminded us all that, even dreamed up under pressure, ideas are not abstract, ethereal imaginings. They can be a solid, practical force for good with the power to change the world.

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