Margaret A. Wilcox, who was born in Chicago in 1838, became a prolific mechanical engineer and inventor at a time when very few women — due to prevailing social conventions — played any meaningful role at all in these professions. She developed a strong interest in mechanical engineering early in life and would use her technical knowledge and skills to come up with innovations to help improve the quality of life for others.
Several of Wilcox’s inventions centered on home appliances, and they included a stove that could be used for both cooking food and heating water; and a machine that was designed to wash both clothes and dishes. Her most pivotal and far-reaching invention, however, was arguably one that involved transportation.
By the time she was in her 20s, Wilcox had begun focusing on what to do about the downright frigid temperatures inside railway cars during the colder months in the Chicago area. To help provide greater warmth and comfort to those train passengers, Wilcox experimented with harnessing residual heat from the locomotive and channeling that heat into the cars. Finally, on November 28, 1893, she was granted U.S. patent number 509, 415 for what was identified as a car heater.
In the short term, Wilcox’s train-based invention was not commercially successful due to concerns about how safe it really was and the fact that the cars would continue getting hotter without any ready-made means to modulate and lower the temperature. In the long term, though, this heating system proved to be far better suited for a mode of transportation that was comparatively smaller and therefore easier to thermally regulate. Within a decade after Wilcox died in Los Angeles in 1912, an ever-growing number of automobile manufacturers began adopting her design to generate heat inside their vehicles. (By this time, most of the automobiles being made were enclosed rather than open-air.)
Over time, Wilcox has gained greater-than-before acknowledgment and appreciation for developing a notable predecessor for today’s climate-control mechanisms for motor vehicles. In 2020, for example, the website and monthly magazine Inventors Digest named Wilcox’s 1893 patent of the car heater as of the top 10 patents granted to women.
Image Credit: Public Domain
For more information on Margaret A. Wilcox, please check out https://womensinnovations.org/women-innovator/margaret-a-wilcox/
Transportation History 
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