Who was the first woman to receive a U.S. patent? It turns out the answer is not as straightforward as you might think. Many assert that the first woman to be granted a patent was Mary Dixon Kies. On May 5th, 1809, she was granted her patent for a method of weaving straw with silk thread. And while she, like so many other women who have gone unrecognized for their contributions, deserves our respect and praise, she might not actually be the first American woman to receive a patent. That honor might belong to another inventor some 16 years earlier. Her name was Hannah Wilkinson Slater. And she seems to have invented a new kind of cotton thread that aided her husband’s business immensely.

But cotton, and in particular, how to process cotton into fabric, was the high-stakes, competitive technology of its day. Industrial spies, some even hired by governments, attempted to steal each other’s cotton-processing technology. And Hannah’s story is intertwined, if you’ll pardon the pun, with this international intrigue. And perhaps as early as 1793, she filed for, and possibly received, a patent on her new type of thread. If so, it pushes back the date of the first patent by a woman by some 16 years, and only 3 years after the passage of the first patent act. So hop into the past with the Frog of History and explore the fascinating story of inventor Hannah Wilkinson Slater.