US Trends

what are some of the earliest stem inventions and discoveries by women

Here’s a Quick Scoop–style deep dive into some of the earliest STEM inventions and discoveries by women , from ancient history up to the early industrial age.

Quick Scoop: Earliest STEM Inventions & Discoveries by Women

Women have been doing science, engineering, and math since antiquity , even when they weren’t allowed formal titles like “scientist” or “engineer.”

Below are some of the earliest known examples across chemistry, math, astronomy, medicine, and early engineering.

Ancient & Early Science Pioneers

Tapputi-Belatekallim (c. 1200 BCE) – Early Chemist & Perfumer

  • An Assyrian woman working in Mesopotamia, often cited as the world’s first known chemist.
  • She developed early distillation and filtration methods to create perfumes from resins, oils, and flowers, essentially running a small chemical production lab for the royal court.
  • Her work shows that women were systematically applying experimental processes more than 3,000 years ago.

Mary the Jewess (1st–2nd century CE) – Lab Equipment Inventor

  • An early Alexandrian alchemist whose inventions became standard lab gear.
  • Credited with creating:
    • Bain-marie (double boiler) for gentle, uniform heating.
* **Tribikos** , a three-armed distillation apparatus.

* **Kerotakis** , a sealed vessel for heating and capturing vapors.
  • These devices sit at the roots of today’s chemical engineering equipment and even cooking techniques.

Cleopatra the Alchemist (3rd century CE) – Alembic & Distillation

  • A Hellenistic alchemist often associated with Hermetic texts rather than the Egyptian queen.
  • Credited with inventing or refining the alembic , a key apparatus for distillation used for medicines, perfumes, and early chemical experiments for centuries.
  • Her work helped standardize how volatile liquids were purified and separated.

Early Mathematics & Astronomy

Hypatia of Alexandria (c. 370–415 CE) – Mathematician, Astronomer,

Instrument Maker

  • One of the earliest famous female mathematicians and astronomers ; she led the school at Alexandria.
  • She taught and commented on advanced texts in geometry and algebra , helping preserve and clarify earlier Greek mathematics.
  • Sources credit her with improving tools such as:
    • The astrolabe (for measuring positions of stars and planets).
* The **hydrometer** (for measuring liquid density), important in both science and trade.

Pandrosion (c. 3rd–4th century CE) – Early Numerical Methods

  • A lesser-known Greek mathematician who worked on numerical techniques.
  • She is credited with an early method for approximating cube roots , tackling one of the classic “hard problems” studied by Greek mathematicians.
  • Her work foreshadows later numerical analysis methods used in modern computing.

Medieval & Early Modern STEM

Trota of Salerno (c. 12th century) – Medical Writer on Women’s Health

  • A physician associated with the Salernitan School of Medicine in medieval Italy.
  • She wrote practical treatises on gynecology, childbirth, and women’s health , based on direct clinical observation rather than folklore.
  • Her texts circulated widely in Europe, influencing medical practice for centuries.

Wang Zhenyi (1768–1797) – Astronomer Explaining Eclipses

  • A self-taught Chinese astronomer and mathematician in the Qing dynasty.
  • She used a simple setup with a lamp, mirror, and table to demonstrate how the Earth, Sun, and Moon align to cause a lunar eclipse , offering a clear scientific explanation rather than a mythological one.
  • She also wrote accessible works on mathematics and astronomy to help others learn.

Elizabeth Fulhame (active late 18th century) – Concept of Catalysis

  • A Scottish chemist whose experiments on oxidation and reduction pushed chemistry forward.
  • In 1794, she published work that effectively introduced the concept of catalysis —showing that a substance can participate in a reaction and emerge unchanged , yet alter the rate of the reaction.
  • This idea underlies much of modern chemical engineering, materials science, and even green chemistry.

Early Industrial & Pre-Computer Age Inventions

Jeanne Villepreux-Power (1794–1871) – The Glass Aquarium

  • A French naturalist who needed a way to observe marine animals alive for long periods.
  • In 1832, she invented the first glass aquarium to study marine life (especially the paper nautilus) in controlled conditions.
  • This invention transformed marine biology and ecology , making systematic observation of aquatic behavior possible.

Tabitha Babbitt (1784–1853) – Circular Saw

  • An American toolmaker and Shaker community member.
  • Observing how much effort was wasted with back‑and‑forth hand saws, she devised the circular saw in 1813 to maintain continuous cutting motion.
  • Her idea influenced later industrial saw designs used in lumber and manufacturing.

Ada Lovelace (1815–1852) – First Computer Algorithm

  • Working with Charles Babbage’s proposed Analytical Engine , Lovelace wrote what is widely recognized as the first published computer algorithm , intended to compute Bernoulli numbers.
  • She also articulated the idea that such a machine could manipulate symbols and not just numbers, anticipating modern general‑purpose computing.
  • Because of this, she is often called the world’s first computer programmer.

Later but Still Foundational (For Context)

While your question focuses on the earliest inventions and discoveries, it helps to see how this early pattern continues into more recent centuries.

  • Marie Curie – Discovery of polonium and radium , pioneering radioactivity research.
  • The ENIAC women (Kay McNulty, Jean Bartik, and colleagues) – Programmed one of the first general-purpose electronic computers , ENIAC, in the 1940s.
  • Jocelyn Bell Burnell – Co‑discovered pulsars , a new class of neutron stars.
  • Vera Rubin – Provided key observational evidence for dark matter via galaxy rotation curves.
  • Jennifer Doudna & Emmanuelle Charpentier – Co‑invented CRISPR–Cas9 gene editing , a revolution in molecular biology.

These later breakthroughs sit on a very long historical arc that starts with figures like Tapputi, Mary the Jewess, and Hypatia.

HTML Table of Key Early Women in STEM

Here’s an HTML table you can directly embed, as requested:

html

<table>
  <thead>
    <tr>
      <th>Name</th>
      <th>Era</th>
      <th>Field</th>
      <th>Invention / Discovery</th>
      <th>Why It Matters</th>
    </tr>
  </thead>
  <tbody>
    <tr>
      <td>Tapputi-Belatekallim</td>
      <td>c. 1200 BCE</td>
      <td>Chemistry / Perfumery</td>
      <td>Early distillation and filtration techniques [web:1]</td>
      <td>Represents the earliest known named chemist; shows systematic chemical processing in antiquity. [web:1]</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>Mary the Jewess</td>
      <td>1st–2nd century CE</td>
      <td>Alchemy / Early Chemistry</td>
      <td>Bain-marie, tribikos, kerotakis lab apparatus [web:1]</td>
      <td>Created foundational lab tools for controlled heating and distillation still echoed in modern labs. [web:1]</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>Cleopatra the Alchemist</td>
      <td>3rd century CE</td>
      <td>Alchemy / Chemistry</td>
      <td>Alembic distillation apparatus [web:1]</td>
      <td>Standardized distillation for medicine, perfumes, and early chemical research. [web:1]</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>Hypatia of Alexandria</td>
      <td>4th–5th century CE</td>
      <td>Mathematics & Astronomy</td>
      <td>Work on geometry and algebra; improvements to astrolabe and hydrometer [web:1][web:7]</td>
      <td>Helped preserve and explain advanced Greek mathematics and refined key scientific instruments. [web:1][web:7]</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>Pandrosion</td>
      <td>c. 3rd–4th century CE</td>
      <td>Mathematics</td>
      <td>Early method to approximate cube roots [web:1]</td>
      <td>Early contribution to numerical methods, anticipating later computational techniques. [web:1]</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>Trota of Salerno</td>
      <td>12th century</td>
      <td>Medicine</td>
      <td>Medical treatises on women’s health and gynecology [web:1][web:9]</td>
      <td>Grounded women’s medicine in clinical observation and influenced European medical practice. [web:1][web:9]</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>Wang Zhenyi</td>
      <td>18th century</td>
      <td>Astronomy & Mathematics</td>
      <td>Experimental explanation of lunar eclipses using lamp–Earth–Moon model [web:1]</td>
      <td>Demystified eclipses with a physical model, promoting scientific reasoning in Qing China. [web:1]</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>Elizabeth Fulhame</td>
      <td>Late 18th century</td>
      <td>Chemistry</td>
      <td>Concept of catalysis in oxidation–reduction reactions [web:1][web:5]</td>
      <td>Laid groundwork for modern catalysis used in industrial chemistry and materials science. [web:5]</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>Jeanne Villepreux-Power</td>
      <td>19th century</td>
      <td>Natural History / Marine Biology</td>
      <td>First glass aquarium (1832) [web:1]</td>
      <td>Enabled controlled, long-term observation of marine organisms, transforming marine biology. [web:1]</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>Tabitha Babbitt</td>
      <td>19th century</td>
      <td>Engineering / Toolmaking</td>
      <td>Circular saw design (1813) [web:1]</td>
      <td>Improved industrial cutting efficiency, influencing later manufacturing equipment. [web:1]</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>Ada Lovelace</td>
      <td>19th century</td>
      <td>Mathematics / Computing</td>
      <td>First published computer algorithm for the Analytical Engine [web:2][web:5]</td>
      <td>Anticipated general-purpose computing and symbolic processing; often called first computer programmer. [web:2][web:5]</td>
    </tr>
  </tbody>
</table>

Mini Story-Style Wrap‑Up

If you imagine a timeline, it starts with Tapputi carefully distilling perfumes for a Mesopotamian palace, runs through Mary the Jewess tinkering with heated vessels in Alexandria, and reaches Hypatia mapping the heavens with an improved astrolabe. Centuries later, Wang Zhenyi dims the lights and lines up a lamp, a table, and a mirror to show that eclipses are about geometry, not dragons, while Elizabeth Fulhame quietly rewrites chemistry with catalysis. By the time Ada Lovelace sets down an algorithm for a machine that doesn’t exist yet, women have already been building the foundations of STEM for nearly three millennia.

Meta description (SEO):
Discover some of the earliest STEM inventions and discoveries by women—from ancient chemists and mathematicians to early engineers—and see how they quietly shaped science and technology long before modern labs.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.