OBERLIN, OHIO: Anyone who writes about women inventors must eventually face a stubborn truth: Most of the important things in history were invented by men. Most does not mean all, of course, and several large books have recently been published to catalogue the technological contributions of women. Yet if you listed the 100 most important inventions of all time and the key figures usually associated with each, no more than a small handful would be female.

Some historians overcome this problem by revealing women’s contributions to inventions usually credited to men. For example, a long-standing (if shaky) tradition calls Catherine Greene of Georgia the true inventor of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin. Ada Byron Lovelace, who wrote a description of Charles Babbage’s “analytical engine” in 1843, is often called the world’s first computer programmer (although since Babbage’s machine was never built, she never had to wrestle with debugging). Recently some historians have asserted that Albert Einstein’s first wife, Mileva Einstein-Marie, should share the credit for his work in special relativity. And then there’s Julia Hall, supposed co-inventor of the modern method for refining aluminum.

In that method, called the Hall-Héroult process, an electric current is passed through a red-hot solution of aluminum oxide dissolved in molten cryolite, yielding lumps of pure metal. Julia’s younger brother Charles is credited with its discovery in 1886. Charles had begun searching for a way to extract pure aluminum as a student at Oberlin College (which Julia had also attended, taking most of the same science courses). After his graduation in 1885 he converted the family’s woodshed into a laboratory and continued experimenting until he produced his first sizable sample of aluminum the following February. (See “Silver From Clay,” Invention & Technology , Spring 1986.) For most of a century Charles was generally portrayed as a heroic lone inventor, patiently overcoming failure after failure on his way to eventual triumph. Then a 1979 paper by Martha Moore Trescott asserted that Charles had a collaborator—his sister Julia.

In her paper Trescott called for recognition of Julia’s role as “adviser and confessor,” visiting Charles’s laboratory almost daily and corresponding with him often. Besides offering technical suggestions, Trescott says, Julia “managed many aspects of the invention process” for her unworldly brother. She kept careful records and gave testimony that proved essential in a patent dispute with Paul Héroult, a French inventor who devised a nearly identical method almost simultaneously. According to Trescott, she also secured financing to commercialize the process. In short, Julia “played a central role in her brother’s projects.” Later authors have summarized Trescott’s findings by calling Julia a co-inventor.

Not so fast, says Norman C. Craig, a chemist at Oberlin, in the Fall 1997 issue of Chemical Heritage (the magazine of the Chemical Heritage Foundation). Illustrating the familiar truth that history is a myth disagreed upon, Craig denies virtually every one of Trescott’s points. Julia’s technical contributions were negligible, he says, and while she and Charles did discuss the progress of his experiments (no surprise, since they lived together), it is not clear whether Julia completely understood what Charles was doing. Nor is there any evidence that she kept records or saved letters for patent purposes (Charles’s notebooks and papers were entirely adequate) or helped attract investors (Charles used his own contacts). Her main contribution was running the family home, leaving Charles free to concentrate on his scientific work.

What, then, was Julia Hall’s role: co-inventor, indispensable assistant, secretary, or housekeeper? Should she and Charles be paired together like Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Watson? Or would that be like crediting Jane Austen’s maid as co-author of her novels?

In the end the disagreement may be less sharp than it appears. Craig and Trescott agree that Julia Hall was very smart and unusually well educated for her day. They also agree that she was her brother’s closest confidante (neither of the Halls ever married), that the two often discussed his research, and that she gave valuable testimony in his patent case. Trescott, knowing how women’s work has been ignored throughout history, surmises that she must have played a large (though mostly unrecorded) role in the discovery. In what some feminist theorists would call a femaleoriented version of history, her paper emphasizes a complex interplay of many factors, such as Charles and Julia’s contrasting personalities, rather than simple notions of cause and effect played out by isolated agents. Craig’s approach, by contrast, is masculine and scientific: facts, records, evidence.

By bringing out Julia’s contribution, Trescott reminds us that behind every “lone” inventor stands a host of sup- porters and contributors, many of them women. Craig makes an equally valid point: Help and advice are important, but it took a dogged experimenter toiling in a laboratory, getting his hands dirty with practical work, to actually isolate the process. Students of technology would do well to learn from both accounts.

STRASBURG, PA. [This item was written by John H. White, Jr., a frequent contributor to Invention & Technology ]: Replica sailing ships and historic buildings are commonplace; I have lost count of the number of reproduced Santa Marias . Locomotive replicas are much more rare. During the past 70 years or so, only three have been built in the United States, so it was newsworthy when Stanley P. Gentry, an industrialist of Ribbing, Minnesota, decided to build a replica of the Virginia & Truckee Railroad’s first locomotive, the Lyon .

The original engine was produced in San Francisco by the Union Iron Works in 1869. It was a small freight engine for its day, weighing only about 20 tons, but its six driving wheels gave it enough power to overcome the steep grades of Nevada’s V&T Railroad. This line hauled silver from the mines at Virginia City to stamping mills on the Carson River. In time the rich ore gave out, but the railroad ran on until 1950, its ancient equipment, romantic past, and Wild West setting making it a favorite among railway enthusiasts. Photographs, tickets, timetables, and any scrap of memorabilia became treasures to diehard V&T fans. Stan Gentry is a V&T aficionado who can afford to take his collecting beyond the matchbook level.

Creation of the locomotive has been entrusted to the repair shops of the Strasburg Rail Road. Strasburg is located in the heart of the Pennsylvania Dutch country, about five miles south of Lancaster. The air is pungent with the smells of natural farming. I saw a manure spreader pulled by four mules not far from the railroad’s terminal. The shopwork is being done in between regular repairs for the Strasburg’s trains and outside jobs that are time-critical. To date, the driving wheels, frame, cylinder saddle, and deck plate have been completed. The cylinders are under way, but much remains to be done, so we won’t see a steam-up for several years.

A recent visit to Strasburg led me to the very crowded workplace where the Lyon is slowly coming together. The shop is packed with disassembled locomotives, machine tools, workbenches, and hundreds of loose parts. One must walk carefully to avoid tripping over a journal box or cylinder head. Still, I have visited far more disorderly shops. This is a place to do heavy mechanical work as quickly and as well as possible, and in the process it’s natural that plenty of dust and some confusion will be created.

Just before my visit in early March, word had arrived that the first cylinder casting was defective. This came as no surprise to David Reisig, a veteran patternmaker with 49 years’ experience in the business. A steam-engine cylinder has a complicated network of hollow interior passageways, or ports. Positioning the cores used to create these passageways, and correctly packing sand to support them, is a critical part of a foundryman’s job.

Typically the first few castings will be failures even when done by the most experienced men, if the job is a complex or unusual one, and they don’t come much more difficult than the cylinders needed for an 1869 steam engine. In this case one core shifted, making the wall thickness too great at the bottom of the left side and too thin at the top. To make matters worse, the core failed and the passageway filled with iron. On the right side the molten iron mixed with sand to form a spongy fill inside the steam ports. So the molders tried again. They packed the sand more tightly against the cores. They placed the mold right side up rather than upside down, to put less pressure on the steam port side of the cylinder. And they poured the molten metal at a lower temperature.

The metal is common gray iron, a favorite material for machinery fabrication because it is easy to cast and machine. It is strong in compression but less so in tension, where it tends to crack or break. While cast iron is abundant and cheap, the cost of patternmaking and casting has made it less competitive with steel plate fabrication in modern times. The foreman at the Fairmount Foundry in Hamburg, Pennsylvania, has promised that his men will produce two perfect cylinder castings no matter what it takes. Linn Moedinger, manager of the Strasburg shops, says that these guys never give up, and that is why he has patronized Fairmount. Moedinger is determined to have the engine on its wheels by December of this year. That leaves the big job of the boiler and a great number of other more minor pieces to be done. Stay tuned.