Orange Coast: Streak of Excellence Intact orangecoast.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from orangecoast.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
For this month’s Kickass Women in History we turn to the nerdy end of the spectrum with Josephine Cochrane (sometimes spelled ‘Cochran’). She was the inventor of the modern dishwasher.
Born 1839, Josephine Garis came from a nerdy family of engineers and inventors. In 1858 she married a wealthy man, William Cochran, who had earned a ridiculous amount of money as a dry goods merchant. When they married, Cochrane took her husband’s last name as was the custom, but she added an ‘e’ to the end of it.
After the marriage, Cochrane had two children (one of whom died at the age of two) and became a full-time socialite. The family lived in Shelbyville, Illinois. Cochrane liked to entertain with her special china and she hated it when the dishes were chipped, which she blamed on poor handling by the servants. She started washing her own dishes, and to her extreme annoyance she chipped some herself. Eventually, according to the U.S. Patent and Trade Office, she declared: “If nobo
This month in Kickass Women in History we salute Queen Nanny (also known as Granny or Grandy Nanny and Nanny of the Maroons) a hero of Jamaican history.
Jamaica’s original inhabitants were the Arawak and Taino people. Upon Columbus’ landing in 1494, the island became the property of Spain and most of the Arawaks and Tainos were murdered or killed by disease. Spain “imported” African slaves, many of whom escaped during the violent transition from Spanish to British rule. These and other escapees formed bands and villages in the mountains and became known as “maroons,” from the Spanish word “cimarron” which means “wild.”