How many inventors, in how many eras, in how many product categories, whose names we do not know and whose stories we have not yet recovered?

The patent record holds some of them.

Other records hold some others.

And some are simply gone, unrecorded even in the incomplete records we have.

The work of recovery is not finished.

It is barely begun.

Mary Kenner’s story is one data point in a much larger set that we are still working to understand.

She invented five things.