And Mary Kenner’s long middle period, spanning decades and including the eighteen-year wait for a manufacturing partner and the daily reality of a flower shop, is as important to understanding her story as the patent grants and the eventual recognition.

What Her Story Changes

What does it change, to know Mary Kenner’s story?

What is different about how one understands American history and American invention once one has reckoned with the full arc of her life?

It changes the understanding of who inventive people are and where they come from.

The image of the inventor as a white man in a laboratory, connected to a university or a large corporation, is not entirely wrong as a description of some inventors, but it is catastrophically incomplete as a description of American inventive life.

Mary Kenner invented from a flower shop.