Sarah boone inventor invention

If you've ever tried to iron a shirt, you can appreciate how difficult it is to iron the sleeves. Dressmaker Sarah Boone tackled this problem and invented an improvement to the ironing board in 1892 that would make it easier to press sleeves without introducing unwanted creases. She was one of the first Black women to receive a patent in the United States.

Life of Sarah Boone, Inventor

Sarah Boone began life as Sarah Marshall, born in 1832. In 1847, at age 15, she married freedman James Boone in New Bern, North Carolina. They moved north to New Haven, Connecticut before the ​Civil War. She worked as a dressmaker while he was a brick mason. They had eight children. She lived in New Haven for the rest of her life. She died in 1904 and is buried in Evergreen Cemetery.

She filed her patent July 23, 1891, listing New Haven, Connecticut as her home. Her patent was published nine months later. There is no record found of whether her invention was produced and marketed.

Sarah Boone's Ironing Board Patent

Boone's patent was not the first for an ironing board, despite what you may see in some listings of inventors and inventions. Folding ironing board patents appeared in the 1860s. Ironing was done with irons heated on the stove or fire, using a table that was covered with a thick cloth. Often women would simply use the kitchen table, or prop a board on two chairs. Ironing would usually be done in the kitchen where the irons could be heated on the stove. Electric irons were patented in 1880 but didn't catch on until after the turn of the century.

Sarah Boone patented an improvement to the ironing board (U.S. Patent #473,653) on April 26, 1892. Boone's ironing board was designed to be effective in ironing the sleeves and bodies of ladies' garments.

Boone's board was very narrow and curved, the size and fit of a sleeve common in ladies' garments of that period. It was reversible, making it easy to iron both

Sarah (Marshall) Boone was born enslaved in New Bern, North Carolina in 1832. She married very young (only 14 or 15) and moved to New Haven after her freedom was purchased, ostensibly by her new husband, a freedman. They had eight children and had relocated to Connecticut by 1856, six years before the start of the Civil War. (Sarah Boone Invents A Better Ironing Board, Ainissa Ramirez, CTExplored, 2020)

In 1892, Sarah, now working as a dressmaker, invented and patented an early version of the modern ironing board with collapsible legs. Prior to her invention, women had been pressing and ironing on tables or a plank rested across two chairs. (Created Equal: The Lives and Ideas of Black American Innovators, William Morrow, 1993)

“Sarah Boone was one of many dressmakers in New Haven, and the listing of her name in the city directory after 1861 and her proximity to Yale’s campus suggests that she made dresses for both Black and white clients, a common practice according to Rollins Osterweis’s Three Centuries of New Haven, 1638-1938.” ( Ramirez, 2020).

“My invention relates to an improvement in ironing-boards, the object being to produce a cheap, simple, convenient, and highly effective device, particularly adapted to be used in ironing the sleeves and bodies of ladies garments,” Her patent application states, “My improved device is not only adapted for pressing the inside and outside seams-of the sleeves of ladies waists and mens coats. but will be found particularly convenient, also, in pressing curved waist-seams wherever they occur.”

Sarah’s invention “is the predecessor to our modern ironing board, containing many similar elements: it narrowed at the top to fit inside clothes; it had padding on the side to prevent unwanted impressions; and it was collapsible to be stored easily.” (Here are two Connecticut inventors who should have statues, Anissia Ramirez, The Hartfor