We Spaniards love to show off our inventions with stick.
Although it sounds a little strange, I mean the mop and the Chupa Chups, two great inventions that have facilitated our daily tasks and have sweetened our lives for decades, thanks to two Spanish inventors.
The problem is that, if we stop to read the document 200 years of patents, we will see that the author of these inventions is not so clear and that, for example, if the fame of the invention of the mop has always belonged to the engineer Manuel Jaln CorominasThis was based on many other previous designs, both national and foreign, the first corresponding in Spain to Julia Montouss Frages and Julia Rodrguez-Maribona, a mother and a daughter that, being in possession of a patent older than that of Corominas, they never came to hold their fame, so today we have decided to make a place for them in our section of women scientists, demonstrating that it is not necessary to have engineering studies to be a great inventor.
What do we know about the inventors of the mop in Spain?
It is difficult to find information about this mother and her daughter, natural of Avils (although the mother was born in France), although you can read something on Rosa Milln Garca’s blog, which has done a lot to spread the story of these two women.
Little is known about them, although we do know that did not have a scientific career and that they were only two women belonging to a wealthy family of the 50s.
We don’t know if they will have to clean on your knees Many times, but I know that they were aware of the inconvenience that this meant for those who did it, so they designed a very original way of solving it.
Thus took place the invention of the mop in Spain
Not even they were the first to patent a similar ingenuity, since in 1901 Two New Yorkers designed a device that made it easier to scrub floors, walls and other objects. However, the Spanish postwar period was not exactly open to change and new technologies, so in the 1950s it was still scrubbing on her knees, something these two women solved.
Your patent, filed under the number 34,262 was registered in 1953 with the hardly remembered title of device that can be attached to all kinds of containers such as buckets, buckets, cauldrons and the like, to facilitate scrubbing, washing and drying floors, floors, corridors, baseboards and premises in general.
In spite of everything, they did not achieve the popularity that later Manuel Jaln, which in fact had been based on the way it was scrubbed in the United States to carry out the useful and necessary improvements that earned him the patent for which he is today the legitimate inventor of the mop.
Therefore, although in the time that this mother and daughter lived, the only way to relate a woman to a mop was that only they should use them, the two Julias They showed that they could do much more and that women’s minds are just as necessary to advance as men’s. Fortunately, today there are many more people who support this statement, but much remains to be done.
