The following decade is remarkable for the wonderful increase in the number of inventions due to women, for there was a sudden jump from twenty-eight to four hundred and forty-one patents awarded them between the years 1861 and 1871. Women now began to have confidence in their inventive faculties, and, no longer content with exercising their genius on articles of clothing and culinary utensils, sewing, washing and churning machines, they began to devote their attention to objects that were entirely foreign to their ordinary home activities. This is clearly evinced by the patents they obtained for such inventions as improvements in locomotive wheels, devices for reducing straw and other fibrous substances for the manufacture of paper pulp, improvements in corn huskers, low-water indicators, steam and other whistles, corn plows, a method of constructing screw propellers, improvements in materials for packing journals and bearings, in fire alarms, thermometers, railroad car heaters, improvements in lubricating railway journals, in conveyors of smoke and cinders for locomotives, in pyrotechnic night signals, burglar alarms, railway car safety apparatus, in apparatus for punching corrugated metals, desulphurizing ores and other similar inventions in the domain of mechanical engineering, inventions that, at first blush, would seem to be quite alien to the genius and capacity of woman. From now on women's inventions in the United States increased at an extraordinary rate, for from 1871 until July 1, 1888, when the first government report was made on the patents issued to women inventors, she had to her credit nearly two thousand inventions, many of which were of prime importance.[231] During the seven years following 1888 she was awarded twenty-five hundred and twenty-six patents--more than the total number that had been granted her during the preceding seventy-nine years. Between 1895 and 1910, three thousand six hundred and fifteen more patents were placed to her credit, making a grand total for her first century of inventive achievement of eight thousand five hundred and ninety-six patents. No Patent Office reports are available since 1910, but the number of inventions for which women have received patents since Mary Kies was awarded hers on May 5, 1809, for "straw-weaving with silk or thread," cannot be far from ten thousand. This fact will, doubtless, be a revelation to that large class of men who still seem to share the views of Voltaire and Proudhon that women are incapable of inventing even the simplest article of domestic use. The following story well illustrates the prevailing ignorance regarding the part women have taken in the invention of certain articles that are so common that most people think they were never patented.