Thus the straw industry in the United States is due to Miss Betsy Metcalf, who, more than a century ago, produced the first straw bonnet ever manufactured in this country. Since then the industry which this woman originated has assumed immense proportions. The number of straw hats now made in Massachusetts alone, not to speak of those annually manufactured elsewhere, runs into the millions. Scarcely less wonderful is the industry developed by Miss Knight, already mentioned, through her marvelous invention for manufacturing satchel-bottom paper bags. Many men had previously essayed to solve the problem which she attacked with such signal success, but all to no purpose. So valuable was her invention considered by experts that she refused fifty thousand dollars for it shortly after taking out her patent. Often what are apparently the most trivial inventions prove the most lucrative. Thus, a Chicago woman receives a handsome income for her invention of a paper pail. A woman in San Francisco invented a baby carriage, and received fourteen thousand dollars for her patent. The gimlet-pointed screw, which was the idea of a little girl, has realized to its patentee an independent fortune. Still more remarkable is the Burden horseshoe machine, the invention of a woman, which turns out a complete horseshoe every three seconds and which is said to have effected a saving to the public of tens of millions of dollars. The cotton gin, one of the most useful and important of American inventions--a machine that effected a complete revolution in the cotton industry throughout the world--is due to a woman, Catherine L. Greene, the wife of General Nathaniel Greene, of Revolutionary fame. After she had fully developed in her own mind a method for separating the cotton from its seed, which was after her husband's death, she intrusted the making of the machine to Eli Whitney, who was then boarding with her, and who had a Yankee's skill in the use of tools. Whitney was several times on the point of abandoning as impossible the task which had been assigned to him, but Mrs. Greene's faith in ultimate success never wavered, and, thanks to her persistence in the work and the putting into execution of her ideas, her great undertaking was finally crowned with success. She did not apply for a patent for her invention in her own name, because so opposed was public opinion to woman's having part in mechanical occupation that she would have exposed herself to general ridicule and to a loss of position in society. The consequence was that Whitney--her employee--got credit for an invention which, in reality, belonged to her. She was, however, subsequently able to retain a subordinate interest in it through her second husband, Mr. Miller.