As Nobel Prizes are handed out this week in the sciences, it’s fitting to take note of a woman whose accomplishments in the field of chemistry – as complex as any – made life easier for so many and liberated homemakers from the ironing board.
Dr. Ruth Benerito died Saturday at 97 in her Louisiana home. Though few would recognize the name of the woman inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2008, most are familiar with her work. “A chemist long affiliated with the United States Department of Agriculture, Dr. Benerito helped perfect modern wrinkle-free cotton, colloquially known as permanent press, in work that she and her colleagues began in the late 1950s,” is how her obituary in the New York Times explained it. The achievement “is considered one of the most significant technological developments of the 20th century.”
