Long before soft-serve machines or pint-sized tubs lined grocery store freezers, there was a 25-year-old from North Carolina who looked at the clunky, hand-cranked ice cream freezers of her day and decided the design was inefficient, so she set out to improve it. So she improved upon it. In 1912, Beulah Louise Henry filed a patent for a vacuum-sealed ice cream freezer that required significantly less ice than the machines that were in common use at the time. It would be the first of dozens of patents and the beginning of a career that earned her the nickname "Lady Edison." For readers used to modern narratives about self-made entrepreneurs, Henry’s story carries a familiar ambition, even though it predates that vocabulary by a century.
A dessert hack that turned into a career
