Martha J. Coston
Martha J. Coston was an innovative inventor and entrepreneur born in 1828 in Baltimore, Maryland. After experiencing significant personal losses, including the deaths of her husband and several children, she dedicated herself to realizing her late husband's vision for a signaling flare system designed for maritime communication. Coston successfully developed her husband's concept of using colored flares to convey messages, ultimately receiving U.S. Patent number 23,536 for her "Pyrotechnic Night Signals" in 1859. This invention not only provided a critical communication tool for the U.S. Navy during the Civil War but also significantly enhanced maritime safety for both military and civilian vessels.
Over the years, Coston secured patents in several countries and established a successful business that continued to operate well into the 20th century. Her innovative flares were vital in emergency situations at sea and are considered a precursor to modern signaling devices. As one of the few women to receive a patent in her era, she faced challenges in a male-dominated field but remained steadfast in her pursuits, ultimately inspiring future generations of women to engage in science and entrepreneurship. Coston's story reflects resilience, ingenuity, and a profound impact on maritime safety that resonates even today.
Martha J. Coston
American engineer
- Born: April 10, 1828
- Birthplace: New York, New York
- Died: January 12, 1904
- Place of death: Washington, D.C.
Coston developed a pyrotechnic signaling device and code system for use at sea. For more than a century, Coston flares saved lives and property. They also gave the North a strategic edge during the American Civil War.
Primary fields: Communications; maritime technology; military technology and weaponry; navigation
Primary invention: Signal flares
Early Life
Martha Jay Coston was born in were chosen in 1828 to John Scott and Rebecca (Parks) Hunt of Baltimore. Her father died when she was young, after which her mother moved the family from Baltimore to Philadelphia. As a girl, Martha enjoyed learning and preferred quiet times with her mother to the boisterous company of her elder siblings.
When she was fourteen, Martha met Benjamin Franklin Coston, an up-and-coming scientist five years her senior. He had a reputation as a prodigy; not yet twenty, he had invented a submarine vessel capable of staying submerged for eight-hour periods thanks to a chemical process that supplied breathing air. Benjamin and Martha became friends, and the young inventor took to visiting the schoolgirl at home and helping her with her studies.
The two obtained permission from Martha’s mother to marry once Martha turned eighteen. In 1844, they decided to wed in secret, but the sixteen-year-old Martha could not hide the marriage from her mother for long. After reconciling with Martha’s family, the newlyweds relocated to Washington, D.C. There Benjamin assumed an appointment as master in the service and head of the Washington Navy Yard laboratory.
The Costons flourished in the nation’s capital, forming many social and political connections. However, in 1847, Benjamin resigned from the Navy, due in part to a disagreement with the government over his pay and position, as well as in part to a decline in health related to occupational chemical exposure. Benjamin, Martha, and their three young sons relocated to Boston, where Benjamin became president of a gasworks.
Not long after the birth of their fourth boy, Benjamin became severely ill. Martha cared for her husband for three months before his death on November 24, 1848. Martha and the family moved back to Philadelphia to live with her mother, soon after which her infant son died. Martha then turned to the care of her ailing mother, who after a protracted illness also died.
Life’s Work
While tending sick family members, the young widow Coston had paid little attention to money matters. Medical and funeral expenses, coupled with her naïve trust in relatives and her husband’s business associates, had drained her finances. Hoping to find something of value, Coston combed through her husband’s papers. There she found notes on an uncompleted invention, one involving the use of coded combinations of colored fire to be used for remote communications at sea.
Coston remembered that her husband had tried making some test flares during his work at the Washington Navy Yard. After locating and retrieving the flares, she gave them to a trusted high-ranking naval officer for testing. While she awaited the results, illness claimed the life of yet another of her sons.
On the heels of this tragedy came the unwelcome news that her husband’s flares had proved to be useless. However, Secretary of the Navy Isaac Toucey assured her that the concept was an excellent one. He encouraged her to perfect the invention, offering her use of the naval laboratory’s personnel and resources. When those yielded no positive results, Toucey told Coston that, if she could find someone to make a working flare, the Navy would pay her expenses.
The young widow spent the next decade trying to realize her husband’s concept, hiring and dismissing a series of chemists and conducting her own experiments. To carry out her husband’s coded signaling plans, she needed to be able to produce three distinct, brilliant, and lasting pyrotechnic colors. She eventually managed to create intense, bright white and red flares, but a third color eluded her. (In a spirit of patriotism, she was striving for blue.)
A breakthrough came in August, 1858. America’s top pyrotechnists were gathered in New York City to create a mammoth fireworks display celebrating the first transatlantic cablecommunication, a message sent by Queen Victoria to President James Buchanan. Among the convened fireworks experts, Coston found the technical know-how she needed. Within months, she had her third color (blue being prohibitively expensive, she settled for green) and a reliable, functioning flare.
Coston was granted U.S. Patent number 23,536 for her “Pyrotechnic Night Signals” in April, 1859. She filed as administrator for B. Franklin Coston, crediting her husband rather than claiming the invention as her own. (One of the witnesses was a J. Quincy Adams—possibly President John Quincy Adams’s lawyer grandson, as the president himself had died over a decade earlier.) Coston was one of only five women to receive a patent in 1859, and the only one whose invention was of a nondomestic nature.
Later that year, she also obtained patents in England, France, the Netherlands, Austria, Denmark, Italy, and Sweden and sold three hundred trial flares to the U.S. Navy for approximately $5,000. Navy vessels equipped with the trial flares would make overwhelmingly favorable reports over the next two years on the invention’s effectiveness.
Beginning in the summer of 1859, Coston paid extended visits to England and France to interest the navies of both countries in the use of her flares. She returned to the United States in early 1861, shortly before the presidential inauguration of Abraham Lincoln and the beginning of the Civil War. Lincoln’s call that year for a blockade of all U.S. ports resulted in a pressing demand for the flares. Based on the success of the trial flares, Congress paid Coston $20,000 for rights to the patent for use by the Navy and contracted with her to produce the flares. She initially hired a manufacturer to fulfill the orders to her specifications, but in later years she and her sons took over the business of manufacturing the flares.
In January, 1863, Coston set sail for Europe, where she would spend the next several years marketing her invention while mingling with society, nobility, and royalty. In 1867, the French government (after a protracted but fruitless effort to reverse engineer the invention) purchased the rights from her to manufacture the flares for use by France’s military. In June, 1871, Coston was granted a U.S. patent (number 115,935), this time under her own name, for a new invention: an improvement to the flares that enabled the user to ignite a Coston signal by twisting its handle.
Coston moved back to the United States in 1873, by which time Italy, Denmark, and the Netherlands had officially adopted the flares. America’s Civil War had ended eight years earlier, and the Coston family’s domestic marketing efforts turned to civilian use of the flares by passenger ships, yachts, the U.S. Merchant Marine, and the Life-Saving Service (later the Coast Guard).
Coston detailed her experiences as a wife, widow, inventor, and traveler in her 1886 autobiography A Signal Success. She died in 1904. The Coston Signal Company (renamed the Coston Supply Company in 1927) remained in operation at least until the mid-1980’s.
Impact
Coston labored for years to bring her husband’s idea to fruition. Her efforts yielded untold savings in lives and property. For more than a century, her flares were used around the world by military, civilian, and commercial watercraft in distress to call for aid. With the flares, onshore personnel warned ships away from hazardous conditions. Similar signaling devices inspired by Coston’s flares are still in use today and are considered standard marine safety equipment.
Coston’s well-timed success in perfecting the invention meant that the North entered the Civil War equipped with the new flares. Coston’s signaling device may not have been the deciding factor in the war, but it certainly was a strategic advantage for the Union’s naval forces, and the part it played in planning and executing battles may have helped to bring the war to a close that much sooner.
As a nineteenth century woman working in a traditionally male field, Coston encountered her share of resistance, and sometimes even overt hostility. Yet she persisted, determined to support herself and her family, contribute to her country’s welfare, create a quality product, and earn a fair price for it. Her story was an inspiration for women entering the twentieth century, and it still inspires today.
Bibliography
Coston, Martha J. A Signal Success: The Work and Travels of Mrs. Martha J. Coston—An Autobiography. Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger, 2007. A recent reprint of Coston’s 1886 autobiography, the most detailed available source on Coston’s life and career. Spans her life from girlhood through the 1880’s. Coston describes the process of perfecting and patenting the flares (without divulging trade secrets) and provides several examples of their use, along with numerous testimonials from military officers. Illustrations.
Drachman, Virginia G. Enterprising Women: 250 Years of American Business. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. The second chapter devotes a section to Coston, focusing on her evolution as a businesswoman and her efforts to gain a foothold in the traditionally male realm of maritime technology. Illustrations, index.
Macdonald, Anne L. Feminine Ingenuity: Women and Invention in America. New York: Ballantine Books, 1992. Discusses Coston and her work in the context of other American women inventors and their inventions. Includes a schematic of Coston’s 1871 twist-ignition improvement to the pyrotechnic night signals. Bibliography, patents list, index.
Pilato, Denise E. The Retrieval of a Legacy: Nineteenth Century American Women Inventors. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2000. Chapter 4, “The Civil War: Impetus to Inventing Women,” includes a good biography on Coston drawn largely from the inventor’s own writing. Notes, bibliography, index.
Vare, Ethlie Ann, and Greg Ptacek. Mothers of Invention: From the Bra to the Bomb, Forgotten Women and Their Unforgettable Ideas. New York: William Morrow, 1988. The chapter on “Unsung Heroines” provides an excellent overview of Coston’s life, her inventions, and the obstacles she faced as an enterprising woman in the nineteenth century. Index.