Jones, Amanda Theodosia (1835-1914), an American inventor, entrepreneur (business developer), and author, developed methods of food preservation that are still used today. She also made improvements in oil-burning machinery.
Jones was born on Oct. 19, 1835, in East Bloomfield, New York. She began teaching school at age 15, and her first poem was published when she was 18. In addition to her writing, Jones became enthusiastic about spiritualism, a popular religious movement at the time that sought to communicate with the spirits of the dead.
In the 1870’s, Jones began working with a distant relative, Le Roy Cooley, to improve canned food. Early canning methods prevented food from spoiling, but they also made the food bland and mushy. Jones and Cooley experimented with a vacuum process that sucked air out of the cans, improving the preserved food’s quality. They received five patents for this process in 1873. Some were under her name. Others were credited to Cooley or to both. Their vacuum canning process is now a standard method of food preservation.
To make money from her ideas, Jones opened a Chicago business in 1890 that produced canned fruit, meat, and pudding. She wanted the company to be run entirely by women, helping them to develop managerial skills and earn fair wages. But as her firm grew, a group of male investors took over. By 1893, they had forced Jones out of her own company.
During the early 1900’s, Jones earned additional patents for further innovations in the canning and dehydrating (drying) of foods. She also invented machinery related to the growing petroleum industry. Early oil-burning furnaces were poorly built. Jones patented safety burners and control valves to make oil-burning devices less dangerous and more efficient.
Jones continued to write poetry and also authored a series of articles about liquid fuel. Her autobiography was published in 1910. Jones died on March 31, 1914, in Brooklyn, New York.
