As Good As Any Man

As Good As Any Man 

By Lawrence W. Reed

“Extreme” describes the highs and lows in Martha Coston’s remarkable life. Widowed with five children at the age of 32, she was beginning to recover from the unexpected loss of her husband when two of her children and her mother died. Depressed and penniless with three surviving children facing a bleak future, she managed to turn adversity into success through sheer pluck and willpower.

Coston was born Martha Jane Hunt in Baltimore in 1826 but moved to Philadelphia with her mother a decade later when her father died. When she was 16, she eloped with 21-year-old Benjamin Coston, a nautical engineer and promising inventor. His work in pyrotechnics and on early gas lighting earned him notable attention, but his life was cut short by a combination of pneumonia and chemical poisoning.

Poring over Benjamin’s papers, Martha discovered drawings for a pyrotechnic signal (or “flare”) that would allow ships to communicate with the shore or with each other at night or in fog. Benjamin had labored over the idea but never progressed beyond plans on paper.

For ten years, Coston worked to perfect her late husband’s work, including the proper “recipe” for flares that burned red, white, and blue and then a system (a sort of “Morse code”) that would permit messaging by flare.

On April 5, 1859, she presented her results to the world: a pyrotechnic signaling flare and code system. It worked beautifully. Reliable ship-to-ship and ship-to-shore communications were possible for the first time.

Inventing something useful doesn’t translate into money unless the invention can be marketed, but Coston had no experience in business. Nonetheless, she started her own company to produce and sell her flares, one that lasted more than 125 years.

To the amazement of many, the widowed inventor blossomed into a successful entrepreneur. At first, she downplayed her gender, even using a man’s name in communications to improve the chance that men would be willing to do business with her. “We hear much of the chivalry of men towards women” she wrote, “but let me tell you dear reader, it vanishes like dew before the summer sun when one of us comes into competition with the manly sex.”

With the coming of the Civil War, Coston found a large and ready market by selling her signaling flares to the US Navy. She traveled around Europe, securing customers in both the government and private sectors. She even struck a lucrative deal with the United States Life-Saving Service, which made her product standard equipment at its lifeboat stations.

Her biggest disappointment involved a customer that took advantage of her goodwill and patriotism. To help the Lincoln administration, Coston sold her flares and signaling system at below cost and sometimes accepted nothing more than a government IOU as payment. Washington ripped her off through its greenback inflation, eventually compensating her, in real terms, at about a quarter on the dollar. Had it not been for her skill at marketing elsewhere, she would have been bankrupt by war’s end.

Martha Coston died in 1902.  She had overcome huge challenges and proved that a woman could be just as good in business as any man—and far better than those who defrauded her with their depreciating paper money.

Books by and about Martha Coston: https://tinyurl.com/mr43aujv

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(Lawrence W. Reed is President Emeritus, Humphreys Family Senior Fellow, and Ron Manners Global Ambassador for Liberty at the Foundation for Economic Education in Atlanta, Georgia. He blogs at www.lawrencewreed.com.)