Next time you come in from the cold, think a warm thought for Alice H. Parker.

Born in the year the Civil War ended, it was highly unusual for an African American woman to attend college in her era, but Alice Parker did, and took classes Howard University with honors.

A Morristown resident, Parker grew tired of the cold Morristown winters and the limited effectiveness of fireplaces to warm her home. So, she designed a natural gas-fueled “new and improved heating furnace.” It was the first time anyone had thought of using natural gas for home heating.

Her design won her a patent in December 1919, and from her design was born the thermostat and the more familiar forced air furnace in most homes today.

Not much is known of Alice Parker’s life.

It is unclear whether her anonymity was by choice or by the social design of the time, but to recognize her contribution to the state’s history of innovation, the NJ Chamber has named its “Women Leaders in Innovation” award after her.

Alice Paul followed in the footsteps of many 19th century suffragists but she was the one who led the successful crusade to secure the vote for women. All it required of her was seven arrests, three jail terms, a threat to be sent to an insane asylum, multiple hunger strikes, and the enmity of much of the country.

Paul graduated Swarthmore College with a degree in biology then followed that with a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1912.

She dedicated her life’s work to earning women the right to vote, and she helped organize the National Women’s Party to lead the fight. Her crusade was met with deaf ears in Washington, both in Congress and from incoming President Woodrow Wilson.

In response, Paul organized one of the largest protest parades ever seen in the nation’s Capital on Wilson’s inauguration day. For the next 18months, she and her colleagues picketed in front of the White House - the first known instance of picketing there.

She was arrested numerous times but news coverage of the rough treatment she endured in prison began to shift the national conscience. Wilson eventually came around to support her cause and after a number of failures, the 18th Amendment to the Constitution was passed by Congress in 1920 and ratified by the requisite 36 states.

Paul has been inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame, the National Women’s Hall of Fame and, in April, 2016, it was announced that Paul’s image would be one of those included in the redesign of the $5 bill in honor of the women’s suffrage movement.

While Sara Spencer Washington’s story is a typical entrepreneurial success story, there was nothing typical about Sara Spencer Washington.

She became one of the first African American women millionaires of the 20th Century by filling a gaping consumer need – beauty and cosmetic products for African American women.

Washington moved to Atlantic City in 1913 and opened her own beauty shop. She brought with her a formidable education including advanced chemistry studied at Columbia University and beauty culture studied in York, Pa.

Washington developed her own products and a specific system for using them. She worked in her shop by day, sold the products door-to-door at night and soon opened a beauty school where she taught her system to others. The beauty school expanded across the U.S. and around the world.

Each year, more than 25,000 students graduated from Washington’s schools and became entrepreneurs themselves, administering Washington’s beauty system, and selling her products door-to-door.

Washington made Atlantic City the site for her world headquarters and laboratory where more than 75 different products were developed and manufactured.

She was a committed philanthropist, and supported a multitude of charities.

When she died in 1953, Washington's enterprise was worth millions of dollars and employed some 500 full-time employees plus 45,000 door-to-door sales people.

When she attended the University of Manitoba, Yvonne Brill was told in no uncertain terms that because of her gender, she could not study engineering. Undaunted, she studied mathematics and chemistry instead.

Good move. Brill graduated at the top of her class and later earned a Master’s in Chemistry from the University of Southern California.

Her academic performance earned her a job at Douglas Aircraft in California where she began working on the designs of the first satellite system, which would become the foundation for the RAND Corporation.

“No one had the right degrees back then, so it didn’t matter,” she said later. “I didn’t have the engineering but the engineers didn’t have the chemistry and math.”

It is believed during the she was the only woman working on rocket science in the United States in the 1940s. Brill developed the propulsion system (for which she earned a patent) that kept communications satellites from slipping out of their orbits. Her system is now the industry standard.

She worked for two prominent New Jersey companies - Wright Aeronautical and RCA - where she contributed to propulsion systems for NASA missions, including the space shuttle and the Mars Observer.

Her awards are legion. One of them, ironically, was the prestigious American Association of Engineering Societies’ John Fritz Medal, despite never officially getting an engineer’s license.

She also won the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal, and to cap her career, she was presented the National Medal of Technology and Innovation by President Barack Obama in 2011.

When Brill was inducted into the National Inventor’s Hall of Fame in 2010, two of her fellow inductees were Spencer Silver and Arthur Fry, inventors of the Post-It note. In its article, the Washington Post noted it took two men to invent an adhesive stationary, but only one woman to figure out how to keep satellites in orbit around the Earth.