Mary Florence Potts’ Removable Handle Iron

Mary Florence Potts (née Webber; September 1850 – 1922) was an American businessperson and inventor. She invented clothes irons with detachable wooden handles that became prominent throughout North America and the European continent. She termed herself an "inventress".

Potts is associated with improvements to the SAD Iron that she made from the age of 19. The old English word of SAD before the iron meant heavy, dense, and solid. Potts's patented double-pointed shaped clothes iron was made of hollow rather than solid metal. The flat iron's bottom was of thick iron and the sides were thin sheets of iron. 

The hollow iron was poured and filled with material that was a poor conductor of heat, such as cement or clay. Since her father was a plasterer by trade she experimented on filling some with a type of plaster of Paris. The advantage of these materials was that they did not radiate heat up like the predecessor old-style conventional solid metal clothes irons. 

Her patent claimed it retained heat longer and as a result would need less reheating. The conventional solid metal clothes iron of the 19th century weighed around 5 pounds (2.3 kg) to 10 pounds (4.5 kg) and had to be heated on a stove. It was so hot, that often a rag or thick cloth mitt was utilized to touch the metal handle to prevent burning the fingers. Once this all-metal iron cooled down, the ironing job at hand had to stop until it was reheated. 

The advantage of Potts's system was that there was always a waiting heated base ready to be switched out with the used cooled base, so the ironing could continue immediately.

The most pronounced feature of Potts's clothes iron was a detachable rounded wooden handle. That allowed the iron base to be placed on a heated stovetop and the handle removed at that time to stay away and cool while the base heated up. This prevented burned fingers, that often happened with the conventional all-solid-metal clothes iron of the nineteenth century. The handle and bases were designed standard and could be easily reattached to various sizes after they were heated for little delay in ironing.