The Tiny Test Changed Everything

In 1967, Meg Crane was a 26-year-old graphic designer working at Organon Pharmaceuticals in New Jersey. At the time, the company, which was focused on women’s medicine, was unveiling a new line of cosmetics. Crane had been hired expecting to design packaging for that new line, but instead, found herself working alongside other women in a support role, in a small house set slightly apart from the company’s labs, gathering materials for the men who did the design work.

The day she was sent on an errand to the lab, all that changed. In the lab, Crane noticed rows of test tubes suspended over angled mirrors. She asked what they were and learned that Organon used them to conduct pregnancy tests sent in by doctors on behalf of their patients.

At the time, finding out whether you were pregnant generally meant going through a doctor, who would send a urine sample to a laboratory and deliver the result weeks later.

But when Crane looked at Organon’s tests she found herself wondering: Why couldn’t a woman just do this on her own?

Crane had no background in chemistry, nor did she need to invent the science behind pregnancy testing. The laboratory test that Crane saw at Organon detected human chorionic gonadotropin — or hCG — which is the hormone pregnancy tests still look for today. Crane’s breakthrough was to see that the existing laboratory process could be redesigned as a product a woman could use privately at home. 

Without her employer’s knowledge, Crane began working nights and weekends, to build a prototype she called Predictor. It contained a test tube, an eyedropper and a mirror that allowed a woman to read the result at the bottom of the tube without disturbing it.

The idea was simple. Getting her employer to take it seriously was the challenge.

The Predictor arrived during a period of profound change in women's reproductive lives. The birth control pill had become available in the United States just a few years earlier, but women still faced significant barriers to information and control over their own bodies. 

Executives at Organon worried not only that an at-home pregnancy test would threaten doctors' business, but that women couldn’t be trusted to administer the test or cope with the result. One manager reportedly raised the prospect of an unmarried senator’s daughter discovering she was pregnant and jumping off a bridge. 

Crane persisted anyway. 

With the Predictor developed by 1968, the company filed for U.S. patents on the design and diagnostic device in 1969. By the early 1970s, the test was available to consumers in Canada and the Netherlands and in 1976 it was approved for use in the U.S. It reached the U.S. market the following year.

Nearly 60 years later, well over 200 million home pregnancy tests are sold every year, and the global market is valued at around $1.9 billion. Crane's original prototype is in the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., and, the soft-spoken octogenarian behind an invention that transformed women’s reproductive lives has finally begun to receive recognition for it.

In a conversation with The Persistent, Crane reflected on the light-bulb moment that started it all, the men who tried to stop her, the patent she gave away for a dollar and why, despite everything, she’d do it all again. 

The following conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

What made you look at the pregnancy tests in Organon’s lab and think you could turn one into something women could use themselves?

I'm the least organized person in the world, and I was a terrible product manager. I was not happy there and I was thinking of leaving until I walked into the lab and saw these test tubes. They were over an angled metallic shelf.

I asked somebody about it, and they told me these were the pregnancy tests that the company did for doctors. The doctor would get back to the woman or her husband to say whether or not she was pregnant.

It was a light-bulb moment for me because it looked like something that could be put into a small container of some sort and women could do it themselves.

How did you make the first prototype without chemistry knowledge?

I really didn't need a chemistry background. The chemistry was already in the test tube. I knew that if a woman was doing it herself, it would take a small test tube and an eyedropper so she’d know how much urine to add and how much water to add.

You'd shake up the tube once you had all that in it and set it back into the box so that it would be stable, and you’d wait two hours. It sounds terrible now, but at that time, two hours compared to weeks sometimes was quite different.

To make my prototype I worked at night in New York in a print shop — I had a little space there and lots of things to work with. I knew I couldn’t mention it to anybody in the company until I had something perfected.

I understood the basic chemistry already in the test tube and I knew what elements were necessary. You had to have a mirror because you had to look at the bottom of the test. You couldn’t move the test tube once you put everything in it. [Editor’s Note: A positive result produced a dark brown circle; a negative result left the background a kind of milky white.]

Once I had my prototype, I brought it to the person who hired me. He kind of laughed at it and said, “Well, we can’t do that. We’ll lose our doctor business. Go back to what we hired you for.”

But that was the beginning of it for me.

How much of the resistance was to the idea itself, and how much was because the idea was coming from a young woman who was stepping outside the role she’d been given?

I think it was both. I was rejected. The idea was rejected. But I knew it had to happen with that company because they had all the ingredients for it, and I'd have to find somebody or some way to convince someone there that this was a good idea.

I kept perfecting it over the next several months.

Then they hired a man to be head of all the women’s products. He came in on January 2, about a year after I first presented my idea. I had spent New Year’s Eve making it perfect to show him when he came in.

He was not happy to have to work with women. He was shouting at me and at the secretary, and he wouldn’t look at the test that I was so proud of.

What I didn't know was that after I presented my prototype months before the executives went to Organon’s parent company in The Netherlands, somebody laughingly mentioned my idea to make this a women’s personal test. They thought it was a joke, but the Dutch thought it was a great idea.

The company hired a group of product designers — three men — to do a prototype for the test.

I heard about a meeting that was going to happen the next day, so I crashed the meeting and brought my test with me. No other woman was there. I was looked at rather strangely having walked in.

They put theirs on the table, and I put mine on the table too.

One of the advertising people they’d hired to do a product test, Ira Sturtevant, walked over to the table and picked mine up. He said, “Well, this is what we’re using, right?”

And they said, “Oh, no, no, no. That’s just something Meg did for talking purposes.”

But as he interviewed the others about their prototypes, it was clear none of them would work.

They still didn't want to make my test because they said the glass I’d used to make it was too expensive. I was determined, so I took a few days off and called plastic manufacturers. I brought all this to the company, and they pretty much had to use mine because I came up with the best price and a finished prototype.

You eventually sold the patent rights to Organon for $1. How did that happen?

[After they’d chosen my prototype] I got a call to come for a meeting in the big building. There were a few lawyers and different company executives and papers on the table.

They said that in order to protect themselves, they had to patent the product, and you had to have the inventor’s name on the patent. They said it was normal procedure to give me a dollar for the rights to be transferred to them.

I hesitated a little bit, thinking, “What’s going on here?”

And they said, “Well, if we don’t get patents for this, we’re not going to do it.”

So I signed. I knew that I was losing out, but I was also thrilled that it meant they’re actually going ahead with making this product. That’s all that mattered at that time. 

You are legally named as the inventor on the patent, but Organon owned the patent and went on to license the test to other companies. Do you wish you’d fought harder to retain a stake in what you invented?

Looking back on it now, when I talk with young people, I say, “If you're in a situation where people want you to sign off for something and the other guys have lawyers, walk away or come back with a lawyer. Don't just jump in like I did.”

But still, I don’t regret it.

The product came on the market because of that. In 1971, Ira and I were in charge of the test marketing in Canada. It was wonderful working with Ira. The two of us started to have our own business and we lived together, but nobody knew about it. 

[Editor’s Note: Crane and Sturtevant became life partners and went on to run an advertisement and design agency together.]

I got Ira because of this. Nothing could have been better.

Did you think at the time that what you were doing was feminist?

I thought about all my friends who were wondering if they were pregnant at different times. Some were very concerned, and since this was before Roe v. Wade, I knew some who had to go through back-alley abortions.

It was a scary time. The ‘60s were meant to be the sexual revolution, a revolution for everything practically. It was a very tumultuous time. I thought about that as soon as I saw the possibility that a woman could [oversee her own pregnancy test] herself. 

Knowing [whether you are pregnant] right away, whatever you plan to do about your condition or the situation, matters a whole lot. That was the whole thing.

Looking back on all you’ve done, how do you feel about it?

Creating the pregnancy test is certainly the most important thing I’ve done.

I've been lucky in so many ways: Lucky that I saw those test tubes in the laboratory, lucky that I met Ira, and lucky that so many things happened, all fell into place.

It was not without some trouble, obviously, but in the long run it was a great time in life for me.