Margaret Crane

Margaret "Meg" M. Crane (born 1939) is an American inventor and graphic designer who created the first at home pregnancy test in 1967 while working at Organon Pharmaceuticals in West Orange, New Jersey. She is the listed inventor on US Patent 3,579,306 and 215,7774. There was resistance to marketing pregnancy tests for consumers rather than doctors, and the home pregnancy test did not become available until 1977, except for a market test in Canada in 1972.

Career

At age 26, Crane was hired by Organon in 1967 to work on a new cosmetic line for the company. One day as she was touring the laboratory of the company she noticed many test tubes. Curious to what they were, she asked and to her surprise they were pregnancy tests. Each individual test tube contained reagents that when mixed with a pregnant woman's urine would indicate pregnancy by displaying a red ring at the bottom of the test tube.

Invention Crane took matters into her own hands and went to her home in New York to begin working on her prototype. She combined a paper clip holder, a test tube, a mirror, and a dropper. When Crane presented her idea, it was met with major pushback. Crane's proposal made the lab hesitant due to concerns that the lab would lose sales to doctors if women started performing these tests at home.

Organon eventually decided to do a test market of the product and Margaret Crane's design was chosen. Organon hired a New York advertising agency to do the marketing, and Ira Sturtevant was to head the account. He took a particular interest in Margret Crane's prototype. He was intrigued by how elegantly the home pregnancy kit was put together. Organon chose Canada for the test market and Crane and Sturtevant were chosen to head the project. They went on to become partners for more than 40 years until his death in 2008. With success the pair went on to build their own marketing company named Ponzi and Weill.

This was Margaret Crane's biggest motivation to invent the at-home pregnancy kit. Before Crane's invention, women would have to go to a doctor and have their urine tested in a lab to determine if they were pregnant. As a result, women would have to wait weeks for results. In the 1960s, when Crane's idea first came to be, a pregnancy test was processed in a lab by monitoring levels of a hormone called human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) in urine.

Although her name was on the patents for the device, Organon licensed the product to three over-the-counter pharmaceutical companies, and Crane never received a penny for her design. She had to sign away her rights for a dollar and never saw that dollar. But she was grateful to have met her partner in the process.

It was not until 2012, when the New York Times ran a short "Who Made It" story, that Crane received proper recognition for her prototype that simplified the pregnancy of many women. Since 2012, Crane has received recognition for her invention.

Legacy A prototype of The Predictor and a 1970 packaged product version were acquired by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in 2015.

Predictor, a play by Jennifer Blackmer about Margaret Crane and her invention of the home pregnancy test, received its New York premiere in December 2025 starring Caitlin Kinnunen as Crane.