Archive for May, 2010

Latimer’s excel­lent artis­tic flair and draft­ing abil­i­ties at Crosby, Hal­stead and Gould – a patent law firm — advanced him quickly and he found him­self even­tu­ally work­ing for Alexan­der Gra­ham Bell. At Bell’s patent law firm, he was in charge of draft­ing the nec­es­sary draw­ings required to receive a patent for Bell’s tele­phone. After a time with Bell, he found employ­ment at the U.S. Elec­tric Light­ing Com­pany, where he patented in 1881 the “Process of Man­u­fac­tur­ing Car­bons”, an improved method for the pro­duc­tion of car­bon fil­a­ments for light bulbs. Latimer’s patent improved on the orig­i­nal designs of Thomas Edi­son, who’s light bulbs, because of the way the car­bon fibers that emit­ted light were con­structed, would often break after only a cou­ple of days.

In dis­cussing the improve­ments, Latimer stated in his patent appli­ca­tion for the process –

“My inven­tion relates more par­tic­u­larly to car­boniz­ing the con­duc­tors for incan­des­cent lamps, though it is equally applic­a­ble to the man­u­fac­ture of del­i­cate sheets or strips of dense and tough car­bon designed for any pur­pose whatsoever….

“When heated the confining-plates expanded, while the blanks between them con­tract very con­sid­er­ably under the intense heat of the fur­nace, so that many of them are bro­ken and dis­torted in con­se­quence of their extremely-delicate struc­ture and their ten­dency to shift their posi­tion between the plates. This I avoided by the method I propose…”

His method was to coat the car­bon in graphite (to keep it from stick­ing) and then place it inside of a card­board sleeve which would pre­vent the super-heated car­bon from break­ing dur­ing the car­boniz­ing process. His method reduced the amount of bro­ken car­bons to almost zero, allow­ing for more use­able car­bons instead of the few that were being pro­duced per batch at the time. His mass pro­duc­tion process could be applied to many dif­fer­ent uses, and because of this the Latimer car­bons had a much longer life and made them less expen­sive.¹⁰

Next time, The Edu­ca­tional Sys­tem in 19th Cen­tury America

The rock star of African-American inven­tors of the 19^th cen­tury, Woods enjoy great fame dur­ing his life­time. “The most noted Negro inven­tor of the coun­try today is Granville T. Woods, of New York, hav­ing patented more than forty devices, relat­ing to the con­trol of elec­tric­ity. One was sold to Bell Tele­phone for $10,000.”⁷

After work­ing in the rail­road indus­try for sev­eral years Woods moved to Cincin­nati, Ohio and set up a firm for pro­duc­tion of tele­phones and other elec­tri­cal equip­ment. While there, at the age of 31, he patented a means of teleg­ra­phy for trains to com­mu­ni­cate with sta­tion houses using wires on the roofs of the train cars. He based his idea on trol­ley car wires, attach­ing to another wire sus­pended above the train track. The Syn­chro­nous Mul­ti­plex Rail­way Tele­graph was a major break­through in teleg­ra­phy which, because it allowed com­mu­ni­ca­tions between indi­vid­ual trains and sta­tions, greatly reduced rail­way acci­dents by allow­ing dis­patch­ers to com­mu­ni­cate the loca­tions of trains to other trains. As Woods put it in his patent application:

“My inven­tion relates to induction-telegraphy, hav­ing ref­er­ence to its use between mov­ing vehi­cles, par­tic­u­larly on rail­ways; and its object is to obtain increased effects from a given dynamic force with a sin­gle per­ma­nent con­duc­tor, thereby econ­o­miz­ing in respect to the plant employed.”⁸

This was the first time train oper­a­tors had been able to give and receive infor­ma­tion about their loca­tion that could be imme­di­ately passed on to other mov­ing trains. The Wash­ing­ton Bee lauded him for his discoveries:

“Granville T Woods is the smartest col­ored man in Ohio. He is an inven­tor who will some­day make Edi­son look to his lau­rels. Never a day passes but that he invents some­thing new, and his only plea­sure is to exper­i­ment in elec­tric­ity and applied mechanics.

“…the most notable of Mr. Woods’ inven­tions is a plan for telegraph­ing from one mov­ing train to another. When a rail­road engi­neer he thought out this device. After­wards the same thing was dis­cov­ered by Riley Smith and Edi­son per­fected it, but Woods was the first in the field and he has suc­cess­fully estab­lished his claim in the courts.”⁹

Woods was fas­ci­nated by what elec­tric­ity could do when har­nessed prop­erly, and his advances in in-motion teleg­ra­phy saved count­less lives. Dur­ing the rest of his career as an inven­tor, applied for more than 60 patents, among them a steam boiler fur­nace, an auto­matic air brake, a tun­nel con­struc­tion for elec­tric rail­way and an electro­mechan­i­cal brake.

The three inven­tors of focus didn’t have many advan­tages from life in gen­eral. Cer­tainly not what you would expect from men who went on to be ground­break­ing inven­tors. Two were the chil­dren of escaped slaves, the third of mixed race at a time when this was entirely socially unac­cept­able. How­ever, despite what their par­ents were able to pro­vide for them, each man lever­aged his ideas and intel­lect to spur progress and invent things that would change the world for the better.

Eli­jah McCoy
Eli­jah McCoy’s great inven­tion, the one that would secure his name in the Amer­i­can lex­i­con, was some­thing that solved a com­mon prob­lem among all crews of trains – lubri­cat­ing engine parts. In 1870 McCoy took a job with the Michi­gan Cen­tral Rail­road as a fire­man – part of his duties included oil­ing the engine. Crews would often have to stop their loco­mo­tives, some­time for hours on end, and oil the engine to pre­vent over­heat­ing. This caused pas­sen­ger and mail delays and stretched long loco­mo­tive travel times even longer. ³

McCoy thought of a way to erad­i­cate this prob­lem. As he said in his patent appli­ca­tion, in flow­ery lan­guage, “To all whom it may con­cern: Be it known that I, ELIJAH MCCOY, of the city of Ypsi­lanti, in the county of Washt­e­naw and the state of Michi­gan, have invented cer­tain new and use­ful Improve­ments in Lubri­ca­tors; and I do hereby declare that the fol­low­ing is a full, clear, and exact descrip­tion thereof, ref­er­ence being had to the accom­pa­ny­ing draw­ing and to the let­ters of ref­er­ence marked thereon, which form a part of this specification.

“The nature of my inven­tion con­sists in the con­struc­tion and arrange­ment of a lubri­ca­tor for steam-cylinders, as will be here­inafter more fully set forth.”

McCoy then set about explain­ing his incred­i­bly sim­ple but rev­o­lu­tion­ary device: A cov­ered cup, con­tain­ing lubri­cat­ing oil, with a hol­low stem at the bot­tom that had a valve that would be forced upward as steam pres­sure exerted force on the valve. When the steam opened the valve lubri­cat­ing oil would drip out of the cup, dis­pens­ing oil to the engine parts requir­ing the oil.⁴

McCoy took a prob­lem that had plagued engi­neers for decades and solved it with a device so sim­ple yet so invalu­able that com­peti­tors began to copy his inven­tion, lead­ing dis­cern­ing peo­ple with a want for the true arti­cle to ask for “the Real McCoy”.⁵

As a 1903 The Col­ored Amer­i­can put it in an arti­cle about African-American inventors –

“At the head of the list stands the name of Eli­jah McCoy, of Detroit. He has suc­ceeded in plac­ing his lubri­ca­tors on many of the steam-car and steam­boat engines in the North­west, and also on some of the Trans-Atlantic steam­ers. And these are said to net him a hand­some roy­alty.”⁶

I fin­ished the paper. Turned out to be good (thanks to Kim’s edit­ing) and my pre­sen­ta­tion went over pretty well and I only stopped once to look down at my notes. After cram­ming to fin­ish this I felt like I’d stud­ied for an exam I knew it so well.

You’ll notice super­scripts through­out the posts. Those are for the end­notes that were part of the hard copy. I will not be includ­ing that in this; no point in doing that.

Also, if you find this paper and copy it, believe me, there are ways to find you. The Inter­net is a glo­ri­ous and won­der­ful place, and I’m post­ing my paper because I’m proud of it, but that works two ways — me being nice, and you, the reader, play­ing nice too.

And so with­out fur­ther ado.…
Eli­jah McCoy, Lewis Latimer and Granville Woods: African-American Inven­tors of the 19th Cen­tury
African-Americans down through the cen­turies, whether slave or free, impro­vised and cre­ated tools and machines that helped them either in the fields or in the cities of the United States dur­ing the Nine­teenth Cen­tury. As The Col­ored Amer­i­can put it Novem­ber 14, 1903 –

“It should be borne in mind that the great indus­trial bur­den in the South fell almost wholly upon the Negro slaves, not only in agri­cul­ture and domes­tic labor, but in mechan­i­cal pur­suits as well: so that through his expe­ri­ences in field and work­shop the Negro laborer was enabled – indeed forced – to devise many an new prac­ti­cal con­trivance for min­i­miz­ing the exact­ness of man­ual labor.“¹

On the plan­ta­tions of the South, where African-Americans of many skills and strengths were often grouped together, new tools and machines were cre­ated that helped ease the back-breaking day to day labor. In the cities, mind-numbingly tedious labor, such as the con­struc­tion of shoes, was made sim­ple and quick by inven­tors such as Jan Ernst Matzeliger, who’s shoe last­ing machine rev­o­lu­tion­ized the shoe indus­try, dras­ti­cally cut­ting pro­duc­tion time and man hours.

As early as the late 19^th cen­tury African-American inven­tors were begin­ning to be rec­og­nized for their accom­plish­ments. “The oft-repeated accu­sa­tion against the Negro that he is an imi­ta­tor and not an inven­tor does not stand the test when brought under the lime­light of inves­ti­ga­tion,” claimed a reporter in 1908 in the Seat­tle Repub­li­can. Which was true. Accord­ing to the Gov­ern­men­tal Patent Office at that time, it was esti­mated that of the 900,000 total patent rights that had been granted in the his­tory of the office about 1,000 of those came from African-American inven­tors. Henry E. Baker, one of the first Black Patent Exam­in­ers in the U.S. Patent and Trade­mark Office said, “…the records of this office do not dis­tin­guish between inven­tors as to race but only to nation­al­ity (but black inventors)…not only served to raise the stan­dard of the inven­tors mate­ri­ally and socially but (have) greatly aided in increas­ing the facil­i­ties of civ­i­liza­tion.“²

African-Americans, often with­out the ben­e­fits of higher edu­ca­tion, were start­ing to make noted, valu­able con­tri­bu­tions to the Amer­i­can land­scape, even if they as a peo­ple were still not fully accepted as social or intel­lec­tual equals in white Amer­ica. This paper will focus on the back­grounds, work and inven­tions of three influ­en­tial African-American Inven­tors of the 19^th Cen­tury inven­tors: Lewis Latimer, Eli­jah McCoy and Granville Woods. It will address their inven­tions, the social and racial cli­mate at the time and how their race impacted their oppor­tu­ni­ties and edu­ca­tions.
Next time, their inventions.