Elijah McCoy, Lewis Latimer and Granville Woods: African-American Inventors of the 19th Century — Part 1 — Introduction

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.