Elijah McCoy, Lewis Latimer and Granville Woods: African-American Inventors of the 19th Century — Part 2 — The Inventions — Granville T. Woods

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.