Elijah McCoy, Lewis Latimer and Granville Woods: African-American Inventors of the 19th Century — Part 4 — Education as the Foundation of Invention

Eli­jah McCoy was the most edu­cated of the three. His par­ents, George and Mil­dred, both run­away slaves, fled to Canada from Ken­tucky. When the Cana­dian rebel­lions of 1837 broke out against Great Britain, George sided in the hos­til­i­ties with the British. After the Red River Rebel­lion, as it was called, was quashed by the Crown, George was given 160 acres of farm­land near Colch­ester, Ontario for his loy­alty and ser­vice. Eli­jah was born there on March 27, 1844, one of 12 chil­dren that George and Mil­dred had. When he was three his fam­ily moved back to the U.S., set­tling in Detroit, Michi­gan, and it was in nearby Ypsi­lanti that McCoy would do his invent­ing.

As a boy McCoy was fas­ci­nated with tools and machines, and when the oppor­tu­nity arose to be edu­cated about his inter­ests arose he jumped at it. At six­teen years old he trav­eled to Edin­burgh, Scot­land, to serve an appren­tice­ship in mechan­i­cal engi­neer­ing, and while he was there he won the cre­den­tials of a mas­ter mechanic and engi­neer. Inter­est­ingly though, upon fin­ish­ing his edu­ca­tion he returned to his home­town to find employ­ment as a mechan­i­cal engi­neer. He found the prej­u­dices against edu­cated blacks ran strong and beliefs that they were intel­lec­tu­ally infe­rior were wide­spread, lead­ing many poten­tial employ­ers to believe that McCoy couldn’t be as skilled as he claimed he was, and if he were, the whites that he might super­vise would prob­a­bly not take orders from a black man. Which is what lead him to take a job on the rail­road giv­ing him the expo­sure to engines and the ideas for improv­ing their lubri­ca­tion that he might not oth­er­wise have had.¹²

Granville Woods was Aus­tralian by birth and moved  and emi­grated to Mis­souri with his fam­ily in 1872 when he was 16. His school­ing was over­seas was mea­ger and upon emi­grat­ing he began work­ing as a fire­man – a job whose sole pur­pose was to fuel the fire­box of the engine to keep the steam lev­els high – with the Iron Moun­tain Rail­road. While the self-taught Woods con­tin­ued to teach him­self about elec­tric­ity, he worked a vari­ety of trans­porta­tion and indus­trial jobs. He did strive for more edu­ca­tion and occa­sion­ally man­aged to get pri­vate tutor­ing or take night courses in engi­neer­ing, but he never earned a degree.¹³

Lewis Howard Latimer was the son of run­away slaves. Born in Chelsea, Mass­a­chu­setts on Sep­tem­ber 4, 1848 to George and Rebecca Latimer who had fled his mas­ter in Vir­ginia for the safety of Tren­ton, New Jer­sey six years prior. When George’s mas­ter, James B. Gray arrived where the Latimers had set­tled in Boston to take them back to Vir­ginia, famous abo­li­tion­ist William Lloyd Gar­ri­son took up the cause. Even­tu­ally funds were raised to pay Gray $400 for George’s freedom.

From those begin­nings, Lewis had a min­i­mal school-based edu­ca­tion. Most of what he knew came from on-the-job train­ing and what he could pick up here and there. He even­tu­ally joined the Navy dur­ing the Civil War and after­ward he began work at Crosby Hal­stead and Gould where he learned most of the skills that he would later employ in his work: sketch­ing patent draw­ings.¹⁴

Next time, The Fruit of Their Labor