Elijah McCoy, Lewis Latimer and Granville Woods: African-American Inventors of the 19th Century — Part 5 — The Fruit of Their Labor

While McCoy’s inven­tions earned mil­lions of dol­lars in profit, lit­tle of that money found its way into his pock­ets. Because he lacked the finan­cial back­ing to man­u­fac­ture his lubri­ca­tors him­self in large num­bers he sold many of his patent rights to investors. In return for this he was given only small amounts that allowed him to con­tinue his research. McCoy was awarded at least 72 patents dur­ing his long life­time but retained own­er­ship of only a few of them. Per­son­ally, he had hap­pi­ness mar­ried to his wife Mary Eleanor for 50 years. At the end of his life McCoy he suf­fered from hyper­ten­sion and senile demen­tia. He died in an infir­mary in Eloise, Michi­gan, on Octo­ber 10, 1929.¹⁵

Woods remained an inde­pen­dent inven­tor his entire life, always remain­ing out­side of the tech­no­log­i­cal main­stream of Bell and Edi­son. The never end­ing scourge of his life became hav­ing to con­stantly defend his patents in court. As peo­ple of the time were always invent­ing it was nat­ural that sev­eral peo­ple could come up with the same idea at roughly the same time. Because of this, the major­ity of Woods’ money went to fight­ing legal dis­putes. After years of being des­ti­tute and pen­ni­less he suf­fered a stroke on Jan­u­ary 30, 1910 at Harlem Hos­pi­tal in New York City – killing him at the young age of 53. Despite his great suc­cess as an inven­tor and amass­ing over 60 patents in total, he had lit­tle to show for it. His sim­ple ground-level head­stone in East Elmhurst, New York reads “Granville T. Woods, Esq, 1856–1910, Elec­tri­cian — Inven­tor.”¹⁶

Latimer under­stood incan­des­cent light in ways that few other men did, enough so that Thomas Edi­son him­self asked him to work for him and help defend Edison’s patents against com­peti­tors. Later in life Latimer worked as a drafts­man and an expert wit­ness in patent lit­i­ga­tion on elec­tric lights. He mar­ried Mary Wil­son on Decem­ber 10, 1873. They had two daugh­ters, Emma and Louise. In 1918 Latimer was asked to join the Edi­son Pio­neers, a group of dis­tin­guished men who had par­tic­i­pated in the early years of the elec­tric light indus­try. Mem­ber­ship in this group rep­re­sented the high­est honor to indi­vid­u­als in the elec­tri­cal field, and he was one of the orig­i­nal 28 char­ter mem­bers, all of whom had worked with Edi­son prior to 1885. In addi­tion to this he vol­un­teered his time to help the com­mu­nity as well as an accom­plished poet, author, musi­cian and artist. He died at the age of 80.¹⁷

Next time, How They Made a Dif­fer­ence and Conclusion