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
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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.
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African-Americans at the end of the Civil War craved acceptance as a people and this hope was only partially reciprocated. Education in the late 19^th Century was either a short-lived moment in a person’s life or a multi-year luxury that few in the general populace could afford. Whites had an easier path to it, but African-Americans had an even harder road toward it. But it wasn’t for trying. Booker T. Washington, the famous proponent of education for freedmen in the post-Reconstruction South, founded the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute to help educate African-Americans. He realized that in modern society African-Americans would have to be educated, and educated well, in order to excel. It was a belief that was shared by many African-Americans at the time: that education could help set them on an equal footing with their white counterparts in both jobs and social stature.

Educational reform in the United States was just gaining momentum in the late 19^th century. Before that time educating enslaved African-Americans in the South was forbidden by law in many states, but in the North, where schools for African Americans did exist, they were generally housed in crowded buildings staffed by teachers of low q

ualifications and restricted to the knowledge of the teacher. African-American parents also grouped together to make private arrangements for schooling and often times hired their own teachers. Public schools did outnumber private ones, but the quality of educational services varied from school to school, with the quality of teaching depending on how much the parents were willing to spend to pay teachers.

In fact, many of the schools formed would hardly be recognized as such by modern standards. Elementary education was available to African-Americans, but higher, more specialized, educational services that would produce more respect among the already somewhat-doubting white class was harder to attain.

Due in part to this, illiteracy rates among African-Americans were tracked at a staggering 79.9% in 1870, the first year that such statistics were collected. With improvements in education this figure dropped by roughly 10% in each decade that followed underscoring the need for African-American education.¹¹

It’s surprising then that education seemed to be of little factor in the success of any of the black inventors mentioned. Of the three, only one was able to attain a college degree – McCoy. While, conversely the most successful of the bunch – Woods who was also known as the “Black Edison” – had only a meager elementary school education. They proved that the sky was the limit for what could be achieved with creativity and knowledge of your subject against the traditional thinking that formal education alone stood as the foundation for invention of thought.

Next time, Education as the Foundation of Invention

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.