All posts by

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.

The three inven­tors of focus didn’t have many advan­tages from life in gen­eral. Cer­tainly not what you would expect from men who went on to be ground­break­ing inven­tors. Two were the chil­dren of escaped slaves, the third of mixed race at a time when this was entirely socially unac­cept­able. How­ever, despite what their par­ents were able to pro­vide for them, each man lever­aged his ideas and intel­lect to spur progress and invent things that would change the world for the better.

Eli­jah McCoy
Eli­jah McCoy’s great inven­tion, the one that would secure his name in the Amer­i­can lex­i­con, was some­thing that solved a com­mon prob­lem among all crews of trains – lubri­cat­ing engine parts. In 1870 McCoy took a job with the Michi­gan Cen­tral Rail­road as a fire­man – part of his duties included oil­ing the engine. Crews would often have to stop their loco­mo­tives, some­time for hours on end, and oil the engine to pre­vent over­heat­ing. This caused pas­sen­ger and mail delays and stretched long loco­mo­tive travel times even longer. ³

McCoy thought of a way to erad­i­cate this prob­lem. As he said in his patent appli­ca­tion, in flow­ery lan­guage, “To all whom it may con­cern: Be it known that I, ELIJAH MCCOY, of the city of Ypsi­lanti, in the county of Washt­e­naw and the state of Michi­gan, have invented cer­tain new and use­ful Improve­ments in Lubri­ca­tors; and I do hereby declare that the fol­low­ing is a full, clear, and exact descrip­tion thereof, ref­er­ence being had to the accom­pa­ny­ing draw­ing and to the let­ters of ref­er­ence marked thereon, which form a part of this specification.

“The nature of my inven­tion con­sists in the con­struc­tion and arrange­ment of a lubri­ca­tor for steam-cylinders, as will be here­inafter more fully set forth.”

McCoy then set about explain­ing his incred­i­bly sim­ple but rev­o­lu­tion­ary device: A cov­ered cup, con­tain­ing lubri­cat­ing oil, with a hol­low stem at the bot­tom that had a valve that would be forced upward as steam pres­sure exerted force on the valve. When the steam opened the valve lubri­cat­ing oil would drip out of the cup, dis­pens­ing oil to the engine parts requir­ing the oil.⁴

McCoy took a prob­lem that had plagued engi­neers for decades and solved it with a device so sim­ple yet so invalu­able that com­peti­tors began to copy his inven­tion, lead­ing dis­cern­ing peo­ple with a want for the true arti­cle to ask for “the Real McCoy”.⁵

As a 1903 The Col­ored Amer­i­can put it in an arti­cle about African-American inventors –

“At the head of the list stands the name of Eli­jah McCoy, of Detroit. He has suc­ceeded in plac­ing his lubri­ca­tors on many of the steam-car and steam­boat engines in the North­west, and also on some of the Trans-Atlantic steam­ers. And these are said to net him a hand­some roy­alty.”⁶