Month: June 2010

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

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

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