I bet every WPI student is familiar with the exploits of such great inventors like Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison. What about the exploits of other such great inventors like Garret A. Morgan, Jan E. Matzeliger, George Washington Carver, just to name a few. Hmmm, sound like foreign names; but they aren't. These are names of some Black inventors, who have a daily impact on your life in some fashion, and ironically, none of them are in the National Hall of Fame. Some of the products of their genius include: shoes, sugar, ice cream, the traffic light, the electric lamp, and Door Guard, which is a bullet resistant Plexiglas cage used in banks.
George Washington Carver (1864-1943), an agricultural scientist, devoted his life to research projects connected primarily with southern agriculture. The products he derived from the peanut and the soybean revolutionized the economy of the South by liberating from an excessive dependence on cotton.
From the peanut, he derived 300 products; From the sweet potato 100 different products. He revolutionized the southern agricultural economy by showing how these many products could be made from the peanut. By 1938, peanuts had become a $200 million industry and a chief product of Alabama.
Garret A. Morgan (1877-1963), whose valued invention was the "gas inhalator". The gas inhalator was first acknowledged during a successful rescue operation of several men trapped by a tunnel explosion in the Cleveland Waterworks, some 200 feet below the surface of Lake Erie. During the emergency, Morgan, his brother, and two other volunteers - all wearing inhalators - were the only men able to descend into the smoky, gas filled tunnel, and save several workers form asphyxiation.
In 1923, orders for the Morgan Inhalator soon began to pour into Cleveland from fire companies all over the nation, but as soon as Morgan's racial identity became known, the nation and the world did not beat a path to Garret Morgan's door, and therefore his orders were canceled. During World War I, the Morgan Inhalator was transformed into a gas mask used by combat troops.
Born in Paris, Kentucky, Morgan moved to Cleveland at an early age. His first invention was an improvement on the sewing machine which he sold for $150. In 1923, having established his reputation with the gas inhalator, he was able to command a price of $1400 from General Electric Company for his automatic traffic signal.
Morgan died in Cleveland, the city which had awarded him a gold medal for his devotion to public safety.
Some other great scientist and inventors include: Charles Drew (1904-1950), a physician; David N Crosthwait Jr. (1898-1976), an engineer; David L. Wood; an electric engineer; Otis Boykin, an inventor; George E Carruthers, a physicist; Beatrice Kenner; Benjamin Banneker (1731-1806), an inventor, mathematician, almanac-maker; and the list goes on and on.
Despite racism and discrimination, black inventors and scientist, male and female, have enriched the lives of all Americans with their creativity and ingenuity.
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