A 2015 report conducted by the National Museum of African American History and Culture and Oberg Research found that while most teachers understand the importance of teaching Black history, only 8% or 9% of history classes in US schools are devoted to the subject. There are constant repetitions of the Black inventors and Black heroes who paved ways for our future today, but when you see them it’s usually the same names. I want to take it up a notch and introduce you to several popular Black heroes that literally changed the way America is as a country and made our lives a lot easier.
Elijah Mccoy (The Real Mccoy)
Elijah Mccoy changed the entire railroad system by inventing the Automatic Lubricator. Engines needed frequent lubrication each time the trains had to be stopped and started which was very inefficient. McCoy was convinced there was a better way and invented his automatic lubricator.
McCoy’s creation became a necessity on trains, but it never would have happened without an entirely different kind of railroad.
Mccoy was born in the 1840s where his parents escaped slavery using the Underground Railroad. He was born in Canada but they eventually settled in Michigan, USA. He ended up going to school in Scotland for Mechanical Engineering, but of course, when he returned to the states, they wouldn’t give him a job worth his abilities. Instead, they stuck him at the Michigan Central Railroad as an oiler and fire person. However, Black excellence will always stake its claim. He couldn’t help but to be great.
Herb Boyd, the author of Black Detroit: A People’s History of Self-Determination, calls McCoy “absolutely prolific,” noting that his work went beyond train lubrication, including one patent for a folding ironing board. Apparently, Mccoy had more than 50 patents to his name mostly related to the railway! When he was 72 years old, in 1916, he patented the “graphite lubricator” which was a mixture of graphite and oil that worked well in the period’s “superheater” locomotives, but didn’t create his own company to make some of his inventions until 1920. He has been honored in the National Inventors Hall of Fame, and a patent office in Detroit was named after him. His name is widely known for the popular phrase the “real McCoy”. The story is still unclear how it became so popular but some say that the phrase was common among other mechanical engineers that refused to use knock off oil lubricants and would ask “is that the real Mccoy?” Today, we use the phrase when we are referring to something as the real deal! Either way, Mccoy has graced this country with great inventions pioneering us through the years and giving us a head start on a better way of life today. Thank you Elijah!
Dr. Charles Drew
Charles Drew is a brilliant African American surgeon who helped pioneer a method that allowed blood to be stored for long periods of time and used in blood transfusions. Our blood bank systems might be operating a bit differently if at all if we hadn’t had this Black inventor!
Dr. Drew was born in 1904 and had four siblings. He was an athlete and decided to go to medical school when his sister died from tuberculosis. He earned a partial scholarship and graduated in 1926 from Amherst College in Massachusetts and spent two years as a Biology and Chemistry instructor at then-Morgan College in Baltimore.
Accepted to the McGill University Faculty of Medicine in Montreal, he graduated second in his class in 1933. He then became an instructor in Pathology at Howard University School of Medicine in Washington, D.C., promoted to Assistant Professor of Surgery and Chief surgical resident at Freedmen’s Hospital. Finally, at Howard University is where the mastermind began. Dr. Drew was completing his doctoral thesis, “Banked Blood,” just as World War II began in Europe. In 1940, in response to Great Britain’s desperate need for blood and plasma to treat military and civilian casualties, all of New York City’s leading hospitals, surgeons, and blood researchers asked him to direct the Blood for Britain project. It was a success!
However, as the US prepared for it’s participation in WWII in 1941, the American Red Cross asked Dr. Drew to direct the first Red Cross Blood Bank. He was in charge of providing blood to the U.S. Army and the Navy. Unfortunately, the U.S. showed it’s true colors and complicated things with it’s continued racism. The U.S. military policy at the time prohibited African Americans from donating blood, a policy that Dr. Drew publicly expressed was unscientific. Even when the policy was revised to let African Americans donate blood, it still prohibited giving blood from a non-white donor to white soldiers of the military. It was so much of a fight for Dr. Drew that he ended up leaving his position with the Red Cross in 1942.
Dr. Drew returned to Howard University as chair of surgery with a mission to train the next generation of African-American medical students, as it should be done. In 1942, he became the first Black surgeon to be named an examiner on the American Board of Surgery, and received the Spingarn Medal from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, honoring his contributions to human welfare. In 1946, he was elected to the International College of Surgeons, and a year later launched a movement to persuade the American Medical Association to admit Black members. Thank you Dr. Drew!
Alice Parker
I love a beautiful Black woman inventor story and I love it even more when it’s an invention I use all the time like central heating! Bye bye sitting by the fire to get warm, God created Alice Parker and aren’t we glad He did. Unfortunately for us, it will be a short story thanks to Parker receiving barely any recognition for her contribution to technology nor do we know that much about her life.
We do know that Parker was born in Morristown, New Jersey. She attended Howard University Academy, a high school located in Washington D.C., and was granted a certificate with honors in 1910. She was said to have grown tired of the cold New Jersey days and felt the fireplace was not effective enough for the entire home.
Natural gas was being used for a number of industrial heating applications in the early years of the 20th century, yet no one thought to consider it for home and business use. Parker discovered using a single source of heat, centrally located, to provide warmth via air pipes to a home. She submitted a design for a patent that illustrated a gas-fired “heating furnace” and the patent was granted to her on Dec. 23, 1919. ,The gas furnace concept she invented was never adopted exactly to her specifications, but it did resemble modern gas furnace models. It allowed people to customize temperatures in different rooms through a heat exchanger and a series of burners and ducts. It is important to remember that although some fireplaces did warm some homes, most of these homes got their heat from burning coal and firewood. Think of how inconvenient, expensive, time-consuming and dangerous it was. Homeowners had to constantly stock their furnaces and buy coal if they could afford it, or regularly chop their own firewood.
Parker had zero experience in that particular trade. She designed the furnace based on the idea that natural gas was a safer, more flexible and more efficient source of fuel than others being used at the time. In other words, she was a ‘shero’! Thank you Alice!
Otis Boykin
You may not find Otis Boykin in the history books but he is extremely popular in the medical field, with his large improvement to the pacemaker. He also made every day electronic devices, such as the television and computers, more efficient and affordable.
Boykin was an African-American inventor and engineer who had a special interest in resistors. He was born in Dallas, Texas, attended Fisk College in Nashville, Tenn., and continued his education at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. His mother died from heart failure when he was 1 year old prompting him to find a resistor that worked.
Resistors slow the flow of electricity, allowing a safe amount of electricity to move through a device. It could also provide tolerances as low as required and could withstand “relatively great accelerations and shocks and great temperature changes” without breaking the fine resistance wire or causing other detrimental effects.
Did you know that Boykin had his own company called Boykin-Fruth Inc.? He worked on all kinds of inventions specializing in electronics. His resistor was incorporated into a number of products, including guided missiles and IBM computers in the United States and overseas. In addition, a version of his resistor helped regulate the success of the pacemaker, which has helped to save and lengthen the lives of thousands of men and women around the world! Thank you Otis!
Garrett Morgan
While Garrett Morgan may be in the history books, you will mostly see him popularized for the traffic light signal. Morgan invented much more than that. He was another African American with multiple inventions to his name.
Morgan was born in Kentucky during the ,Reconstruction era, in 1877. His father was the mixed-race son of a slave and a Confederate colonel, John Hunt Morgan. His mother, half Indian and half Black, was the daughter of a Baptist minister. Morgan only had a sixth-grade education but that didn’t stop him from being a mechanical genius. He had his first career as a sewing machine mechanic which he later improved with one of his inventions.
He decided to open his own repair business which brought major success to him. In fact, while he was looking to solve a problem that dealt with the sewing machines and woolen fabric being scorched by the sewing machine, he somehow came up with a chemical solution to reduce friction created by the needle. This solution developed into a cream sold to African Americans. He established the G.A. Morgan Hair Refining Company! This invention alone made way for Morgan to fund the rest of his inventions.
His next invention was the breathing device, or “safety hood,” that provided a safer breathing experience in the presence of smoke, gases and other pollutants. ,In 1914, Morgan, secured a patent for his device, a canvas hood with two tubes. Part of the device held on the back filtered smoke outward, while cooling the air inside. It won awards and over 500 cities bought it. He sold the hoods to the U.S. Navy, and the Army used them in World War I. Can you guess who didn’t accept him? The good ol’ racist South. This didn’t stop Morgan, he ended up hiring a white actor to pose as the inventor during presentations of the breathing device and he would take up as the sidekick disguised as a Native American. Pure genius.
Lastly, there was an incident in 1916 where the city of Cleveland was drilling a new tunnel under Lake Erie for a fresh water supply. Workers hit a pocket of natural gas, which resulted in a huge explosion and trapped workers underground amidst suffocating noxious fumes and dust. Morgan literally took him and his brother, put on his famous mask and went down there to rescue the workers. They both ended up saving two lives and recovered four bodies before the rescue effort was cut short. Unfortunately for Morgan, he got a lot of publicity for this and once people found out that he was actually the Black inventor they put their money into they stopped supporting. Did you know that neither Morgan nor his brother were fully recognized for their heroic efforts until years later. However, we will always recognize Morgan for what he has done for America, our culture, and our history. Thank you Garrett!
Powered by WPeMatico
