Stupid Foreigners

Black Inventors: Part Two of Two

jhameia:

racismschool:

Continued…

How many of these black inventors have you heard of?

• Dr. Henry Sampson co-invented and co-patented the gamma electric cell in 1968, which produced stable high voltage output and current. He also holds three patents concerning solid rocket motors and one on the direct conversion of nuclear energy into electricity.
• The son of escaped slaves from Kentucky, Eijah McCoy was born in Canada and educated in Scotland.  Settling in Detroit, Michigan, he invented a type of lubricator for steam engines (patented 1872) and established his own manufacturing company.  During his lifetime he acquired 57 patents.
• Born the son of a French planter and a slave in New Orleans, Norbert Rillieux was educated in France. Returning to the U.S., he developed an evaporator for refining sugar, which he patented in 1846. Rillieux’s evaporation technique is still used in the sugar industry and in the manufacture of soap and other products.
• Otis Boykin’s most noteworthy invention was an electrical mechanism, created in 1955, as a regulating unit for the heart pacemaker. Boykin also invented a type of resistor (an electric circuit element) commonly in use today in radios, computers, and television sets.
• Born in Nashville, TN, David Crosthwait, Jr. was an expert in on heating, ventilation, and air conditioning; he designed the hearing system for Radio City Music Hall in New York. During his lifetime he received some 40 U.S. patents relating to HVAC systems.
• Garrett Augustus Morgan invented a smoke hood in 1916 that he used to rescue several men trapped by an explosion in tunnels under Lake Erie. This invention was later refined by the U.S. Army into the gas mask, which was used to protect soldiers from chlorine fumes during World War I. He also invented an early version of a traffic signal that featured automated STOP and GO signs. «Hello this!
• Benjamin Bradley, a slave, was employed at a printing office and later at the Annapolis Naval Academy.  In the 1840s he developed a steam engine for a war ship. Unable to patent his work, he sold it and used the proceeds to purchase his freedom.
• Louis Latimer was the only African American engineer/scientist member of the elite Edison Pioneers research and development organization. Until Latimer’s process for making carbon filament, Edison’s light bulbs would burn only for a few minutes. Latimer’s filament burned for hours.

Not an invention but an interesting theory proven:

• Walter S. McAfee is a mathematician and physicist that first calculated the speed of the moon. On January 10, 1946 a radar pulse was transmitted towards the moon. Two and a half seconds later, they received a faint signal, proving that transmissions from earth could cross the vast distances of outer space.

I read about Norbert Rillieux! In NK Jemisin’s Effluent Engine! I wish I’d known about this historical tidbit; I could have put it into my MA thesis. When I next re-read The Effluent Engine I shall keep this in mind. 

(via cosmopolitan-fascist)