This is the second week of our May biweekly series that focuses on black men who changed the world with their inventions.
David crosthwait
Responsible for creating heating systems for more significant buildings. David Crosthwait Jr. Was born on May 27, 1898, in Nashville, Tennessee.
His father a biology and chemistry teacher and the first principal of Nashville’s first African American high school. The family moved to Kansas City, Missouri.
David was encouraged to pursue Engineering from a young age by his parents and teachers, who gave him challenging homework and experiments. After graduating from high school, he received a full scholarship to Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana. He graduated top of his class in 1913 and received a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering.
He got a job in Dunham company and had to Iowa, where he designed, installed, and diagnosed faulty heating systems. As a result of his exceptional work, he rose through company ranks and was promoted to supervisor.
Between the 1920s and 1930s, David Crosthwait invented a vacuum pump, boiler, and thermostat control to ensure more effective heating systems for more significant buildings.
While he’s famed for creating the heating systems for the Rockefeller Center and New York’s Radio City Music Hall, his Inventions in air conditioning, ventilation and heat transfer systems are numerous, and he holds quite a lot of patents in the field.
After his retirement in 1970, David Crosthwait taught at Purdue University. He died on February 25, 1976.
Henry Sampson
Henry T. Sampson, born on April 22, 1934, was an inventor, a film historian and an African American engineer who invented the gamma electric cell in 1972. This device could generate auxiliary power from the shielding of a nuclear reactor.
His parents, Henry T. Sampson Sr. and Esther B. (Ellis) Sampson, encouraged his interest in science. He graduated from high school in 1951, attended Morehouse College in Atlanta, and then transferred to Purdue University, where he received a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering in 1956.
He was the first African American in the United States to earn a PhD in nuclear engineering. From 1962 until 1964, he worked with the United States Navy. He also worked at the Aerospace Corporation in El Segundo, California, where he led an engineering staff to develop and operate several space satellites.
He was awarded numerous patents. He also had great success as a film historian, and in 2011, Sampson donated his considerable collection of historical film memorabilia to Jackson State University, where his father had been Dean.
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