This is the final week and final part of our biweekly series that focuses on black men who changed the world with their inventions.
Granville woods
Holding over 50 patents in the USA, Granville T Woods was a prominent inventor and electrical engineer between 1884 and 1903.
He was born in Columbus, Ohio, on April 23, 1856. He left school at the age of 10 to start work at a mechanic shop. He developed a fascination with railroad equipment and began to focus all of his spare time and attention on mastering electrical engineering.
In 1876, when he was 20, he trained in electrical and mechanical engineering for two years in a technical college. Afterwards, he worked on a British steamer which allowed him to travel the world.
He finally moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, where he formed his company, the Woods Electric Company.
He got his first patent in 1884, but his most important invention that allowed communication between moving trains and train depots, the Synchronous Multiplex Railway Telegraph, was developed in 1887.
In 1888, he developed another system for conducting overhead electricity, which helped to power locomotives and in 1889, he filed his first patent for an improved steam boiler furnace.
Woods won the legal claim Thomas Edison filed against him for being the pioneer founder of the multiplex telegraph. This made Edison offer him an important position in his company in New York. Woods, however, declined the offer.
He died in 1910 in Cincinnati at the age of 54.
Philip Emeagwali
Also known as the Bill Gates of Africa, Philip Emeagwali was born in 1954 in Nigeria. He dropped out of school at 14 due to financial constraints.
This prompted the switch to home lessons. His father taught him till he could solve 100 math problems in one hour.
When he was 17, he got a scholarship to Oregon State University, where he earned a BS in mathematics. He also earned three other degrees – a PhD in Scientific computing from the University of Michigan and two Masters degrees from George Washington University.
In 1989, he used 65,000 processors to invent the world’s fastest the computer, which performs computations at 3.1 billion calculations per second, emulating the bees’ honeycomb construction.
Being one of the most famous African-American inventors of the 20th century, Dr Emeagwali has won the Gordon Bell Prize – the Nobel Prize for computation. His computers are being used to forecast the weather and predict the likelihood and effects of future global warming.
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