This article is a biweekly series that focuses on black men who changed the world with their inventions.
Garrett Morgan:
Garrett Morgan was the seventh of 11 children, born in Paris, Kentucky, on March 4, 1877, to Elizabeth Reed, his mother. She was of Indian and African descent and the daughter of a Baptist minister. His father, Sydney, a formerly enslaved person freed in 1863, was the son of John Hunt Morgan, a Confederate colonel.
Morgan moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, to look for work in his mid-teens, and found it as a handyman to a wealthy landowner. Despite only completing elementary school education, Morgan could pay for lessons from a private tutor.
Jobs at several sewing machine factories eventually captured his imagination and determined his future.
After learning the inner workings of the machines and how to fix them, Morgan finally obtained a patent for an improved sewing machine and opened his own repair business, which became a huge success.
Being the first Black man in Cleveland to own a car, Morgan worked on his mechanical skills and developed a friction drive clutch. He created a new traffic signal, one that had a warning light to warn drivers when they needed to stop. He quickly acquired a patent for this invention but eventually sold the rights to General Electric for $40,000.
The three-position traffic signal was only one of the numerous inventions of Garrett Morgan.
Alexander Miles:
Alexander Miles was an African-American inventor more popularly known for patenting his design for improving the automatically opening and closing elevator doors.
He was born near Circleville, Ohio, to the family of Michael Miles and Mary Pompy, on May 18, 1838. Later on, he moved to Waukesha, Wisconsin, where he worked as a barber throughout the 1860s. In 1870, while living in Winona, Minnesota, he met his future wife, Candace J. Dunlap, from New York City. After the birth of their daughter, Grace, the family moved again to Duluth, Minnesota, where his wife worked as a dressmaker.
Alexander Miles was a successful barber who opened his barbershop in St. Louis Hotel, a four-storey building. He also purchased a real estate office with his savings. As a result of his achievements in business, he got a spot as the first black member of the Duluth Chamber of Commerce.
After building a three-storey building known as the Miles block, Miles became inspired to work on elevator door mechanisms. Witnessing the risks associated with manual doors, he invented elevator doors that could automatically open and close. He was awarded U.S. Patent 371,207 on October 11, 1887.
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