You've heard
the claims before: Were it not for the genius and energy of African-American
inventors, we would all have to live without the traffic signal, the gas
mask, the light bulb filament, dozens of common household items and other
assorted technological contrivances that make our world
go 'round.
Many such beliefs originate from historical records of
patents issued to African Americans. The people who compile the records or
present them in popular form often fail to understand that hundreds or even
thousands of patented variations may exist for any type of invention. As a
result, the specific versions patented by the black inventors end up being
mistaken for the "firsts" of their general type.
Unfortunately some of
the mistakes have been creeping into mainstream books and websites, and
occasionally pop up in newspaper articles and TV segments especially during
Black History Month. There is a possibility, as the catalog of errors is
repeated, that the historical myths will eclipse the true history. Thus I
decided to publish here to put some records straight.
Each invention
below is listed with the supposed black originator beneath it along with the
year it was supposedly invented. This is followed by something about the real
origin of the invention, or at least an earlier instance of
it. -------------
Air Brake Granville Woods in 1904? No! In
1869, a 22-year-old George Westinghouse received US patent #88929 for an air
brake and in the same year organized the Westinghouse Air Brake Company. Many
of the 361 patents he accumulated during his career were for air
brake variations and improvements.
Air Conditioner Black invention?
NO! Willis Carrier built the first system to simultaneously control
the temperature and humidity of air. He received the first of many patents
in 1906 (U.S. patent #808897, for the "Apparatus for Treating Air"). In 1911
he published the formulae which became the scientific basis for A/C design,
and formed the Carrier Engineering Corporation in
1915.
Airship J.F. Pickering in 1900? NO! Henri Giffard invented
the powered navigable airship in 1852. The La France airship built by Charles
Renard and Arthur Krebs in 1884 featured an electric motor and improved
steering capabilities. In 1900 Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin's first
rigid-framed airship took to the air. Of the hundreds of inventors granted
patents for early airship designs and variations, few succeeded in building
or flying their craft. There doesn't appear to be any record of a "Pickering
Airship" ever getting off the ground.
Aviation Patent Database,
1799-1909
Automatic Transmission Richard Spikes in 1932? NO! The
first automatic-transmission automobile to go into production was made by the
Sturtevant brothers in 1904. US Patent #766551 was the first of several
patents on their system. Automatic transmission technology continued to
develop, spawning hundreds of patents and numerous experimental units; but
because of cost, reliability issues and lack of demand, several
decades passed before automatic-transmission vehicles became
widespread.
Bicycle Frame Isaac R. Johnson in 1899? NO! Comte Mede
de Sivrac and Karl von Sauerbronn built primitive versions of the bicycle in
1791 and 1816 respectively. The frame of John Starley's 1885 "safety bicycle"
was hardly distinguishable from that of a modern bicycle.
Blood
Bank Dr. Charles Drew in 1940? NO! Although Drew was a leading authority on
blood storage and transport, and led a major blood collection program during
World War II, he was not responsible for the first blood banks. 1932: The
first blood bank is established in a Leningrad hospital.
1937: Bernard
Fantus, director of therapeutics at the Cook County Hospital in Chicago,
establishes the first hospital blood bank in the United States. In creating a
hospital laboratory that can preserve and store donor blood, Fantus
originates the term "blood bank." Within a few years, hospital and community
blood banks begin to be established across the United States. Some of the
earliest are in San Francisco, New York, Miami, and Cincinnati.
source:
American Association of Blood Banks (www.aabb.org)
Nor was Drew the first
to separate plasma from whole blood. MORE...
Blood Transfusion Charles
Drew in the 20th century? NO! The long history of blood transfusion goes back
at least to the 1600s. One of the most important advances was Karl
Landsteiner's discovery of ABO blood groups in 1900, for which he won a Nobel
Prize thirty years later. See Highlights of Transfusion Medicine
History.
Cellular Phone Henry T. Sampson in 1971? NO! On July 6,
1971, Sampson and co-inventor George Miley received a patent on a "gamma
electric cell" that converts a gamma ray input into an electrical output
(Among the first to do that was Bernhard Gross, US patent #3122640, 1964).
What, you ask, does gamma radiation have to do with cellular communications
technology? The answer: nothing. Some multiculturalist pseudo-historian must
have seen the words "electric" and "cell" and thought "cell
phone."
The father of the cell phone is Martin Cooper who first
demonstrated the technology in 1973.
Clock, (First one built in
America) Benjamin Banneker in 1753? NO! Abel Cottey, a Quaker clockmaker
from Philadelphia, built a clock which is dated 1709 (source: Six Quaker
Clockmakers, by Edward C. Chandlee; Philadelphia, The Historical Society of
Pennsylvania, 1943). The historian Silvio Bedini found examples of early
clockmakers from Banneker's home state of Maryland:
Several watch and
clockmakers were already established in the colony prior to the time that
Banneker made the clock. In Annapolis alone there were at least four such
craftsmen prior to 1750. Among these may be mentioned John Batterson, a
watchmaker who moved to Annapolis in 1723; James Newberry, a watch and
clockmaker who advertised in the Maryland Gazette on July 20, 1748; John
Powell, a watch and clockmaker believed to have been indentured and to have
been working in 1745; and Powell's master, William Roberts.
Silvio
Bedini, The Life of Benjamin Banneker (Baltimore: Maryland
Historical Society, 1999)
Clothes Dryer George T. Sampson in
1892? NO! In earlier days, a "clothes dryer" simply meant a wooden rack or
frame on which one could hang clothes to dry, and that's exactly what is
shown in Sampson's patent #476416, dated 1892. As you might expect, wooden
frames for drying clothes go back long before 1892. In fact, the Subject
Matter Index of Patents Issued from the United States Patent Office from 1790
to 1873 Inclusive lists over three hundred patents with the title "clothes
drier" (usually spelled with an i) or variants of that name, and many more
similar devices under the title "clothes frame."
A Frenchman named
Pochon in 1799 built the first known rotating, tumbling type of clothes dryer
(World Almanac Book of Inventions). It was a crank-driven metal drum pierced
with ventilation holes and held over heat. The prototype for the modern
electric clothes dryer is usually credited to Ross Moore in the
1930s.
Dustpan Lloyd P. Ray in 1897? NO! The ultimate origin of the
dustpan is lost in the mists (dusts?) of time, but at least we know that US
patent #20811 for "Dust-pan" was granted to T.E. McNeill in 1858. In the US,
there were 164 or so dustpan patents prior to Lloyd Ray's. See the dustpan
patent list.
Egg Beater Willie Johnson in 1884? NO! The rotary
hand-crank egg beater with two intermeshed, counter-rotating whisks was
invented by Turner Williams of Providence, Rhode Island in 1870 (U.S. Patent
#103811, picture). It was an improvement on earlier rotary egg beaters that
had only one whisk.
Electric Trolley Did Granville Woods invent the
original electric trolley car, overhead trolley wire, and the wheel that
makes contact with the trolley wire, in 1888? NO, NO, and NO Dr. Werner
von Siemens demonstrated the "trolley" concept when he exhibited his electric
carriage, the Elektromote, near Berlin on April 29, 1882. The vehicle's two
electric motors collected power through contact wheels running atop a pair of
overhead wires. The earliest patentee of a trolley rail system in the United
States appears to be Eugene Cowles (#252193 in 1881), followed by Dr. Joseph
R. Finney (#268476 in 1882) who operated an experimental vehicle in
Allegheny, PA in the summer of 1882 (Scribner's Magazine, March 1888, p.316).
In early 1885, John C. Henry established in Kansas City, Missouri, what is
thought to be the first overhead-wire electric transit system to enter actual
service in the United States (New England Magazine, April 1891, p.192).
Belgian-born Charles van Depoele, who earned 240+ patents in electric railway
technology and other fields, set up trolley lines in several cities across
the U.S. by 1887. In February 1888, an electric street railway system
designed by Frank Sprague began operating in Richmond, Virginia. Sprague's
Richmond system became the lasting prototype for electric street rail lines
in the U.S.
Elevator Alexander Miles in 1887? NO! Miles was the
first to patent a self-closing shaft door? No. Steam-powered hoisting devices
were used in England by 1800. Elisha Graves Otis' 1853 "safety elevator"
prevented the car from falling if the cable broke, and thus paved the way for
the first commercial passenger elevator, installed in New York City's
Haughwout Department Store in 1857. The electric elevator first appeared in
Mannheim, Germany in 1878, built by the German firm of Siemens and Halske. A
self-closing shaft door was invented by J.W. Meaker in 1874 ("Improvement in
Self-closing Hatchways," U.S. Patent No. 147,853). See Elevator
Timeline
Fastest Computer Philip Emeagwali designed the world's
fastest computer, or world's fastest computer program, in 1989? No! The
Connection Machine -- the computer that Emeagwali used to program his "fast"
computation in 1989 -- was actually invented by Danny Hillis.
To
Emeagwali's credit, he did write a program that won a prize in
the Price/Performance category of the 1989 Gordon Bell competition
(for "price-performance ratio as measured in megaflop/s per dollar on a
genuine application"), but official records show that never in the prize's
existence did he win the Performance category for the fastest computational
speed. It turns out that he didn't really achieve the highest
price-performance ratio either... MORE...
Fiber Optics Black
invention? No! See Jeff Hecht's A Fiber-Optic Chronology.
Filament for
Light Bulb Lewis Latimer invented the carbon filament in 1881 or 1882?
NO! English chemist/physicist Joseph Swan (later Sir Joseph Swan)
experimented with a carbon-filament incandescent light all the way back in
1860, and by 1878 had developed a better design which he patented in Britain.
On the other side of the Atlantic, Thomas Edison developed a
successful carbon-filament bulb, receiving a patent for it in January 1880
(#223898), before he had any association whatsoever with Lewis Latimer. From
1880 onward, there were countless "improvements" and innovations of the
carbon filament by numerous inventors (Edison had over 50 patents for
such improvements). Latimer did get two filament-related patents in 1881
and 1882, but neither was among the most important innovations, nor is there
any indication that either were adopted outside the particular company for
which Latimer worked at the time.
Latimer also did not invent the
first screw base for the light bulb or the first book on electric
lighting.
Fire Escape Joseph Winters in 1878? NO! Winters' "fire
escape" was a wagon-mounted ladder. The first such contraption patented in
the U.S. was the work of William P. Withey, 1840 (US patent #1599). The fire
escape with a "lazy-tongs" type ladder, more similar to Winters' patent, was
pioneered by Hüttman and Kornelio in 1849 (US patent #6155). One of the first
fire escapes of any type was invented in 18th-centu ry England:
In
1784, Daniel Maseres, of England, invented a machine called a fire escape,
which, being fastened to the window, would enable anyone to descend to the
street without injury.
Butterworth, Growth of Industrial Art,
1888
By 1888 the U.S. had granted 1,099 patents on fire escapes of "many
forms, and of every possible material." (Ibid.)
Fire
Extinguisher Thomas J. Martin in 1872? NO! In 1813, British army captain
George Manby created the first known portable fire extinguisher: a
two-foot-tall copper cylinder that held 3 gallons of water and used
compressed air as a propellant.
One of the earliest extinguishers to use
a chemical-based extinguishing agent, and not just water, was invented in
1849 by the Englishman William Henry Phillips, who patented the device in
England and also in the United States (U.S. patent #7,269).
Fountain
Pen W.B. Purvis in 1890? NO! The first reference to what appears to be a
fountain pen is found in an Arabic text from 969 AD; little is known about
the pen's construction or reliability. A Frenchman named Bion designed the
oldest fountain pen that still survives, dated 1702. Subsequent advances
included John Scheffer's 1819 pen, possibly the first to be mass-produced;
John Jacob Parker's "self-filling" pen of 1832; and the famous Lewis Waterman
pen of 1884 (U.S. Patents #293545, #307735). Early History of the Fountain
Pen
Gas Mask Garrett A. Morgan in 1914? NO!!! The invention of the
gas mask predates Morgan's breathing device (which was not really even a gas
mask) by several decades. Protective masks that filtered out poisonous
chemicals from the air were constructed by the Scottish chemist John
Stenhouse in 1854 and the physicist John Tyndall in the 1870s, among many
other inventors prior to World War I. See The Invention of the Gas
Mask.
George Washington Carver Revolutionized Southern U.S.
agriculture and discovered over 300 new uses for the peanut? NO! Barry
Mackintosh, who served as bureau historian for the National Park Service,
refuted such overstatements made on Carver's behalf by demonstrating that (1)
the benefits of peanut-based agriculture were already well known prior to
Carver's research; (2) that the explosive growth in peanut production in
Southern agriculture actually preceded Carver's promotion of the crop; and
(3) that many if not most of Carver's "discoveries" were either unoriginal or
commercially valueless. See Mackintosh's article "George Washington Carver:
The Making of a Myth." It's a must-read.
Also see "George Washington
Carver and the Peanut: New Light on A Much Loved Myth." American Heritage,
1977, 28(5):66-73.
Golf Tee Dr. George Grant in 1899? NO! Two
Scots, William Bloxsom and Arthur Douglas, received the world's first patent
for a golf tee after filing an application with the British Patent Office in
1889. Their tee was a flat piece of rubber with a raised stud to prop up the
ball. The earliest recorded peg-style tee was the "Perfectum" tee, for which
an 1892 British patent was awarded to Percy Ellis of Surrey, England. The
modern all-wood golf tee, with funnel-shaped head, concave top, and narrow,
pointed stem, was introduced by William Lowell in 1922.
(Details,
pictures, source)
Hairbrush Lyda Newman in 1898? NO! An early U.S.
patent for a modern-looking hairbrush went to Hugh Rock in 1854 (U.S. Design
Patent no. D645), though surely there were hairbrushes long before there was
a US Patent Office. The claim that Lyda Newman's brush was the first with
"synthetic bristles" is probably wrong, as her patent mentions absolutely
nothing about synthetic bristles and is concerned only with a new way of
making the handle detachable from the head. Besides, a hair brush that
included "elastic wire teeth" in combination with natural bristles had
already been patented by Samuel Firey in 1870 (U.S., #106680). Nylon bristles
of course did not exist until after nylon was invented
in 1935.
Halogen Lamp Frederick Mosby? No. The original patent
for the tungsten halogen lamp (U.S. #2,883,571; April 21, 1959) is recorded
to Elmer G. Fridrich and Emmett H. Wiley of General Electric. The two had
built a working prototype as early as 1953. Fred Mosby was part of the GE
team charged with developing the prototype lamp into a marketable product,
but was not responsible for the original halogen lamp or the concept behind
it.
Handstamp William Purvis in 1883? NO! The earliest known postal
handstamp is credited to Henry Bishop, Postmaster General of Great Britain,
in the year 1661. The stamp imprinted the mail with a bisected circle
containing the month and the date. See "Bishop marks"
Heart
Surgery Dr. Daniel Hale Williams in 1893? NO! Williams did not perform
heart surgery as we normally think of it, since he repaired only the
pericardium (sac surrounding the heart muscle) but left the heart muscle
itself alone. Was Dr. Williams even the first to operate on the pericardium?
No. Two years earlier, Henry Dalton of St. Louis successfully stitched closed
his patient's pericardium in much the same way as Williams did. Many decades
before that, the Spaniard Francisco Romero performed surgical drainages of
the pericardium to treat cases of pericardial effusion. Baron Dominique-Jean
Larrey, chief surgeon of Napoleon's army, carried out similar operations
around the same time.
It was not until 1896 that Ludwig Rehn successfully
sutured not the mere pericardium but the actual heart muscle (myocardium) in
an operation that many historians mark as the true beginning of cardiac
surgery. Surgery on the open heart was pioneered in the 1950s by John Lewis,
C. Walton Lillehei (often called the "father of open heart surgery") and John
Gibbon (who invented the heart-lung machine).
(Details &
references)
Heating Furnace Alice Parker in 1919? NO! In the
hypocaust heating systems built by the ancient Romans, hot air from a furnace
circulated under the floor and up through channels inside the walls, thereby
distributing heat evenly around the building. One of the most famous heating
systems in recent centuries was the iron furnace stove known as the "Franklin
stove," named after its purported originator Benjamin Franklin around 1745
AD. The U.S. had issued over 4000 patents for heating stoves and furnaces by
1888 (Benjamin Butterworth, Growth of Industrial Art,
1888).
Helicopter Paul E. Williams in 1962? NO! Frenchman Paul
Cornu's helicopter (1907) was the first to leave the ground carrying its own
pilot, if only for a few seconds. Jacques Bréguet of France and Heinrich
Focke of Germany built working tandem-rotor helicopters in the 1930s. Igor
Sikorsky, responsible for many pioneering achievements, was the first to
successfully use the single main rotor and tail rotor design which became the
dominant configuration of today.
A History of Helicopter
Flight
Horseshoe O.E. Brown in 1892? NO! Some sources on the web,
if not ignorant enough to say Brown invented the first horseshoe ever, will
at least try to credit Brown for the first double or compound horseshoe made
of two layers: one permanently secured to the hoof, and one auxiliary layer
that can be removed and replaced whenever it becomes worn. However, in the US
there were already 39 earlier patents for horseshoes using that same concept.
The first of these was issued to J.B. Kendall of Boston in 1861, patent
#33709.
Ice Cream Augustus Jackson in 1832? No! Flavored ices
resembling sherbet were known in China in ancient times. In Europe,
sherbet-like concoctions evolved into ice cream by the 16th century, and
around 1660 or so, the Café Procope in Paris offered creamy frozen
dairy desserts to the public. The first written record of ice cream in the
New World comes from a letter written in 1700, attesting that Maryland
Governor William Bladen served the treat to his guests. In 1777, the New York
Gazette advertised the sale of ice cream by confectioner Philip Lenzi.
History of Ice Cream
Ironing Board Sarah Boone in 1892? NO! Of
the several hundred US patents on ironing boards granted prior to
Sarah Boone's, the first three went to William Vandenburg in 1858 (patents
#19390, #19883, #20231). The first American female patentee of an ironing
board is probably Sarah Mort of Dayton, Ohio, who received patent #57170 in
1866. In 1869, Henry Soggs of Columbus, Pennsylvania earned US patent #90966
for an ironing board resembling the modern type, with folding legs,
adjustable height, and a cover. Another nice example of a modern-looking
board was designed by J.H. Mallory in 1871, patent #120296.
MORE...
Laser Cataract Surgery Patricia Bath invented the first or
only laser device to treat cataracts in 1986? No Use of lasers to treat
cataracts in the eye began to develop in the mid 1970s. M.M. Krasnov of
Russia reported the first such procedure in 1975. One of the earliest patents
for laser cataract removal was issued to Francis L'Esperance in 1976. In
later years, a number of experimenters worked independently on laser devices
for removing cataracts, including Daniel Eichenbaum (U.S. patent 4,694,828,
filed April 21, 1986) whose work became the basis of the Paradigm PhotonT
device; and Jack Dodick, whose Dodick Laser PhotoLysis System eventually
became the first laser unit to win FDA approval for cataract removal in the
United States. Still, the majority of cataract surgeries continue to be
performed using ultrasound, not laser.
Lawn Mower John Burr in 1899?
NO! Edwin Budding of England invented the first reel-type lawn mower
(with blades arranged in a cylindrical pattern) and had it patented in
England in 1830. In 1868 the United States issued patent #73807 to Amariah M.
Hills of Connecticut, who went on to establish the Archimedean Lawn Mower Co.
in 1871. By 1888, the U.S. Patent Office had granted 138 patents for
lawn mowers (Butterworth, Growth of Industrial Art). Doubtlessly there were
even more by the time Burr got his patent in 1899.
Burr's variation of
lawn mower was not, as some claim, a "rotary blade" mower with a single
centrally mounted spinning blade. Instead, his patent #624749 shows yet
another new twist on the old reel mower, differing in only a few details with
Budding's original.
Lawn Sprinkler J. H. Smith in 1897? Elijah McCoy?
NO! The first U.S. patent with the title "lawn sprinkler" was issued to
J. Lessler of Buffalo, New York in 1871 (#121949). Early examples
of water-propelled, rotating lawn sprinklers were patented by J. Oswald in
1890 (#425340) and J. S. Woolsey in 1891 (#457099) among a gazillion
others.
Smith's patent shows just another rotating sprinkler, and McCoy's
1899 patent was for a turtle-shaped sprinkler.
Lubricator
(Automatic) Elijah McCoy in 1872? NO! The phrase "Real McCoy" derives from
Elijah? Nope The oil cup, which automatically delivers a steady trickle of
oil to machine parts while the machine is running, predates McCoy's career; a
description of one appears in the May 6, 1848 issue of Scientific American.
The automatic "displacement lubricator" for steam engines was developed in
1860 by John Ramsbottom of England, and greatly improved upon in 1862 by
fellow Englishman James Roscoe. The first "hydrostatic" automatic
lubricator appeared in 1870 or 1871.
Variants of the phrase Real McCoy
appear in Scottish literature dating back to at least 1852 -- well before
Elijah McCoy started designing lubricators.
More: The not-so-real
McCoy
Mailbox (letter drop box) P. Downing invented the street letter
drop box in 1891? NO! George Becket invented the private mailbox in 1892?
NO! The US Postal Service says that "Street boxes for mail collection began
to appear in large [U.S.] cities by 1858." They appeared in Europe
even earlier, according to historian Laurin Zilliacus:
"Mail boxes as
we understand them first appeared on the streets of Belgian towns in 1848. In
Paris they came two years later, while the English received their 'pillar
boxes' in 1855."
Laurin Zilliacus, Mail for the World, pg. 178 (New York,
J. Day Co., 1953)
In the same book (p.178), "Private mail boxes were
invented in the United States in about 1860." Eventually, letter drop
boxes came equipped with inner lids to prevent miscreants from rummaging
through the mail pile. The first of many U.S. patents for such a purpose was
granted in 1860 to John North of Middletown, Connecticut (U.S. Pat.
#27466).
Mop Thomas W. Stewart in 1893? NO! Mops go back a long,
long way before 1893. Just how long, is hard to determine. Restricting our
view to the modern era, we find that the United States issued its first mop
patent (#241) in 1837 to Jacob Howe, called "Construction of Mop-Heads and
the Mode of Securing them upon Handles." One of the first patented mops with
a built-in wringer was the one H. & J. Morton invented in 1859 (U.S.
#24049).
The mop specified in Stewart's patent #499402 has a
lever-operated clamp to hold the mop strands; the lever is not a wringing
mechanism as erroneously reported on certain websites. Other inventors had
already patented mops with lever-operated clamps, one of the first being
Greenleaf Stackpole in 1869 (US Pat. #89803).
Paper Punch
(hand-held) Charles Brooks in 1893? NO! Was it the first with a hinged
receptacle to catch the "chads"? No! The first numbered U.S. patent for a
hand-held hole punch was #636, issued to Solyman Merrick in 1836. Robert
James Kellett earned the first two US patents for a chad-catching hole punch,
in 1867 (patent #65090) and 1868 (#79232).
Peanut Butter George
Washington Carver after 1903? NO! The earliest documented evidence for peanut
butter as we know it comes from U.S. patent #306727 issued to a Marcellus
Gilmore Edson of Montreal, Quebec in 1884, for a process of grinding roasted
peanuts between heated surfaces until the peanuts were "ground into a fluid
or semi-fluid state." As the product cooled, it set into what Edson described
as "a consistency like that of butter, lard, or ointment." It seems that
Edson saw no other use for his "peanut-paste" than as flavoring for candy.
Around 1890, George A. Bayle Jr. also devised a process for preparing peanut
butter and sold the product out of barrels. In 1897, J. H. Kellogg, of cereal
fame, received US patent #580787 for his "Process of Preparing Nutmeal" which
ground peanuts into a "pasty adhesive substance" that Kellogg called
"nut-butter."
Pencil Sharpener John Lee Love in 1897? NO! Bernard
Lassimone of Limoges, France, invented one of the earliest sharpeners, for
which he received French patent number 2444 in 1828. Another Frenchman,
Therry des Estwaux, in 1847 developed a manual sharpener similar to some that
are still used today. The parent of the 20th century hand-cranked sharpener
was patented by G. F. Ballou in 1896 (US #556709) and marketed by the A.B.
Dick Company as the "Planetary Pencil Pointer." As the user held the pencil
stationary and turned the crank, twin milling cutters revolved around the tip
of the pencil and shaved it into a point.
Love's patent #594114 was a
variation on a different kind of sharpener, in which one would crank the
pencil itself around in a stirring motion. An earlier device of a similar
type was devised in 1888 by G.H. Courson (patent #388533), and sold under the
name "President Pencil Sharpener."
Here are several other examples of
19th century pencil sharpeners: Early Mechanical Pencil
Sharpeners Mechanical Pencil Sharpener Gallery ~ 1884-1899
Permanent
Wave Machine (for perming hair) Marjorie Joyner in 1928? NO! That would be
Charles Nestle in 1906.
Postmarking and Canceling Machine William
Barry in 1897? NO! Try Pearson Hill of England, in 1857. Hill's machine
marked the postage stamp with vertical lines and postmark date. By 1892, US
post offices were using several brands of machines that could cancel,
postmark, count and stack in the range of 20,000 to 40,000 pieces of mail per
hour (Marshall Cushing, Story of Our Post Office, Boston: A. M. Thayer &
co., 1892, pp.189-191).
Printing Press W.A. Lavalette in 1878?
NO! Movable-type printing originated in East Asia. It appeared in Europe
around 1455, when Johann Gutenberg adapted the screw press used in other
trades such as winemaking and combined it with type-metal alloy characters
and oil-based printing ink. Major innovations after Gutenberg include
the cylinder printing press (c. 1811) by Frederick Koenig and Andreas Bauer,
the rotary press (1846) by Richard M. Hoe, and the web press (1865) by
William Bullock.
The U.S. had granted 3,268 patents on printing
apparatus by the year 1888 (Butterworth, Growth of Industrial
Art).
Improvements After Gutenberg
Propeller for Ship George
Tolivar? NO! John Stevens constructed a boat with twin steam-powered screw
propellers in 1804 in the first known application of a screw propeller for
marine propulsion. Other important pioneers in the early 1800s included Sir
Francis Pettit Smith of England, and Swedish-born ship designer John Ericsson
(U.S. patent #588) who later designed the USS Monitor.
Railroad Car
Coupler (Automatic) Andrew Beard in 1897? NO! US Civil War veteran Eli H.
Janney in 1873 (US patent no. #138405) invented the automatic railroad car
coupler that replaced the dangerous link-and-pin coupler and became the basis
for standard coupler design through the remainder of the millenium. It became
known as the "knuckle coupler" or "Janney coupler." Andrew Beard's variant of
Janney's knuckle-style coupler was just one of approximately eight thousand
coupler variations patented by 1900. (See a history of the automatic coupler
and also The Janney Coupler.)
Railway Telegraph (induction) Granville
Woods in 1887? No The first inventor to patent an induction telegraphy system
for communicating to and from moving trains was William W. Smith (US.
Pat. #247127, Sept 13, 1881). The first to attain practical success was
Lucius Phelps, who patented his railway telegraph in 1884 (#307984)
and successfully demonstrated it on the New York, New Haven & Hartford
railroad in January of 1885. The feat was hailed in Scientific American, Feb.
21, 1885. By that time, Granville Woods hadn't even applied for a patent
yet, nor had he built a working railway telegraph. Phelps remained the leader
in the development of the technology, and by the end of 1887 already held
14 patents on his system. Phelps eventually joined forces with Thomas Edison
-- who had been developing his own "grasshopper telegraph" for trains --
and together they constructed, on the Lehigh Valley railroad, the only
train telegraph ever known to have been put to commercial use. Phelps and
Edison challenged one of Granville Woods' patents and accused him of stealing
ideas from the 1885 Scientific American article, but the courts ruled twice
that Woods had developed his own plan independently.
The Lehigh Valley
telegraph, although a technical success, apparently fulfilled no public need,
and the whole field of train telegraphy soon fizzled out. There is no
evidence that any commercial railway telegraph based on Woods' patents was
ever built.
"Real McCoy," origin of phrase see Lubricator,
Automatic. Refrigerator T. Elkins in 1879? John Stanard in 1891?
NO! Oliver Evans proposed a mechanical refrigerator based on a
vapor-compression cycle in 1805 and Jacob Perkins had a working machine built
in 1834. Dr. John Gorrie created an air-cycle refrigeration system around
1844, which he installed in a Florida hospital. In the 1850s Alexander
Twining in the U.S. and James Harrison in Australia used mechanical
refrigeration to produce ice on a commercial scale. Around the same time, the
Carré brothers of France led the development of the first absorption
refrigeration systems. A more detailed timeline
John Stanard's
"refrigerator" patent describes not a mechanical refrigeration unit, but
rather a version of the old icebox -- an insulated cabinet into which ice is
placed to cool the interior. Thomas Elkins' "refrigerator" is a modification
of an even older idea, going back to ancient times, and he even acknowledges
in his patent #221222 that "I am aware that chilling substances inclosed
within a porous box or jar by wetting its outer surface is an old and
well-known process."
Rotary Engine Andrew Beard in 1892? NO! The
Subject Matter Index of Patents Issued from the United States Patent Office
from 1790 to 1873 Inclusive lists 394 "Rotary Engine" patents from 1810-1873.
The Wankel engine, a rotary combustion engine with a four-stroke cycle, dates
from 1953. History of the Rotary Engine from 1588 Onward
Screw Socket for
Light Bulb Lewis Latimer? NO! The earliest evidence for a light bulb screw
base design is a drawing in a Thomas Edison notebook dated Sept. 11, 1880. It
is not the work of Latimer, though:
"Edison's long-time associates,
Edward H. Johnson and John Ott, were principally responsible for designing
fixtures in the fall of 1880. Their work resulted in the screw socket and
base very much like those widely used today."
R. Friedel and P.
Israel, Edison's Electric Light: Biography of an Invention, (New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1986).
The 1880 sketch of the screw socket is
reproduced in the book cited above.
Smallpox Vaccine Onesimus the
slave in 1721? NO! Onesimus knew of variolation, an early inoculation
technique practiced in many areas of the world before the discovery of
vaccination. English physician Edward Jenner created the smallpox vaccine in
1796 after finding that the relatively innocuous cowpox virus would build
immunity against the deadly smallpox. His discovery led to the eventual
eradication of endemic smallpox throughout the world. Vaccination differs
from the primitive inoculation method known as variolation, which involved
the deliberate transfer of live smallpox from an infected individual to
the healthy and usually produced milder symptoms than if the disease was
caught "naturally." Variolation not only was risky to the patient but,
more importantly, failed to prevent the disease from
spreading.
Smokestack for Locomotives L. Bell in 1871? NO! Even the
first steam locomotives, such as the one built by Richard Trevithick in 1804,
were equipped with smokestacks. Later smokestacks featured wire netting to
prevent hazardous sparks from escaping. Page 115 of John H. White Jr.'s
American Locomotives: An Engineering History, 1830-1880 (1997 edition)
displays a composite picture showing 57 different types of spark-arresting
smokestacks devised before 1860.
Steam Boiler Furnace Granville Woods
in 1884? No! There can be no steam engine without a boiler to make steam;
therefore steam boilers are as old as the steam engine itself. The Subject
Matter Index of Patents Issued from the United States Patent Office from 1790
to 1873 Inclusive lists several hundred variations and improvements to the
steam boiler, including the revolutionary "water-tube boiler" patented in
1867 by American inventors George Herman Babcock and Stephen
Wilcox.
Street Sweeper Charles Brooks in 1896? NO! Brooks' patent
was for a modified version of a common type of street sweeper cart that had
long been known, with a rotary brush that swept refuse onto an elevator belt
and into a trash bin. In the United States, street sweepers started being
patented in the 1840s, and by 1900 the Patent Office had issued about 300
patents for such machines. MORE...
Supercharger for Automobiles Joseph
Gammel? NO! In 1885, Gottlieb Daimler received a German patent for
supercharging an internal combustion engine. Louis Renault patented a
centrifugal supercharger in France in 1902. The first successful supercharged
racecar, or at least one of the first, was built by Lee Chadwick of
Pottstown, Pennsylvania in 1908 and reached a speed of 100 miles per hour.
History of Supercharging
"Third rail" (for transmitting power to
electric railways/subways) Granville Woods in 1897 or 1901? NO!!! Woods
did design a third-rail system and get a patent for it (in 1901), but so did
many other inventors before him, including Thomas Edison in 1882 (US Pat.
#263132); in fact, the technology was already two decades old before Woods
supposedly "invented" it. The originator of the concept may have been Werner
von Siemens, who used an electrified third rail (laid between the two track
rails) to supply power to his experimental electric locomotive at a Berlin
exhibition in 1879. Further development by Siemens' company led to the
world's first public electric rail system in Lichterfelde, Germany in 1881.
In the US, English-born Leo Daft used a third rail to electrify the Baltimore
& Hampden lines in 1885. The first electrically-powered subway trains,
which debuted in London in early October, 1890, likewise drew current from a
third rail. MORE...
Toilet; also, Railroad Car Toilet T. Elkins
invented the first toilet in 1897? Lewis Latimer invented the first toilet
for railroad cars? No, and no... The Minoans of Crete are said to have
invented a flush toilet thousands of years ago; however, there is probably no
direct ancestral relationship between it and the modern one that evolved
primarily in England starting in 1596. In that year, Sir John Harrington
devised a flushing device for his godmother Queen Elizabeth. In 1775
Alexander Cummings patented a toilet in which some water remained after each
flush, thereby supressing odors from below. The "water closet" continued to
evolve, and in 1885, Thomas Twyford provided us with a single-piece ceramic
toilet similar to the one we know today. Link: Who Invented the
Toilet?
As for the railroad car toilet, William E. Marsh Jr. of New
Jersey took out US patent #95597 for "Improvement in Water-closets for
Railroad Cars" five years prior to Latimer's 1874 patent with the same title.
The text of Marsh's patent specification suggests that railroad-car water
closets, i.e., toilets, were already in use:
"In the closets or
privies of railroad cars, the cold and wind, especially while the train is in
motion, are very disagreeable... My invention is to remove these
objectionable features...."
W.Marsh, US patent #95597,
1869
Traffic Signal Garrett A. Morgan in 1923? NO! The first
known traffic signal, designed by JP Knight, appeared in London in 1868 near
the Houses of Parliament. Some other notable early signals are Lester Wire's
red-and-green electric light signals installed in Salt Lake City circa 1912;
James Hoge's traffic light (U.S. patent #1,251,666) installed in Cleveland by
the American Traffic Signal Company in 1914; and William Potts' 4-way
red-yellow-green traffic lights introduced in Detroit beginning in 1920. New
York City traffic towers began flashing red, yellow, and green signals also
in 1920.
Garrett Morgan's cross-shaped, crank-operated signal was not
among the first few dozen patented traffic signals; nor was it "automatic" as
is sometimes claimed; nor did it play any significant part in the development
of the modern traffic light; nor is there any real evidence that it was ever
put into widespread use. See Inventing History: Garrett Morgan and the
Traffic Signal.
Tricycle M.A. Cherry in 1886? NO! In Germany in
the year 1680 or thereabouts, paraplegic watchmaker Stephan Farffler built
his own tricycle at 22 years of age. He designed it to be pedaled with the
hands, for obvious reasons. History of the tricycle.
Typewriter L.S.
Burridge & N.R. Marshman in 1885? NO! Henry Mill, an English engineer,
was the first person to patent the basic idea of the typewriter in 1714. The
first working typewriter known to have actually been built was the work of
Pellegrino Turri of Italy in 1808. Americans C. L. Sholes and C. Glidden
patented the familiar QWERTY keyboard in 1868 and brought it to market in
1873. In 1878 change-case keys were added that enabled the typing of both
capital and small letters.
A more extensive chronology, with pictures:
Typewriter History
Washington D.C. city plan Benjamin Banneker?
NO! Pierre L'Enfant created the layout of Washington D.C. Banneker
assisted Andrew Ellicott in the survey of the D.C. territory, but played no
direct role in the planning of the city. The story of Banneker reconstructing
the city design from memory after L'Enfant ran away with the plans (with
the implication that Washington D.C. would not exist today if not for
Banneker) has been debunked by historians. MORE...