Goode, Sarah E.

Source:

 African American National Biography

Goode, Sarah E.

(c. 1850s–early 1900s),

inventor and entrepreneur, blazed a path for black female inventors, yet little is known of her early life. Neither her parents' names nor her exact date or place of birth are known one biographer indicates that she was born in the 1850s and grew up in slavery. After the Civil War ended and former slaves in the South were emancipated, Goode, like thousands of African Americans, made her way north, taking up residence in Chicago by the early 1880s. In Chicago, she owned and operated a furniture store, and her entrepreneurial endeavors led to her become the first African American woman to receive a patent from the United States Patent Office. On 14 July 1885 Goode received her patent for a “Folding Cabinet Bed,” comparable to modern sofa or hideaway beds. The first of five black women to patent new inventions in the nineteenth century, she was a pioneer, and her efforts inspired other women and African Americans to pursue patents and take control over their creative contributions to American culture.

As did so many blacks of the time, Goode left the-South in an effort to escape discrimination and violence and to build a better future for themselves and their families. Arriving in Chicago, she recognized the growing market for furniture as new arrivals found employment, rented apartments, and began to purchase items for making empty rooms into homes. Responding to this market, Goode set up her own furniture store, purchasing furniture wholesale from local manufacturers and selling it to customers moving into Chicago's ethnic neighborhoods.

At this time, Chicago, like most American urban centers, was a segregated city. Each ethnic group, whether Irish, Italian, or African American, was confined to a particular area of the city, and individuals within those ethnic groups tended not to live outside designated areas, even when they worked in other parts of the city. This form of segregated housing was particularly stringent for African Americans. City officials, real estate agents and agencies, and the white community worked cooperatively to prevent blacks from renting apartments or buying homes outside of the black section of the city. As more and more blacks arrived in Chicago and found themselves limited to living within a restricted segment of the city, conditions became more crowded and monthly rents continued to rise.

Goode's Folding Cabinet Bed was an invention designed specifically for the needs of people moving into apartments and homes with limited space and increasingly crowded conditions. Her customers needed high-quality furniture that was also flexible in application. Goode designed a piece of furniture that could function as a cabinet or desk during the day and be converted into a bed at night. The cabinet Goode designed looked like “an antique rolltop desk” (Sullivan, 13–16), with pockets and shelves for organizing correspondence and storing important papers. The desk could also be used as a table and, at night, as an extra bed. “It was the perfect solution for anyone who had limited living space. It was functional and inexpensive” (Sullivan, 13–14).

Goode filed her patent application on 12 November 1883. The patent application included a model of her Folding Cabinet Bed, drawings indicating the design and how to construct the item, and a description of her new invention. According to Goode's patent application, the purpose of her invention was:

"first, to provide a folding bed of novel construction, adapted, when folded together, to form a desk suitable for office or general use; second, to provide for counterbalancing the weight of the folding sections of the bed, so that they may be easily raised or lowered in folding or unfolding the bed; third, to provide for holding the hinged or folding sections securely in place when the bed is unfolded, and fourth, to provide an automatic auxiliary support for the bedding at the middle when the bed is unfolded. (U.S. Patent #322,177)"

Through her entrepreneurial founding of a furniture store and her invention and patenting of a folding cabinet bed, Sarah Goode made a memorable contribution to American society and culture. Overcoming barriers presented by racism and sexism, she proved that legal and economic restrictions faced by entrepreneurial blacks and women could be breached. As the first black woman to receive a patent, she paved the way for other creative and innovative black women who would seek patents for their inventions in the coming years. Her success was followed by Miriam E. Benjamin, who patented her so-called Gong and Signal Chair for Hotels (a call button on the chair allowed guests to summon waiters) in 1888, and Anna M. Mangin, who received a patent for a pastry fork just a few months before Sarah Boone received her patent for an improved ironing board in 1892. By 1900, five African American women had patented their new inventions, and by the mid-twentieth century, black female inventors had contributed inventions ranging from a fruit press to heat regulators for furnaces to new hair-beauty techniques to torpedo discharge devices. Women, Goode among them, found creative ways to respond to the needs of their businesses, their communities, and the shifting consumer markets of the nineteenth century when they invented new technologies or improved on existing ones.

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