Development of Technology, African Americans and the

In the last half of the twentieth century, technology in all its facets—the discovery and expansion of underlying scientific principles, their application, and the development of new fields of endeavor using these principles and products—came to the fore as the driving force in the global economy. Nowhere has that been more evident than in the United States, the apex of the modern technological society.

It is often lamented that African Americans are being left behind by the surging technological revolution. Indeed, Emerge, the black newsmagazine, has cautioned that blacks are in danger of becoming “road kill on the information highway.” The perception that African Americans are not latching onto this revolution presupposes, however, that blacks are not a part of and did not contribute to the development of this innovative era.

But this perception now, as it was in the past, is not accurate, in light of three factors. First, this is not the first era driven by technological development, only the most recent. Blacks, from the ancient Egyptians to the industrial and information revolutions, have been intimately involved in all such periods of innovation. Second, blacks have contributed to technological advances in society even during periods of the worst educational, social, and economic constraints. One of the most significant advances in chemistry during the Industrial Revolution resulted from the work of a black engineer in Louisiana during the period of slavery. Finally, in this most recent era, the expansion of American higher education following World War II (1939–1945) coupled with the dismantling of the most obtrusive educational barriers during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s produced a growing flood of technologically trained men and women of color remarkable in the variety and breadth of their achievements. The influx of blacks into the fields of mathematics, the sciences, and computer technology allowed African Americans to make many of the key contributions driving this latest age of technology.

Innovation in the Nineteenth Century

As the Industrial Revolution reached the United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth and centuries, black inventors made technological contributions that opened up entire fields of endeavor. The most significant of these innovators was Norbert Rillieux.

Chemical Engineering

. Norbert Rillieux, the son of the French owner of a Louisiana sugar plantation and a black woman, presumably one of his slaves, attended the L'école Centrale in Paris, France. In 1830 he became the youngest professor in the school's Department of Applied Mechanics, specializing in the new science of steam technology. After returning to Louisiana, Rillieux, using principles of thermodynamics, patented a multiple-effect vacuum pan evaporator in 1843 that revolutionized sugar refining and turned sugar from a luxury item into an everyday staple of the masses. His one-step process for breaking down sugarcane into its constituent components also opened the field of modern commercial chemistry. His refining process is still in use; its analogue in modern chemistry is the catalytic-cracking process used to break down crude petroleum.

Railroads

. Steam-powered rail transportation was introduced in the United States in 1830, and the power of steam locomotives drove the nation's western expansion. But trains could not be safely scheduled with any frequency until 1887, when African American electrical and mechanical engineer Granville T. Woods solved the problem of communication with crews in moving trains with his invention of the induction telegraph. American inventor Thomas Edison tried to claim credit for the device but lost in court. Woods went on to patent an electromagnetic railway brake and other devices now found in safe, modern mass-transit systems.

African American engineer Elijah McCoy studied steam technology at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. He returned to the United States in the early 1860s, but could find work only as a railroad fireman because of his race. Nevertheless, he went on to develop an automatic lubricating system that vastly increased the efficiency of machinery, such as railroad engines. He patented his invention in 1872. His lubricating cup made it possible for steam engines and factory equipment to run continuously without having to be periodically dismantled and lubricated with animal grease.

Electricity

. African American inventor Lewis Howard Latimer was one of the few engineers to work with both Edison and Alexander Graham Bell, the American inventor of the telephone. Latimer's role in the development of electric light filaments and telephone improvements in the 1870s and 1880s is generally acknowledged. But lesser known is the fact that Latimer was chief engineer and developer of the first central-office electric power plant, in which power was generated in a large, centrally located plant and distributed to individual users by a vast network of wires. He built the wiring system and power boosters that brought electricity to New York City; London, England; Baltimore, Maryland; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Toronto, Ontario, before the turn of the twentieth century.

Post–World War II

Following World War II, the GI Bill, which provided higher education funding for former soldiers, propelled a surge of African Americans to college. This surge prompted five historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) to open engineering departments, joining Howard University, which opened the first black engineering school in 1911.

Growing Number of Graduates

. In 1960 approximately 22 percent of blacks had completed high school and 3 percent had completed college. By 1996 those figures had risen to about 75 percent for black high school graduates and 13 percent for college graduates. Many of these graduates entered the field of technology, enrolling in accredited engineering programs at nine HBCUs—Howard, Hampton, Morgan State, North Carolina Agricultural and Technical, Prairie View Agricultural and Mechanical (A&M), Southern, Tennessee State, and Tuskegee universities, and the joint program at Florida A&M and Florida State universities. Smaller programs at other HBCUs—such as the civil engineering department at Alabama A&M and the joint engineering program between the Georgia Institute of Technology and Clark Atlanta University—contributed to the growth in black engineering talent. Collectively, these schools turn out about a third of the 3,000 black engineers graduating annually and a similar number of computer scientists. By 1995 there were about 20,000 black students in all the nation's engineering programs, and in 1997 blacks accounted for 3.9 percent of the nation's 2 million engineers, and 7.5 percent of the 1.5 million computer scientists and mathematicians. Blacks made up another 5.1 percent of the nation's half million natural scientists.

Space Exploration

. These men and women were not spectators to the technological revolution of the twentieth century. From their ranks, in fact, came many of the key developments. Arguably the most visible symbol of the dawn of the modern technological age was the space race of the 1960s. The drive to safely place humans on the moon and return them to earth has generally been perceived as a technological feat of white men. The truth is somewhat different, however. There were scores of black men and women who made key contributions to that national endeavor, including three in particular, Gilbert B. Chapman II, Robert Shurney, and Katherine Johnson.

Chapman graduated from high school in 1953 and joined the fledgling National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), operating supersonic wind tunnels to test designs and propulsion systems. In 1959 he began two years in the United States Air Force as a fuels specialist. He returned to NASA during the Mercury program (1961–1963), leading a team analyzing cooling agents to find the least corrosive compound that could be safely pumped through the skin of the astronauts' capsule after reentry. When it was time to go to the moon, later in the 1960s, NASA turned to Chapman to lead the redesign of the nozzles of the Saturn V rocket engines to find the most effective way to mix the fuel and liquid oxygen to prevent flameout. Chapman also developed a system of emission spectrographic analysis that enabled NASA scientists to determine levels of elements in a light ray to within four parts per million. The analysis was used to test alloys that could withstand the stresses of reentry. From 1977 through the 1990s, Chapman worked as an automotive engineering executive, first for the Ford Motor Company and then for the Chrysler Corporation (now Daimler Chrysler).

The major gap in the training of America's first astronauts was finding a way for them to learn to work in weightless conditions. Underwater training was not sufficient, since the astronauts could still orient themselves vertically. Solving that problem was the project of Robert Shurney, a mathematician at Alabama A&M. Shurney theorized that a plane flying in a particular parabolic arc could simulate weightlessness for short periods of time at the top of the curve. He was given a modified KC-135 cargo plane, which he turned into a lab at the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. He developed the series of training flights that is still used to condition astronauts to the disorientation of weightlessness and teach them to work under these unusual conditions. By the time the Apollo Moon project concluded in 1972, Shurney had logged more hours in weightlessness than all the astronauts combined.

During the Moon flights, it was up to NASA Mission Control specialists to know where the spacecraft was at all times relative to the gravitational tugs of earth, the sun, and the moon and to tell the crew when to fire rockets for attitude changes or for reentry. This function was particularly critical on the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission in 1970, which was crippled by an explosion early in the flight. With part of its fuel and life-support systems destroyed, the craft had to be guided along a narrow, zero-tolerance trajectory on a slingshot orbit of the moon and back to a splashdown on Earth. NASA's human “computer” for those missions, before mechanical devices were developed to perform the role, was Katherine Johnson, a West Virginia State University mathematician who coauthored the earliest reports on plotting spacecraft trajectories, calculating orbital flights in relation to points on earth, and locating orbiting craft.

Manufacturing and Design

. African Americans excelled in other fields as well. In 1962 Temple University graduate James West was codiscoverer of the principles leading to the foil electret microphone, the basis for more than 90 percent of the microphones used today. In his later years, West was honored for adapting his discovery for use by surgeons in blood pressure sensing.

African Americans have been in the forefront of the development of computer-driven design and manufacturing systems. Computer scientist Dixie Tryan Garr, a 1975 graduate of Grambling State University, was codeveloper of the programming environment that enables desktop computers to take design information and material specifications and use them to run a complete manufacturing operation. Garr, then at Texas Instruments, with her associate Fred Wedemir, described in a 1985 paper the integration of three kinds of electronic control systems. One of these kinds of control systems uses programmable controllers, equivalent to switches and relays, which run discrete applications such as milling machines, lathes, or drills at consistent levels of precision. A second kind consists of distributed control systems, which replace pneumatic controllers or stand-alone computers to handle processes requiring continuous control, such as papermaking. The third is process computer systems, which could take over for factory engineers, running entire assembly lines or chemical processing plants.

Garr and Wedemir showed it was possible to produce an environment encompassing these three key systems. Their innovation was the foundation of the Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and Computer-Aided Manufacturing (CAM) processes, which revolutionized manufacturing and helped propel American industry to the forefront of world production.

In Seattle, Washington, African American engineer Walt Braithwaite pioneered the use of CAD/CAM techniques for the Boeing Company. Braithwaite came to the aircraft manufacturer in 1966 with a background in computing, engineering, and machine shop operations. The firm was just beginning to develop an infrastructure for numerically controlled programming, which transforms engineering designs from drawings into their mathematical definitions and commands a machine to make the designated parts.

The difficulty for a firm like Boeing was that it had engineers and designers using different computer systems to make varying parts for its jets from locations around the world. Braithwaite developed the Initial Graphics Exchange Specification (IGES), which allowed disparate CAD/CAM systems to communicate. Boeing bet on Braithwaite's system for the development of the Boeing 777, and it worked so well the firm was able to design the commercial craft in record time, cutting out whole testing regimes en route to its introduction into service in 1995.

Polymer chemistry, as an industry, originated in the nineteenth century, but it really took off in the latter half of the twentieth century. One of the most prolific discoverers of new plastics and uses for polymer products was Arnold Stancel, a graduate of Harlem High School. He graduated from City College of New York in 1958 and became the first African American to earn a Ph.D. degree in chemical engineering, four years later, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Stancel joined the Mobil Oil Company in 1962 as a chemical researcher and developed plastics that revolutionized consumer packaging, cut costs in plumbing supplies, and supported the development of fiber-optic communications. His key discoveries at Mobil include a precursor of polyester fiber and the manufacturing process for polybutylene, from which plastic pipe is made. Stancel's polyethylene-making process became dominant throughout the world. During the 1970s, as the first black vice president of the oil giant, he aggressively promoted the use of the petroleum-based plastic film that replaced cellophane in the packaging of consumer goods.

The most complex and lethal war machine ever devised is the nuclear attack submarine, which is capable of silent running, detecting enemy vessels 5,000 km (3,000 mi) away, and carrying 240 atomic warheads on 24 missiles. During the 1980s and 1990s the dominant undersea vessel was the Los Angeles class submarine of the United States. The chief designer of this billion-dollar submarine and the man in charge of its construction was Rear Admiral Osie Coombs, a graduate of Prairie View A&M, an HBCU in Texas. Admiral Coombs, who also built missile submarines, also was chief designer of the Los Angeles class' successor, the Seawolf class.

The senior construction project engineer for these $4-billion boats is Marion Hall, a black woman who took over the project in 1989—just eight years after graduating from Southern University and A&M College—and delivered the first vessel in 1997. The Seawolf is the most complex, heaviest-armed, quietest-running submarine in the world.

Computing and Communications

. One of the most important milestones in the evolution of the modern computer era was the advent of the IBM personal computer (PC) in 1981. At the heart of the development of IBM's original PC, and every IBM personal computer product since then, including the RS/6000 Massive Parallel Processing workstation systems, has been Mark Edward Dean. Dean is an IBM fellow who became director of the company's Austin Research Center in Texas in 1997.

Dean, who holds three of IBM's nine original personal computer patents, was a key designer of the original PC. He then wrote the logic that became the heart of the succeeding generation of PCs, the AT. Dean remained the technical lead designer on IBM's computers into the 1990s, with his skills being particularly critical to the development of the Power PC series of products. For the Power PC, Dean created what became known as the Common Hardware Reference Platform (CHRP), an open industry standard for Power PC systems that required an architecture flexible enough to accommodate the needs of various IBM divisions as well as of external vendors such as Canon, Apple, Motorola, and Toshiba. By 1996 Dean held more than twenty IBM patents. IBM, in recognition of his importance to their continuing prominence in the information field, selected him to be an IBM fellow in 1995. With the appointment, Dean became one of fifty active fellows out of 200,000 IBM employees worldwide and the first African American so honored.

Leroy Jones came out of Howard University's electrical engineering program in 1977, just as Tandy's TRS-80, the Commodore Pet, and the Apple IIe were reshaping the public's idea of what a computer could do. Five years later, he was one of 30 founding engineers of an upstart company called Compaq Computer Corporation. IBM had just released its first PC, and Compaq's founders thought there was an opportunity in the development of portable computers. Jones showed the group that by offering a portable with exact compatibility with IBM's open architecture, which made the system specifications for the PC publicly available to outside producers, their product would be able to run all of the software being written for the industry giant. Compaq went on to become a runaway success.

Motorola became a world leader in portable communications systems through its STX series of products. These are the small, digital products with simultaneous capabilities for use as cellular phones; private, two-way radio dispatch communicators; connections to public telephones or paging systems covering the full VHF or UHF bandwidths; messaging units; and mobile conference-call centers capable of connecting up to thirty different groups.

At the heart of these systems is the Virtual Radio Interface Standard (VRIS), the architecture Motorola has employed since 1989. The VRIS allows for programming flexibility. The patent holder on this system is Marc S. Desruisseaux, who began as an engineer at Motorola in 1988 and is one of the world's experts on radio software. The architecture designed by Desruisseaux is flexible enough to be used as a standard by digital cellular designers around the globe and is the basis for the development of all Motorola radio products.

Much of the modern wizardry associated with Hollywood was made possible by Marc R. Hannah, a native of Chicago, Illinois, who earned a degree in electrical engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1977 and went to work for Bell Laboratories. Bell sent Hannah to Stanford University, where he studied under Jim Clark. Clark invented the geometry engine, a graphics processor that could perform sophisticated work independently of a computer's central processing unit. Hannah reinvented the geometry engine to run five times faster and developed a companion, the image engine, which worked extremely quickly and ushered in a new era of three-dimensional modeling.

Hannah and Clark left Stanford in 1981 to found Silicon Graphics. Two years later, Hannah returned to Stanford to complete his doctorate and developed the Silicon Graphics Iris GT graphic architecture, which used an array of image engines, each handling specific tasks and working in parallel, to process pixels at a sustained rate of eighty million per second. This innovation landed Silicon Graphics a motion-picture role generating the morphing in the movie Terminator 2 (1991).

This is but a small sample of the quiet contributions blacks have made to launching and sustaining the technological revolution that has driven the world economy during the last half of the twentieth century. There is simply no area of technological development and implementation in which African Americans did not play a significant role.

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