Patents and Inventions

By: Paul Finkelman, Richard Newman

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

Patents and Inventions

Although they were often denied formal recognition for their innovations, black inventors created a notable body of achievement during the colonial and early national periods. Indeed, in a climate where African American intellect itself was consistently (and sometimes violently) denigrated, black inventors worked not only to create new products and ways of doing things but also to undercut negative stereotypes about black ability. In fact, African Americans have a long history of seeking patents for their intellectual property and inventions. Historians have only recently begun a new appraisal of the number and significance of inventions and patents sought by African-descended people in early America.

In January 1794 Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, two free black leaders in Philadelphia, received the first patent for a published work by an African American in the United States. The pamphlet, A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People during the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia, defended free blacks from harmful stereotypes leveled at African Americans aiding white Philadelphians during the city's famous yellow fever epidemic of 1793. The essay also attacked slavery in American society. The first African American patent holder for an invention was Thomas L. Jennings, a free black New Yorker and well-known reformer who worked in the tailoring and dry-cleaning trade. In 1821 he received a patent for a new dry-cleaning process.

In many cases, scholars have found, black innovators were not credited with their inventions or they did not seek official sanction for their products. As the historian Julie Winch shows in A Gentleman of Color, a biography of the black Philadelphian James Forten, even a successful African American merchant might refrain from seeking a patent in the early Republic. Forten, a sailmaker who purchased his shop from a white merchant in 1798, invented a sail-handling device but never sought an official patent from the government. Nevertheless, Forten's expert work made his sailmaking shop one of Philadelphia's most successful enterprises. Similarly, Benjamin Banneker never received a patent for any of his work. A freeborn African American mathemetician and surveyor who remains perhaps most famous for his almanacs, which were printed in Maryland between 1792 and 1797, Banneker constructed in 1751 what some scholars consider the first watch built in America. Like Forten and Banneker, other African American inventors used their proficiencies in certain crafts to develop new technologies. In the eighteenth century George Peake, a free black farmer who lived in Ohio, invented a manually operated gristmill. In 1834 Henry Blair, a free black man from Maryland, gained patent recognition for a device that aided in the planting of corn.

Black innovators who received little to no credit for their ideas were numerous. One notable example comes from Puritan New England, where, during the 1720s, Cotton Mather claimed to have learned about the effectiveness of smallpox inoculation from his slave, an African man named Onesimus. While many colonial New Englanders ridiculed Mather's insistence on the benefits of inoculation, George Washington later utilized its preventative application in the Continental army to combat smallpox. Few people remembered Mather's original accreditation to Onesimus.

Another example of unrecognized early black inventiveness is to be found in the realm of rice-production methodologies in the African-descended communities of South Carolina. Research has shown that rice growers in eighteenth-century South Carolina relied on the technical expertise of enslaved people, who themselves hailed from the rice-growing cultures of West Africa. Rice cultivation in North America dated to the period between the late 1600s and early 1700s, in both South Carolina and Georgia; slaveholders deployed knowledge garnered from enslaved people to harness the rich and valued rice crops known as Carolina Gold. Indeed, exploiting African knowledge systems helped Carolina masters create one of the wealthiest slaveholding groups in colonial America.

While such contributions of ingenuity on the part of slaves was never officially recorded, in comparing the tidal irrigation systems utilized in rice-growing cultures along the Gambia River in western Africa with those used in South Carolina, the technology historian Judith Carney concluded that Africans taught Europeans how to master the crop—from planting to irrigation of the land to the actual husking of the rice. To a certain extent, enslaved Africans used their rice-growing expertise strictly for their own benefit: their proficiency allowed them to bargain with masters for independence and self-sufficient activity. Even in the face of brutality, black inventiveness was put to productive use.

Although many white leaders and antiabolitionists sought to denigrate African American achievement in the early Republic, black leaders viewed African American inventiveness as a crucial component in their struggle for equality. Innovators like James Forten and Thomas Jennings used their earnings to fund abolitionist activity. More generally throughout early American history, from colonial-era South Carolina rice-growing cultures to early national figures such as Forten and Jennings, African American inventors often used the profits of their cutting-edge work for the benefit of the broader black community, whether free or enslaved. By the 1830s, when the first national black conventions were held and an interracial abolitionist movement was taking shape, both African American leaders and their white allies encouraged black inventors to more systematically collect evidence of and publicize their work in the cause of racial redemption.

Slaves and free blacks in the antebellum period worked as mechanics and blacksmiths. Some refined existing machinery, especially agricultural equipment like cotton gins. In the North many blacks worked in the maritime industries and not surprisingly, some invented new equipment. In the 1840s Lewis Temple invented a whaling harpoon, known as Temple's Toggle or the “Temple Iron.” The barbed head allowed the harpoon to both more easily penetrate the whale and lodge in its body. Temple added a wooden pin that broke off, allowing the harpoon head to twist and remain secure. Like many black inventors, Temple did not patent his design, and others made more money from his harpoon designs than he did.

In 1858 the U.S. patent office refused a patent to O. J. E. Stuart, whose slave Ned had invented a cotton scraper. The master claimed that he was entitled to the patent because “the master is the owner of fruits of the labor of the slave.” But the patent office did not see it that way, and refused to grant the patent. While unstated, it is entirely likely that the refusal was based on ideological assumptions and proslavery theory. If a slave could invent something worth patenting, then how could slavery be legitimatized on the grounds of the racial inferiority of the slave? The Confederacy was less concerned about these ideological inconsistencies, and during the Civil War passed laws to allow masters to patent the inventions of their slaves. Confederate president Jefferson Davis supported this law, in part because his brother Joseph Davis owned a slave who had invented a special propeller for ships navigating in shallow waters. Before the war the U.S. patent office had refused to grant a patent to Joseph Davis, just as it had refused to give one to O. J. E. Stuart.

The issue of slave inventors also came up in Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. In the novel George Harris, the husband of Eliza, invented a machine for hemp production. Rather than being praised for his creativity, George's master further mistreated him because the master could not accept that a slave could be an inventor. This situation was based on fact. As Stowe wrote in her book The Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853), “In regard to general intelligence, the reader will recollect that the writer stated it as a fact which she learned while on a journey through Kentucky, that a young coloured man invented a machine for cleaning hemp, like that alluded to in her story.”

With the end of slavery blacks were of course able to claim credit for their own talents and obtain patents. In 1894 the representative George Washington Murray, a black Congressman from South Carolina, read a list of ninety-two black inventors into the Congressional Record. This was published in the Record as “A partial list of patents granted by the United States for inventions by Afro-Americans.”

One of these was the inventor Jan Matzeigler, who in 1883 received a patent for his “Lasting Machine” for binding soles to shoes. Between 1888 and 1891 he received four other patents for his shoe-making machinery. He later sold his patents for $15,000 in stock in what became the United Shoe Machinery Corporation. Elijah McCoy was the Canadian-born son of fugitive slaves who returned to the United States in 1849, settling in Ypsilanti, Michigan. McCoy studied engineering in Edinburgh, Scotland, and returned to develop lubricating machinery for railroads and other engines. He received his first patent in 1872 and continued to patent lubricating machinery into the 1880s. His career continued until the eve of World War I, when he patented a graphite lubricator in 1915. The term “the real McCoy” may have entered American slang to designate that a machine was one of the first-rate products built by McCoy. Lewis Latimer, another inventor, was the son of the famous fugitive slave George Latimer, who escaped to Boston in the 1840s. Latimer attended school in Boston and sold the Liberator to earn money. He served in the U.S. Navy during the Civil War and then worked for a law firm specializing in patent work. In 1874 he received a patent for a railroad-car toilet and later obtained patents for electrical equipment. He worked with Thomas Edison and authored Incandescent Electrical Lighting, a Pratical Description of the Edison System in 1890. Granville T. Woods was also a pioneer in electronics, working out of Cincinnati, Ohio. He earned his first patent in 1883 for a telephone mouthpiece that vastly improved the one first invented by Alexander Graham Bell. By the time of his death in 1910 Woods held more than twenty-five patents for inventions that helped spur the development of the telephone, the telegraph, and electric streetcars and subways. At the end of the nineteenth century George Washington Carver graduated from Iowa State College (now Iowa State University) with a BA and an MA (in 1896). In the next century he would invent and develop numerous agricultural products and techniques while heading the agricultural department at Tuskegee University.

Black inventors were hindered throughout the nineteenth century by a lack of access to education, employment, and working capital. Nevertheless, a few slaves invented useful items and a number of African Americans contributed to the technological boom of the late nineteenth century. As slaves, black inventors undermined the racial theories of the proslavery scientists. As free men after the war, black inventors like Latimer, Woods, and McCoy became the living embodiment of what W. E. B. Du Bois called “the talented tenth.” By 1900 more than 200 African Americans had received patents for over 350 inventions. These included nine patents to George Washington Murray for agricultural equipment and twenty patents to Granville T. Woods. The “real McCoy” of black nineteenth-century inventors was indeed Elijah J. McCoy, who held twenty-six patents at the end of the century.

See also Abolitionism; Allen, Richard; American Revolution; Banneker, Benjamin; Civil War; Entrepreneurs; Forten, James; Free African Americans to 1828; Free African Americans in the Antebellum (North); Free African Americans in the Antebellum (South); Jones, Absalom; Mather, Cotton, and African Americans; New York; Ohio; Pennsylvania; Science; Slavery; South Carolina; and Stereotypes of African Americans; Washington, George, and African Americans.

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