Lewis Latimer

The audio and transcript are from the University of Houston's School of Engineering's site

Latimer House was the home of African-American inventor, electrical pioneer and civil rights voice, Lewis Howard Latimer from 1903 until his death in 1928. Latimer and his wife purchased this house on Holly Avenue in 1903. It remained in the family until his daughter Louise's death in 1963. Threatened with demolition, the House was moved to Leavitt Field in 1888 where today is serves as a museum.
The son of escaped slaves, Latimer was born in 1848. After serving in the Union Navy during the civil War, he taught himself mechanical drawing and quickly rose to become chief drastman at a Boston patent attorney's firm. There he executed the drawings for Alexander Graham Bell's telephone. Soon, Latimer's talent earned him a position at the United States Electric Light Company. In 1879, he invented the carbon filament and patented several improvements to incadescent lightbulb. In 1885, Latimer met Thomas Edison and was named chief engineer and patent investigator of edison Electric Light Company.
Today, we meet an electric lighting pioneer. The University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.
A battle is going on in New York City. A pretty 2½-story house in Flushing is scheduled to be torn down. It's one of those nice old gingerbread Victorian affairs. The people fighting its demolition want to see it made into an historic memorial to black scientists and engineers -- and especially to Lewis Latimer, who lived his last twenty years in the house.
Latimer was born in 1848 in Boston. His father had escaped from slavery in Virginia. Latimer went to work doing odd jobs when he was 13. At the age of 15 he joined the Union Navy for the rest of the Civil War. When he was 17 he became an office boy for a firm of patent attorneys.
Latimer had the sort of omnivorous mind that keeps finding things to chew upon. When people in the office weren't looking, he wrote down titles of drafting texts. Then he went off to find cheap copies at used bookstores. He taught himself drafting and was soon making patent drawings for the firm. In fact he made the patent drawings for Alexander Graham Bell's new telephone.
But Latimer wasn't content to draw other people's inventions. In 1879 he went to work for Hiram Maxim at the American Electric Light Company. That was the year of Edison's first light-bulb patent. In 1880 Latimer provided Maxim with an improved incandescent filament. Maxim responded by making Latimer his chief electrical engineer. He put him in charge of installing plants and electrical lighting systems -- both here and in England.
In 1884, after he'd patented several lighting improvements, Latimer was hired away by the man he so greatly admired -- by Thomas Edison. Six years later Latimer published the first book on these wonderful new lights -- titled Incandescent Electric Lighting.
Latimer lived until 1928 -- until he was 80. And he did everything. He wrote poetry and music, he worked for civil rights, he painted, and he taught English to immigrants. At one point, he wrote:
Keep in touch with the world;
The days that are ours,
Are fleeting ...
Not a bad thought. Lewis Latimer is telling us we have to stay in the ring. We have to use our time and abilities. That's certainly what he did. He started out as a boy with nothing but his brain and a fine natural optimism. And he made superb use of them.

Lewis H. Latimer House Museum
34-41 137th Street, Flushing, NY 11354, (718) 961-8585
Hours: By appointment. Directions: Subway: Subway #7 to Main Street Roosevelt. Take Q25 to Linden Place and 35th Ave

Elijah McCoy: The Real McCoy

I found an audio biography of Elijah McCoy on the University of Houston's School of Engineering's site and I combined it with McCoy images for the above slide show movie.
The site comes with the audio's narration

Today, the inventor of an engine lubricator changes the English language. The University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.
Elijah McCoy's parents were slaves who used the underground railway to escape from Kentucky into Canada. Elijah was born there in 1843. His father did well in Canada, and he was able to send Elijah off to college in Scotland. Five years later, Elijah McCoy returned as a trained engineer.
But prospects weren't good for black engineers in Canada then -- during the Civil War. The best job he could get was work as a railroad engine fireman in Michigan. But he was made of the stuff that could turn that kind of adversity into profit.
In the mid 19th century, steam-engine lubrication was a difficult proposition. It required a lot of starting and stopping. It was a nuisance job that ate up a lot of time, and the engine was in danger any time oiling was neglected.
McCoy began experimenting with automatic lubricators. The trick was to create a mechanism with a large reservoir that fed oil into the engine one drip at a time. He patented his first lubricator in 1872 and quickly followed it with five more improvements.
McCoy's lubricators were successful precisely because he understood the problem from both sides -- he was a trained engineer, and he'd worked for years in direct contact with machinery. Today, lubricators are commonplace items. You'll find them in any engine. They're one of the invisible necessities that make the engines of our ingenuity run.
At first, white railway engineers called McCoy's new lubricators "nigger oil cups," but not for long. These new oiling devices were too effective -- they made life so much simpler. Pretty soon McCoy's competitors were copying his designs. Pretty soon those same people began asking if a given lubricator was a copy or if it was "the real McCoy." Pretty soon appreciation triumphed over racism, and a new expression was added to the English language.
Elijah McCoy filed his 45th patent in 1915 when he was 72. By then engines were running at much higher temperatures, and lubrication had become increasingly difficult. He invented a graphite/oil lubricator and then formed a company to produce it. McCoy went into old age proud, active, and alert. He lived to the age of 86.
Few of us remember this fine engineer and inventor today, but he permanently changed America in two ways. He left steam engine technology much better than he found it. And he was the real McCoy who wrote his name where none of us will ever forget it.

Black Inventors: Patricia Bath, George Washington Carver, Lewis Latimer, Elijah McCoy

These are the inventors who the kids from the last post were referring to. I never knew about Dr. Bath. Here's a biography of her which I found at a site with comprehensive information on black inventors:

When Patricia Era Bath was born on November 4, 1942, she could have succumbed to the pressures and stresses associated with growing up in Harlem, New York. With the uncertainty present because of World War II and the challenges for members of Black communities in the 1940's, one might little expect that a top flight scientist would emerge from their midst. Patricia Bath, however, saw only excitement and opportunity in her future, sentiments instilled by her parents. Her father, Rupert, was well-educated and an eclectic spirit. He was the first Black motorman for the New York City subway system, served as a merchant seaman, traveling abroad and wrote a newspaper column. Her mother Gladys, was the descendant of African slaves and Cherokee Native Americans. She worked as a housewife and domestic, saving money for her children's education. Rupert was able to tell his daughter stories about his travels around the world, deepening her curiosity about people in other countries and their struggles. Her mother encouraged her to read constantly and broadened Patricia's interest in science by buying her a chemistry set. With the direction and encouragement offered by her parents, Patricia quickly proved worthy of their efforts.
Bath was enrolled in Charles Evans Hughes High School in New York where she served as the editor of the school's science paper. In 1959, she was selected from a vast number of students across the country for a summer program at Yeshiva University (New York City) sponsored by the National Science Foundation. Only 16 years old she worked in the field of cancer research under the tutelage of Dr. Robert Bernard and Rabbi Moses D. Tendler. During the program she developed a number of theories about cancer growth and at the end of the summer she offered a mathematical equation that could be used to predict the rate of the growth of a cancer. So impressed with her was Dr. Bernard that he incorporated parts of her research into a joint scientific paper that he presented at a conference in Washington, DC. Due to the resulting publicity about her work, Mademoiselle magazine presented Patricia with its 1960 Merit Award. The award was presented annually to ten young women demonstrating the promise of great achievement. In only 2 1/2 years of study she was able to graduate from high school and set out for college.
In 1964, Bath graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree from Hunter College in New York. Soon thereafter, she enrolled in medical school at Howard University in Washington, DC. Her exposure to Black professors and administrators had a great impact on her belief in Black leadership in society. While in medical school, she took part in a summer program in Yugoslavia, focused on pediatrics research. The program, sponsored by a government fellowship, allowed her to travel abroad for the first time and to gain experience internationally. She graduated with honors from Howard in 1968.
Patricia returned to New York in the fall of 1968 to work as an intern at Harlem Hospital and accepted a fellowship in ophthalmology at Columbia University a year later. In working in the two distinct atmospheres, she was able to make a clear and alarming observation. In the Eye Clinic in Harlem she noticed that many of the patients suffered blindness while few at the Columbia Eye Clinic did. After further research she concluded in a well-received report that Blacks were twice as likely to suffer from blindness as the general population. Further research would reveal that Blacks were eight times more likely to suffer blindness as a result of glaucoma than whites. Bath believed that the main explanation for this disparity was the lack of access to ophthalmic care for Blacks and other poor people. This would eventually lead to her promoting the concept of Community Ophthalmology, which would work as an outreach programs, sending volunteers out into the community to provide vision, cataracts and glaucoma screening. This would help to provide treatment that could save the vision of elderly people and provide glasses that would help children in school and prevent vision problems in the future. She implored many of the professors at Columbia to donate their time and perform pro bono services for Harlem Hospital's Eye Clinic.
From 1970 to 1973 Patricia moved on to New York University where she became the first Black person to complete a residency in ophthalmology. In addition to her professional success, she enjoyed personal happiness as well, as she got married and had a daughter. In 1974, Bath moved to California and became a faculty member at UCLA and the Charles R. Drew University. Over the next nine years, she would serve in various capacities, and in 1983, co-founded and chaired the Opthalmology Residency Training Program at Drew/UCLA. The fact that she was the first woman in the country to hold such a position would be noteworthy, if not for the fact that Bath was the first to achieve so many distinctions in her life. In 1976, she co-founded the American Institute for the Prevention of Blindness based on the principle that "eyesight is a basic human right."
After traveling around the world offering her services and bringing awareness to vision issues, Bath settled back into her research at UCLA. She pondered the problems associated with addressing cataracts disease in the United States. Cataracts is characterized by a cloudiness that occurs within the lens of an eye, causing blurred vision and often blindness. Standard treatment called for using traditional surgical methods to remove the damaged lens (one method employed the use of a mechanical drill-like mechanical device that would grind away the cataracts and could only be used for secondary cataract surgery). Bath devised safer, faster and more accurate approach to cataracts surgery.
In 1981 she began work on her most well-known invention which she would call a "Laserphaco Probe." The device employed a laser as well as two tubes, one for irrigation and one for aspiration (suction). The laser would be used to make a small incision in the eye and the laser energy would vaporize the cataracts within a couple of minutes. The damaged lens would then be flushed with liquids and then gently extracted by the suction tube. With the liquids still being washed into the eye, a new lens could be easily inserted. Additionally, this procedure could be used for initial cataract surgery and could eliminate much of the discomfort expected, while increasing the accuracy of the surgery. Unfortunately, though her concept was sound, she was unable to find any lasers within the United States that could be adapted for the procedure (the majority of laser technology in the United States was dedicated to military purposes). She was able to find the laser probe she needed in Berlin, Germany and successfully tested the device which she described as an "apparatus for ablating and removing cataract lenses" and later dubbed it the "Laserphaco Probe." Bath sought patent protection for her device and received patents in several countries around the world. She intends to use the proceeds of her patent licenses to benefit the AIPB.
Patricia Bath retired from UCLA in 1993 and continues to advocate vision care outreach and calls for attention to vision issues. Her remarkable achievements as a Black woman make her proud, but racial and gender-based obstacles do not consume her. "Yes, I'm interested in equal opportunities, but my battles are in science."

Black Inventors: A Kids' Video

This is very cute. I love the kid who does George Washington Carver. It was posted on youtube. I've met some of the people from the nyc parks' dept who work in computer after school programs and they do wonderful work. They have a program called RECYouth, Real Education and Communication For Youth