Where are the Black inventors of the Industrial Revolution?

November marks the end of Black History Month in the UK. This year, inspired by an ongoing campaign to teach Black British History in schools, my company’s D&I committee investigated different periods of the curriculum to find the missing contributions of Black people. The piece I worked on and am sharing below has been adapted into an internal learning module. Doing the research was fascinating and surprisingly easy. The documents are there, the stories are there, waiting to be told and taught – which begs the question: why aren’t they?

BLACK INVENTORS’ CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

Innovation is an important concept for humanity. Homo Sapiens climbed to the top of the food chain not because it was stronger than other animal species, but because it invented sophisticated tools and technology. From Thomas Edison to Elon Musk, innovators have a special status in modern societies because they further an idea that started when humans mastered the use of fire: that among other animal species, humans are special – we can elevate ourselves.

The Industrial Revolution was a turning point in our history. Machines and processes were invented that improved manufacturing and made Great Britain the world’s leading commercial power. Inventors like James Hargreaves and Richard Arkwright are celebrated. Their contributions are taught as part of the school curriculum and have inspired generations of innovators, all the way up to today’s Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos.

If you type “Industrial Revolution inventors” in a search engine, you may notice a pattern: all the inventors are male, and all are white. An Internet user could see this and think that this demographic was the sole contributor to the Industrial Revolution. More subtly, they could see all these white men and think – perhaps unconsciously – “this is what an innovator looks like”. 

Actually, the search engine obeys the same bias than the school curriculum: we look at patented innovations and connect them with economic developments to rate their historical significance. 

Here is the problem though. The Industrial Revolution happened between the mid-18^th century and the end of the 19^th century, when the Atlantic slave trade was in full force. In fact, the development of our textile industry is directly correlated with the expansion of labour camps in plantations in America, to produce cheap cotton. Black people were enslaved to work in these camps. Because they were enslaved, they were not allowed to own any property, including intellectual property. 

There are documented accounts for example of a blacksmith called Ned who lived in Mississippi and in the 1850s invented a cotton scraper for ploughing cotton fields. But he was enslaved by Oscar Stewart who tried to claim the patent for this invention, on the grounds that “the master has the same right to the fruits of the labor of the intilect [sic] of his slave”.

It is enraging to think of all the brilliant minds who should have been supported and were instead forced into gruesome, unpaid labour. This is something we unfortunately cannot change now. But here is what we can change: we can rehabilitate their legacies. 

We should do this because it is the fair thing to do, but also because of the positive impact it would have on society today. In the words of Lavinya Stennett who set up The Black Curriculum, a campaign for black British history to be embedded into the UK curriculum: “The school curriculum is very whitewashed, and black history is usually either omitted entirely, or taught only in terms of colonialism and slavery, rather than black people’s achievements.” 

Imagine the difference it would make if next time you typed “Industrial Revolution inventors” in your search engine you saw not only the well-known faces of James Watt and Samuel Morse but also the full diversity of men and women whose innovations ushered us into the modern age. Imagine the impact on Black pupils, and the careers they may choose to pursue. 

Here is a list of 10 Industrial Revolution Black innovators and how their contributions changed lives:

1. Benjamin Banneker

We owe him: The first striking clock to be made in America, progress on astronomical observations and calculations.

Short bio: Benjamin Banneker was born in 1731 in Maryland. He was a gentleman farmer and self-taught mathematician and astronomer who at 21 invented a clock out of wood that struck a gong on the hour and kept time to the second. He created the first of 6 Banneker’s Almanac in 1792, which were used by farmers and other residents to see when the sun would come up and set, tide tables, lunar and solar eclipses and phases of the moon. He offered a handwritten manuscript of his almanac to Thomas Jefferson, along with a letter asking for justice for Black men and women “under groaning captivity and cruel oppression”. On the day of his funeral, a mysterious fire destroyed his farmhouse and laboratory, including his clock and every record of his achievements except for his published almanacs and his journal.

To learn more about him: www.whitehousehistory.org/benjamin-banneker

2. Henry Blair

We owe him: Two models of seed planters which boosted agricultural productivity.

Short bio: Henry Blair was born in 1807 in Maryland. We know little about his early life other than he became a successful, independent farmer. He worked on ways to increase the efficiency of his farming and was awarded a patent in 1834 for a corn planter which combined ploughing, placing the seeds, and covering the seeds with soil. In doing so he became only the second African American inventor to receive a U.S. patent. Two years later he obtained a second patent, this time for a cotton planter.

To learn more about him: https://www.biography.com/inventor/henry-blair 

3. Henry Boyd

We owe him: The Boyd Bedstead, a sturdier bed construction still commonly used today.

Short bio: Henry Boyd was born into slavery in 1802 in Kentucky. He became an inventor, carpenter, and a master mechanic. He proved early on to have an impressive talent for carpentry, which he used to buy his and his siblings’ freedom, then to open his own woodwork workshop where he invented the Boyd Bedstead. Because he was Black, he was not allowed to obtain a patent for this, which was later claimed by George Porter, a white cabinet maker. His business prospered nonetheless and in 1843 he was one of the most successful furniture makers in Cincinnati, Ohio. His factory was unfortunately burnt by arsonists several times. He rebuilt it twice, but the third time insurance companies refused to cover him, and he closed it for good in 1862.

To learn more about him: www.nkytribune.com/2019/02/our-rich-history-henry-boyd-once-a-slave-became-a-prominent-african-american-furniture-maker

4. Solomon Brown

We owe him: He installed the wires of Samuel Morse’s first telegraph and was the first African American to be hired by the Smithsonian Institute.

Short bio: Solomon Brown was born in 1829 in Washington. At just 15 he started working at the Washington D.C. Post Office as a postmaster assistant where he assisted Samuel Morse and Joseph Henry with the installation of the first Morse telegraph. He followed Morse when he founded the Morse Telegraph Company, where he worked for seven years. In 1852, Joseph Henry hired him to join the Smithsonian Institute, where he worked for 54 years and held many positions. He was very involved in civic and educational programs to support the African American community and served three terms as a Republican member of the House of Delegates for Washington D.C. from 1871-1874. He also published poetry and gave lectures on entomology and geology for which he used his own drawings.

To learn more about him: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon_G._Brown

5. George Washington Carver

We owe him: 300 products derived from peanuts – including peanut butter, soaps, flour and insulation – and innovative agricultural methods.

Short bio: George Washington Carver was born into slavery in Diamond, Missouri, in 1864 or 1865. He studied Botany at Iowa State Agricultural College and would go on to be the first Black faculty member to teach there. He developed an agricultural extension program that taught farmers to restore nitrogen to soils depleted by repeated plantings of cotton, by alternating with plantings of different crops such as sweet potatoes or peanuts. He also founded an industrial research laboratory to find and promote applications for these alternative crops. He received many honours and became one of the very few Americans to be made a member of the Royal Society of Arts in England in 1916.

To learn more about him: www.blackhistorymonth.org.uk/article/section/science-and-medicine/4317/

6. Thomas L. Jennings

We owe him: the invention of dry scouring, the ancestor of dry-cleaning.

Short bio: Thomas Jennings was born in 1791 in New York City. He trained as a tailor and quickly became a successful businessman. He was not satisfied with conventional methods of cleaning that harmed clothes and started experimenting himself. This is how he invented dry scouring, for which he obtained a patent in 1821 – the first one awarded to an African American. He used the profits from his invention to buy the freedom of his family and supported the abolitionist cause. In 1831 he became assistant secretary for the First Annual Convention of the People of Colour in Philadelphia. In 1854 his daughter Elizabeth was forcefully removed from a streetcar and filed a lawsuit against the Third Avenue Railroad Company. She won the lawsuit the next year and the railroad company ordered its cars desegregated.

To learn more about him: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_L._Jennings

7. Lewis Howard Latimer

We owe him: a long-lasting and cheap filament to use in light bulbs, and six other patented inventions

Short bio: Lewis Latimer was born in 1848 in Massachusetts. He joined the Navy at 15 and served for 3 years before joining a patent law firm where he learned how to sketch patent drawings. At just 26, Latimer co-patented an improved toilet system for railroad cars. Two years later, Alexander Graham Bell hired him to draft the drawings for the patent of his telephone. In 1879 Latimer joined the U.S. Electric Lighting Company owned by Thomas Edison’s rival. He received a patent himself for an improved method of production of carbon filaments for lightbulbs in 1882. Two years after that he joined Thomas Edison’s research team and became the head draftsman for General Electric. There, he wrote the first book on electric lightning and supervised the installation of public electric lights in New York, Philadelphia, Montreal and London. He lived in New York with his family until his death in 1928.

To learn more about him: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Howard_Latimer

8. Jan Ernst Matzeliger

We owe him: Affordable shoes, thanks to a machine he invented that could make 14 times more shoes in a day than the manual process, thus slashing their price for consumers and doubling wages for millions of people in the shoe industry.

Short bio: Jan Ernst Matzeliger was born in 1852 in Dutch Guyana (now Suriname). His father was a Dutch engineer and his mother was an enslaved Black Surinamese. He moved to Massachusetts in 1877, where he worked for the Harney Brothers Shoes factory. He obtained a patent for his machine in 1883 and continued to work on automating the shoe production process. He contracted tuberculosis and died at 36. He was honoured by a U.S. Postal Service commemorative stamp as part of the Black Heritage Stamp Series in 1991, described as “a Black American who revolutionized America’s shoe-making industry in the late 19th century”.

To learn more about him: www.blackhistorymonth.org.uk/article/section/science-and-medicine/jan-ernst-matzeliger/

9. Norbert Rillieux

We owe him: the multiple-effect vacuum evaporator which produced a whiter, more refined sugar with less labour.

Short bio: Norbert Rillieux was born in 1806 into a prominent Creole family in New Orleans. In the 1820s he travelled to Paris to study at Ecole Centrale – one of the best engineering school in France – where at 24 he became the youngest teacher. He published several papers about the use of steam to work devices, which was the premise for his invention. Until then the process to refine sugar was very manual, often burning the workers and wasting sugar in the process. Rillieux travelled back to Louisiana in 1833 and worked on his machine, which he patented in 1843. His invention revolutionised the industry. He came back to France just before the Civil War, frustrated by race relations in the US which made patenting invention difficult for Black people. The method he invented went on to be used for all evaporation processes, including condensed milk, gelatin, soap, glue, and whiskey.

To learn more about him: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norbert_Rillieux

10. Sarah Breedlove Walker

We owe her: She revolutionized the African American cosmetics industry with her invention of the hot comb and a pomade to make hair soft and shiny.

Short bio: Madam C. J. Walker – born Sarah Breedlove – was born in 1867 in Louisiana and was orphaned very young. She married at 14 to escape abuse and had a daughter three years later. In 1904 she became a commissioned agent for the Poro Company, an African American haircare brand. A year later Walker moved to Denver with her daughter and started developing her own hair-care business. She then travelled to expand her business with her new husband Charles Walker, and relocated to Pennsylvania, where she started the “Walker System”, a program to train her sales agents and encourage Black women’s economic independence. In 1910 she relocated to Indianapolis where she established her headquarters and built a factory employing 3,000 people, a hair salon, a laboratory and a beauty school. She was a philanthropist, an activist, and is recorded as the first female self-made millionaire in America.

To learn more about her: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madam_C._J._Walker