Happy Birthday to African American mechanical engineer and inventor Granville Woods (b. April 23, 1856, in Columbus, OH), who among other things invented a special telegraph for fast-moving railroad communication. It saved lives and minimized property damage by preventing collisions. As scholar Rayvon Fouché emphasizes, “He was an exception among black inventors of this period in that inventing was his career. For Woods, invention was first and foremost an economic undertaking, a means to gain more capital to invest in future projects. But the grand ideas exemplified in his patents indicate that he also had a vision for modernizing America. It was this vision that led him to file numerous patents, and, by the turn of the twentieth century, he had become closely connected with the American electrical community.” However, funding issues combined with difficulties securing patents limited his career, likely reflecting some of the challenges faced by African American inventors in this era.
Citations: William J. Simmons, Men of Mark: Eminent, Progressive and Rising (Cleveland, OH: Geo. M. Rewell & Co., 1887), 108-109, https://archive.org/details/menmarkeminentp00turngoog; Rayvon Fouché, Black Inventors in the Age of Segregation: Granville T. Woods, Lewis H. Latimer and Shelby J. Davidson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 27-28, https://archive.org/details/blackinventorsin00rayv; William J. Simmons, “Granville T. Woods (1856-1910),” 1887, public domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Woodsgr.jpg#/media/File:Woodsgr.jpg.
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