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Black Invention Myths

21October
2005

Perhaps
you've heard the claims: Were it not for the genius and energy of
African-American inventors, we might find ourselves in a world
without traffic lights, peanut butter, blood banks, light bulb
filaments, and a vast number of other things we now take for granted
but could hardly imagine life without.

Such
beliefs usually originate in books or articles about black history.
Since many of the authors have little interest in the history of
technology outside of advertising black contributions to it, their
stories tend to be fraught with misunderstandings, wishful thinking,
or fanciful embellishments with no historical basis.

The
lack of historical perspective leads to extravagant overestimations
of originality and importance: sometimes a slightly modified version
of a pre-existing piece of technology is mistaken for the first
invention of its type; sometimes a patent or innovation with little
or no lasting value is portrayed as a major advance, even if there's
no real evidence it was ever used.

Unfortunately, some of the errors and exaggerations
have acquired an illusion of credibility by repetition in mainstream
outlets, especially during Black History Month (see examples for the
traffic light and ironing board). When myths go unchallenged for too
long, they begin to eclipse the truth.  Although this page does
not cover every dubious invention claim floating around out there,
it should at least serve as a warning never to take any such claim
for granted.

Each
item below is listed with its supposed black originator beneath it
along with the year it was supposedly invented, followed by
something about the real origin of the invention or at least an
earlier instance of it.

Traffic Signal
-

Invented by Garrett A.
Morgan in 1923?   No!

The first known traffic
signal appeared in London in 1868 near the Houses of Parliament.
Designed by JP Knight, it featured two semaphore arms and two gas
lamps. The earliest electric traffic lights include Lester Wire's
two-color version set up in Salt Lake City circa 1912, James Hoge's
system (US patent #1,251,666) installed in Cleveland by the American
Traffic Signal Company in 1914, and William Potts' 4-way
red-yellow-green lights introduced in Detroit beginning in 1920. New
York City traffic towers began flashing three-color signals also in
1920.

Garrett Morgan's
cross-shaped, crank-operated semaphore was not among the first
half-hundred patented traffic signals; nor was it "automatic" as is
sometimes claimed; nor did it play any part in the evolution of the
modern traffic light. See Inventing History: Garrett Morgan and the Traffic
Signal.

Gas Mask

Garrett Morgan in 1914?
No!

The invention of the
gas mask predates Morgan's breathing device by several decades.
Early versions were constructed by the Scottish chemist John
Stenhouse in 1854 and the physicist John Tyndall in the 1870s, among
many other inventors prior to World War I. See The Invention of the Gas Mask.

Peanut Butter

George Washington
Carver (who began his peanut research in 1903)? No!

Peanuts, which are
native to the New World tropics, were mashed into paste by Aztecs
hundreds of years ago. Evidence of modern peanut butter comes from
US patent #306727 issued to Marcellus Gilmore Edson of Montreal,
Quebec in 1884, for a process of milling roasted peanuts between
heated surfaces until the peanuts reached "a fluid or semi-fluid
state." As the product cooled, it set into what Edson described as
"a consistency like that of butter, lard, or ointment." In 1890,
George A. Bayle Jr., owner of a food business in St. Louis,
manufactured peanut butter and sold it out of barrels. J.H. Kellogg,
of cereal fame, secured US patent #580787 in 1897 for his "Process
of Preparing Nutmeal," which produced a "pasty adhesive substance"
that Kellogg called "nut-butter."

George Washington
Carver

"Discovered" hundreds
of new and important uses for the peanut? Fathered the peanut
industry? Revolutionized southern US agriculture? No!

Research by Barry
Mackintosh, who served as bureau historian for the National Park
Service (which manages the G.W. Carver National Monument),
demonstrated the following:

Most of Carver's peanut
and sweet potato creations were either unoriginal, impractical, or
of uncertain effectiveness. No product born in his laboratory was
widely adopted.

The boom years for
Southern peanut production came prior to, and not as a result of,
Carver's promotion of the crop.

Carver's work to
improve regional farming practices was not of pioneering scientific
importance and had little demonstrable impact.

To see how Carver
gained "a popular reputation far transcending the significance of
his accomplishments," read Mackintosh's excellent article George Washington Carver: The Making of a
Myth.

Automatic Lubricator,
"Real McCoy"

Elijah McCoy
revolutionized industry in 1872 by inventing the first device to
automatically oil machinery? No! The phrase "Real McCoy" arose to
distinguish Elijah's inventions from cheap imitations? No!

The oil cup, which
automatically delivers a steady trickle of lubricant to machine
parts while the machine is running, predates McCoy's career; a
description of one appears in the May 6, 1848 issue of Scientific
American. The automatic "displacement lubricator" for steam engines
was developed in 1860 by John Ramsbottom of England, and notably
improved in 1862 by James Roscoe of the same country. The
"hydrostatic" lubricator originated no later than 1871.

Variants of the phrase
Real McCoy appear in Scottish literature dating back to at least
1856 — well before Elijah McCoy started designing
lubricators.

Evidence & sources:
The
not-so-real McCoy
Also see The
Fake McCoy and Did
Somebody Say McTrash?

Blood Bank

Dr. Charles Drew in
1940? No!

During World War I, Dr.
Oswald H. Robertson of the US army preserved blood in a
citrate-glucose solution and stored it in cooled containers for
later transfusion. This was the first use of "banked" blood. By the
mid-1930s the Russians had set up a national network of facilities for the collection,
typing, and storage of blood. Bernard Fantus, influenced by the
Russian program, established the first hospital blood bank in the
United States at Chicago's Cook County Hospital in 1937. It was
Fantus who coined the term "blood bank." See highlights of transfusion history from the
American Association of Blood Banks.

Blood Plasma

Did Charles Drew
"discover" (in about 1940) that plasma could be separated and stored
apart from the rest of the blood, thereby revolutionizing
transfusion medicine? No!

The possibility of
using blood plasma for transfusion purposes was known at least since
1918, when English physician Gordon R. Ward suggested it in a
medical journal. In the mid-1930s, John Elliott advanced the idea,
emphasizing plasma's advantages in shelf life and donor-recipient
compatibility, and in 1939 he and two colleagues reported having
used stored plasma in 191 transfusions. (See historical notes on plasma use.) Charles Drew was
not responsible for any breakthrough scientific or medical
discovery; his main career achievement lay in supervising or
co-supervising major programs for the collection and shipment of
blood and plasma.

More: Charles Drew Mythology

Washington DC city plan

Benjamin Banneker? No!

Pierre-Charles L'Enfant
created the layout of Washington DC. Banneker assisted Andrew
Ellicott in the survey of the federal territory, but played no
direct role in the actual planning of the city. The story of
Banneker reconstructing the city design from memory after L'Enfant
ran away with the plans (with the implication that the project would
have failed if not for Banneker) has been debunked by historians.

Filament for Light Bulb

Lewis Latimer invented
the carbon filament in 1881 or 1882? No!

English
chemist/physicist Joseph Swan experimented with a carbon-filament incandescent
light all the way back in 1860, and by 1878 had developed a
better design which he patented in Britain. On the other side of the
Atlantic, Thomas Edison developed a successful carbon-filament bulb,
receiving a patent for it in January 1880 (#223898), before Lewis
Latimer did any work in electric lighting. From 1880 onward,
countless patents were issued for innovations in filament design and
manufacture (Edison had over 50 of them). Neither of Latimer's two
filament-related patents in 1881 and 1882 were among the most important innovations, nor did they make the
light bulb last longer, nor is there reason to believe they
were adopted outside Hiram Maxim's company where Latimer worked at
the time. (He was not hired by Edison's company until 1884,
primarily as a draftsman and an expert witness in patent
litigations).

Latimer also did not
come up with the first screw socket for the light bulb or the first book on electric lighting.

Heart Surgery (first
successful)

Dr. Daniel Hale
Williams in 1893? No!

Dr. Williams repaired a
wound not in the heart muscle itself, but in the sac surrounding it,
the pericardium. This operation was not the first of its type: Henry Dalton of St. Louis performed a nearly
identical operation two years earlier, with the patient fully
recovering. Decades before that, the Spaniard Francisco Romero carried out the first successful
pericardial surgery of any type, incising the pericardium to drain
fluid compressing the heart.

Surgery on the actual
human heart muscle, and not just the pericardium, was first
successfully accomplished by Ludwig Rehn of Germany when he repaired a wounded
right ventricle in 1896. More than 50 years later came surgery on
the open heart, pioneered by John Lewis, C. Walton Lillehei (often
called the "father of open heart surgery") and John Gibbon (who
invented the heart-lung machine).

What medical historians say...

"Third Rail"

Granville Woods in
1901? No!

Werner von Siemens
pioneered the use of an electrified third rail as a means for
powering railway vehicles when he demonstrated an experimental
electric train at the 1879 Berlin Industrial Exhibition. In the US,
English-born Leo Daft used a third-rail system to electrify the
Baltimore & Hampden lines in 1885. The first electrically
powered subway trains, which debuted in London in the autumn of
1890, likewise drew power from a third rail. Details...

Railway Telegraph

Granville Woods
prevented railway accidents and saved countless lives by inventing
the train telegraph (patented in 1887), which allowed communication
to and from moving trains? No!

The earliest patents
for train telegraphs go back to at least 1873. Lucius Phelps was the first
inventor in the field to attract widespread notice, and the
telegrams he exchanged on the New York, New Haven & Hartford
railroad in January 1885 were hailed in the Feb. 21, 1885 issue of
Scientific American as "perhaps the first ever sent to and from a
moving train." Phelps remained at the forefront in developing the
technology and by the end of 1887 already held 14 US patents on his system. He joined a team led
by Thomas Edison, who had been working on his "grasshopper
telegraph" for trains, and together they constructed on the Lehigh
Valley Railroad one of the only induction telegraph systems ever put
to commercial use. Although this telegraph was a technical success,
it fulfilled no public want, and the market for on-board train
telegraphy never took off. There is no evidence that any commercial
railway telegraph based on Granville Woods's patents was ever built.
About the patent interference case

Refrigerated Truck

Frederick Jones (with
Joseph Numero) in 1938? No! Did Jones change America's eating habits
by making possible the long-distance shipment of perishable foods?
No!

Refrigerated ships and
railcars had been moving perishables across oceans and continents
even before Jones was born (see refrigerated transport timeline). Trucks with
mechanically refrigerated cargo spaces appeared on the roads at
least as early as the late 1920s (see the proof).
Further development of truck refrigeration was more a process of
gradual evolution than radical change.

Air Brake / Automatic
Air Brake

Granville Woods in
1904? No!

In 1869, a 22-year-old
George Westinghouse received US patent #88929 for a brake device
operated by compressed air, and in the same year organized the
Westinghouse Air Brake Company. Many of the 361 patents he
accumulated during his career were for air brake variations and
improvements, including his first "automatic" version in 1872 (US
#124404).

Air Conditioner

Frederick Jones in
1949? No!

Dr. Willis Carrier
built the first machine to control both the temperature and humidity
of indoor air. He received the first of many patents in 1906 (US
patent #808897, for the "Apparatus for Treating Air"). In 1911 he
published the formulae that became the scientific basis for air
conditioning design, and four years later formed the Carrier
Engineering Corporation to develop and manufacture AC
systems.

Airship

J.F. Pickering in 1900?
No!

French engineer Henri
Giffard successfully flew a powered navigable airship in 1852. The
La France airship built by Charles Renard and Arthur Krebs in 1884
featured an electric motor and improved steering capabilities. In
1900 Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin's first rigid-framed dirigible
took to the air. Of the hundreds of inventors granted patents for
early airship designs and modifications, few succeeded in building
or flying their craft. There doesn't appear to be any record of a
"Pickering Airship" ever getting off the ground.

US Aviation Patent Database, 1799-1909

Automatic Railroad Car
Coupler

Andrew Beard invented
the "Jenny [sic] coupler" in 1897? No!

The Janney coupler is
named for US Civil War veteran Eli H. Janney, who in 1873 invented a
device (US patent #138405) which automatically linked together two
railroad cars upon their being brought into contact. Also known as
the "knuckle coupler," Janney's invention superseded the dangerous
link-and-pin coupler and became the basis for standard coupler
design through the remainder of the millennium. Andrew Beard's
modified knuckle coupler was just one of approximately eight
thousand coupler variations patented by 1900. See a history of the automatic coupler and also The Janney Coupler.

Automatic
Transmission/Gearshift

Richard Spikes in 1932?
No!

The first
automatic-transmission automobile to enter the market was designed
by the Sturtevant brothers of Massachusetts in 1904. US Patent
#766551 was the first of several patents on their gearshift
mechanism. Automatic transmission technology continued to develop,
spawning hundreds of patents and numerous experimental units; but because of cost,
reliability issues and an initial lack of demand, several decades
passed before vehicles with automatic transmission became common on
the roads.

Bicycle Frame

Isaac R. Johnson in
1899? No!

Comte Mede de Sivrac
and Karl von Sauerbronn built primitive versions of the bicycle in
1791 and 1816 respectively. The frame of John Starley's 1885 "safety
bicycle" resembled that of a modern bicycle.

Cellular Phone

Henry T. Sampson in
1971? No!

On July 6, 1971,
Sampson and co-inventor George Miley received a patent on a "gamma
electric cell" that converted a gamma ray input into an electrical
output (Among the first to do that was Bernhard Gross, US patent
#3122640, 1964). What, you ask, does gamma radiation have to do with
cellular communications technology? The answer: nothing. Some
multiculturalist pseudo-historian must have seen the words
"electric" and "cell" and thought "cell phone."

The father of the cell
phone is Martin Cooper who first demonstrated the
technology in 1973.

Clock or Watch (First
in America)

Benjamin Banneker built
the first American timepiece in 1753? No!

Abel Cottey, a Quaker
clockmaker from Philadelphia, built a clock that is dated 1709
(source: Six Quaker Clockmakers, by Edward C. Chandlee;
Philadelphia, The Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1943).
Banneker biographer Silvio Bedini further refutes the
myth:

Several watch and
clockmakers were already established in the colony [Maryland] prior
to the time that Banneker made the clock. In Annapolis alone there
were at least four such craftsmen prior to 1750. Among these may be
mentioned John Batterson, a watchmaker who moved to Annapolis in
1723; James Newberry, a watch and clockmaker who advertised in the
Maryland Gazette on July 20, 1748; John Powell, a watch and
clockmaker believed to have been indentured and to have been working
in 1745; and Powell's master, William Roberts.

Silvio Bedini, The Life
of Benjamin Banneker (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society,
1999)

Clothes Dryer

George T. Sampson in
1892? No!

The "clothes-drier"
described in Sampson's patent was actually a rack for holding
clothes near a stove, and was intended as an "improvement" on
similar contraptions:

My invention relates to
improvements in clothes-driers.... The object of my invention is to
suspend clothing in close relation to a stove by means of frames so
constructed that they can be readily placed in proper position and
put aside when not required for use.

US patent #476416,
1892

Nineteen years earlier,
there were already over 300 US patents for such "clothes-driers"
(Subject-Matter Index of Patents...1790 to 1873).

A Frenchman named
Pochon in 1799 built the first known tumble dryer — a crank-driven,
rotating metal drum pierced with ventilation holes and held over
heat. Electric tumble dryers appeared in the first half of the 20th
century.

Dustpan

Lloyd P. Ray in 1897?
No!

While the ultimate
origin of the dustpan is lost in the mists (dusts?) of time, at
least we know that US patent #20811 for "Dust-pan" was granted to
T.E. McNeill in 1858. That was the first of about 164 US dustpan
patents predating Lloyd Ray's. See the dustpan patent list.

Egg Beater

Willie Johnson in 1884?
No!

The hand-cranked egg
beater with two intermeshed, counter-rotating whisks was invented by
Turner Williams of Providence, Rhode Island in 1870 (US Patent #103811). It was an improvement on
earlier rotary egg beaters that had only one whisk.

Electric Trolley

Did Granville Woods
invent the electric trolley car, the overhead wire that powers it,
or the "troller" wheel that makes contact with the trolley wire, in
1888? No!

Dr. Werner von Siemens
demonstrated his electric trolleybus, the Elektromote, near Berlin
on April 29, 1882. The vehicle's two electric motors collected power
through contact wheels rolling atop a pair of overhead wires. The
earliest patentee of an electric trolley in the United States
appears to be Eugene Cowles (#252193 in 1881), followed by Dr.
Joseph R. Finney (#268476 in 1882) who operated an experimental trolley car near Pittsburgh, PA in
the summer of 1882. In early 1885, John C. Henry established in
Kansas City, MO, the first overhead-wire electric transit system to
enter regular service in the United States. Belgian-born Charles van
Depoele, who earned 240+ patents in electric railway technology and
other fields, set up trolley lines in several North American cities by 1887. In February
1888, a trolley system designed by Frank Sprague began operating in
Richmond, Virginia. Sprague's system became the lasting prototype for electric street railways in
the US.

Elevator

Alexander Miles in
1887? No!
Was Miles the first to patent a self-closing shaft
door? No!

Steam-powered hoisting
devices were used in England by 1800. Elisha Graves Otis' 1853
"safety elevator" prevented the car from falling if the cable broke,
and thus paved the way for the first commercial passenger elevator,
installed in New York City's Haughwout Department Store in 1857. The
first electric elevator appeared in Mannheim, Germany in 1880, built
by the German firm of Siemens and Halske. A self-closing shaft door
was invented by J.W. Meaker in 1874 ("Improvement in Self-closing
Hatchways," US Patent No. 147,853). See Elevator Timeline

Fastest
Computer/Computation

Was Philip Emeagwali
responsible for the world's fastest computer or computation in 1989?
Did he win the "Nobel Prize of computing"? Is he a "father of the
Internet"? No!

The fastest performance
of a computer application in 1989 was 6 billion floating point
operations per second (6 Gflops), achieved by a team from Mobil and
Thinking Machines Corp. on a 64,000-processor "Connection Machine"
invented by Danny Hillis. That was almost double the 3.1 Gflops of
Emeagwali's computation. Computing's Nobel Prize equivalent is the
Turing Award, which Emeagwali has never won. More...

Fire Escape

Joseph Winters in 1878?
No!

Winters' "fire escape"
was a wagon-mounted ladder. The first such contraption patented in
the US was the work of William P. Withey, 1840 (US patent #1599).
The fire escape with a "lazy-tongs" type ladder, more similar to
Winters' patent, was pioneered by Hüttman and Kornelio in 1849 (US
patent #6155). One of the first fire escapes of any type was
invented in 18th-century England:

In 1784, Daniel
Maseres, of England, invented a machine called a fire escape, which,
being fastened to the window, would enable anyone to descend to the
street without injury.

Benjamin Butterworth,
Growth of Industrial Art, 1888

By 1888 the US had
granted 1,099 patents on fire escapes of "many forms, and of every
possible material" (Butterworth).

Fire Extinguisher

Thomas J. Martin in
1872? No!

In 1813, British army
captain George Manby created the first known portable fire
extinguisher: a two-foot-tall copper cylinder that held 3 gallons of
water and used compressed air as a propellant. One of the earliest
extinguishers to use a chemical extinguishing agent, and not just
water, was invented in 1849 by the Englishman William Henry
Phillips, who patented his "fire annihilator" in England and the
United States (US patent #7,269).

Food Additives, Meat
Curing

Lloyd Hall "is
responsible for the meat curing products, seasonings, emulsions,
bakery products, antioxidants, protein hydrolysates, and many other
products that keep our food fresh and flavorable"? No! Hall
"revolutionized the meatpacking industry"? No!

Hall introduced no
major class of additive, certainly not meat curing salts (which are
ancient), protein hydrolysates (popularized by Julius Maggi as
flavor enhancers in 1886), emulsifiers and antioxidants (lecithin,
for example, was used in both roles before Lloyd Hall had any
patents in food processing). The so-called revolutionary meat curing
product marketed by Hall's employer was invented primarily by Karl
Max Seifert ; the number of
Seifert's patent was printed right on the containers. Hall's main
contribution to this product was to reduce its tendency to cake
during storage. Details: Lloyd Hall myth.

Fountain Pen

W.B. Purvis in 1890?
No!

The first reference to
what seems to be a fountain pen appears in an Arabic text from 969
AD; details of the instrument are not known. A French "Bion" pen,
dated 1702, represents the oldest fountain pen that still survives.
Later models included John Scheffer's 1819 pen, possibly the first
to be mass-produced; John Jacob Parker's "self-filling" pen of 1832;
and the famous Lewis Waterman pen of 1884 (US Patents #293545,
#307735). Early
History of the Fountain Pen

Golf Tee

Dr. George Grant in
1899? No!

Two Scots, William
Bloxsom and Arthur Douglas, received the world's first patent for a
golf tee (British, #12941 of 1889). Their rubber tee had a
cylindrical or multi-pronged ball support projecting from a flat
base. Three years later, also from Britain, came the first patented
peg-style tee, which penetrated the ground as opposed to just
resting on it. Invented by Percy Ellis, it sold under the name
"Perfectum." The familiar modern tee design with funnel-shaped head,
concave top surface, and narrow stem, was introduced in 1921 by
American dentist William Lowell. Details...

Hairbrush

Lyda Newman in 1898?
No!

An early US patent for
a recognizably modern hairbrush went to Hugh Rock in 1854 (US Design
Patent no. D645), though surely there were hairbrushes long before
there was a US Patent Office.

The claim that Lyda
Newman's brush was the first with "synthetic bristles" is false: her
patent mentions nothing about synthetic bristles and is concerned
only with a new way of making the handle detachable from the head.
Besides, a hairbrush that included "elastic wire teeth" in
combination with natural bristles had already been patented by
Samuel Firey in 1870 (US, #106680). Nylon bristles weren't possible
until the invention of nylon in 1935.

Halogen Lamp

Frederick Mosby? No

The original patent for
the tungsten halogen lamp (US #2,883,571; April 21, 1959) is
recorded to Elmer G. Fridrich and Emmett H. Wiley of General
Electric. The two had built a working prototype as early as 1953.
Fred Mosby was part of the GE team charged with developing the
prototype lamp into a marketable product, but was not responsible
for the original halogen lamp or the concept behind it.

Hand Stamp

William Purvis in 1883?
No!

The earliest known
postal handstamp was brought into use by Henry Bishop, Postmaster
General of Great Britain, in the year 1661. The stamp imprinted the
mail with a bisected circle containing the month and the date. See
"Bishop marks"

Heating Furnace

Alice Parker in 1919?
No!

In the hypocaust
heating systems built by the ancient Romans, hot air from a furnace
circulated under the floor and up through channels inside the walls,
thereby distributing heat evenly around the building. One of the
most famous heating systems in recent centuries was the iron furnace
stove known as the "Franklin stove," named after its purported
originator Benjamin Franklin around 1745 AD. The US had issued over
4000 patents for heating stoves and furnaces by 1888 (Benjamin
Butterworth, Growth of Industrial Art, 1888).

Horseshoe

Oscar E. Brown in 1892?
No!

Some sources on the
web, if not ignorant enough to say Brown invented the first
horseshoe ever, will at least try to credit him for the first double
or compound horseshoe made of two layers: one permanently secured to
the hoof, and one auxiliary layer that can be removed and replaced
when it wears out. However, in the US there were already 39 earlier patents for horseshoes using that same
concept. The first of these was issued to J.B. Kendall of Boston in
1861, patent #33709.

Ice Cream

Augustus Jackson in
1832? No!

Flavored ices
resembling sherbet were known in China in ancient times. In Europe,
sherbet-like concoctions evolved into ice cream by the 16th century,
and around 1670 or so, the Café Procope in Paris offered creamy
frozen dairy desserts to the public. The first written record of ice
cream in the New World comes from a letter dated 1700, attesting
that Maryland Governor William Bladen served the treat to his
guests. In 1777, the New York Gazette advertised the sale of ice
cream by confectioner Philip Lenzi. History of Ice Cream

Ironing Board

Sarah Boone in 1892?
No!

Of the several hundred
US patents on ironing boards granted prior to Sarah Boone's, the
first three went to William Vandenburg in 1858 (patents #19390,
#19883, #20231). The first American female patentee of an ironing
board is probably Sarah Mort of Dayton, Ohio, who received patent
#57170 in 1866. In 1869, Henry Soggs of Columbus, Pennsylvania
earned US patent #90966 for an ironing board resembling the modern
type, with folding legs, adjustable height, and a cover. Another
nice example of a modern-looking board was designed by J.H. Mallory
in 1871, patent #120296. Details...

Laser Cataract Surgery

Patricia Bath
"transformed eye surgery" by inventing the first laser device to
treat cataracts in 1986? No!

Use of lasers to treat
cataracts in the eye began to develop in the mid 1970s. M.M. Krasnov
of Russia reported the first such procedure in 1975. One of
the earliest US patents for laser cataract removal (#3,982,541) was
issued to Francis L'Esperance in 1976. In later years, a number of
experimenters worked independently on laser devices for removing
cataracts, including Daniel Eichenbaum, whose work became the basis
of the Paradigm Photon™ device; and Jack Dodick, whose Dodick Laser
PhotoLysis System eventually became the first laser unit to win FDA
approval for cataract removal in the United States. Still, the
majority of cataract surgeries continue to be performed using
ultrasound devices, not lasers. Details...

Lawn Mower

John Burr in 1899? No!

English engineer Edwin
Budding invented the first reel-type lawn mower (with blades
arranged in a cylindrical pattern) and had it patented in England in
1830. In 1868 the United States issued patent #73807 to Amariah M.
Hills of Connecticut, who went on to establish the Archimedean Lawn
Mower Co. in 1871. By 1888, the US Patent Office had granted 138
patents for lawn mowers (Butterworth, Growth of Industrial Art).
Doubtlessly there were even more by the time Burr got his patent in
1899.

Some website authors
want Burr to have invented the first "rotary blade" mower, with a
centrally mounted spinning blade. But his patent #624749 shows yet
another twist on the old reel mower, differing in only a few details
with Budding's original.

Lawn Sprinkler

J. H. Smith in 1897?
Elijah McCoy? No!

The first US patent
with the title "lawn sprinkler" was issued to J. Lessler of Buffalo,
New York in 1871 (#121949). Early examples of water-propelled,
rotating lawn sprinklers were patented by J. Oswald in 1890
(#425340) and J. S. Woolsey in 1891 (#457099) among a gazillion
others.

Smith's patent shows
just another rotating sprinkler, and McCoy's 1899 patent was for a
turtle-shaped sprinkler.

Mailbox (letter drop
box)

P. Downing invented the
street letter drop box in 1891? No!
George Becket invented the
private mailbox in 1892? No!

The US
Postal Service says that "Street boxes for mail collection began
to appear in large [US] cities by 1858." They appeared in Europe
even earlier, according to historian Laurin Zilliacus:

Mail boxes as we
understand them first appeared on the streets of Belgian towns in
1848. In Paris they came two years later, while the English received
their 'pillar boxes' in 1855.

Laurin Zilliacus, Mail
for the World, p. 178 (New York, J. Day Co., 1953)

From the same book
(p.178), "Private mail boxes were invented in the United States in
about 1860."

Eventually, letter drop
boxes came equipped with inner lids to prevent miscreants from
rummaging through the mail pile. The first of many US patents for
such a purpose was granted in 1860 to John North of Middletown,
Connecticut (US Pat. #27466).

Mop

Thomas W. Stewart in
1893? No!

Mops go back a long,
long way before 1893. Just how long, is hard to determine.
Restricting our view to the modern era, we find that the United
States issued its first mop patent (#241) in 1837 to Jacob Howe,
called "Construction of Mop-Heads and the Mode of Securing them upon
Handles." One of the first patented mops with a built-in wringer was
the one H. & J. Morton invented in 1859 (US #24049).

The mop specified in
Stewart's patent #499402 has a lever-operated clamp for "holding the
mop rags"; the lever is not a wringing mechanism as erroneously
reported on certain websites. Other inventors had already patented
mops with lever-operated clamps, one of the first being Greenleaf
Stackpole in 1869 (US Pat. #89803).

Paper Punch (hand-held)

Charles Brooks in 1893?
No!
Was it the first with a hinged receptacle to catch the
clippings? No!

The first numbered US
patent for a hand-held hole punch was #636, issued to Solyman
Merrick in 1838. Robert James Kellett earned the first two US
patents for a chad-catching hole punch, in 1867 (patent #65090) and
1868 (#79232).

Pencil Sharpener

John Lee Love in 1897?
No!

Bernard Lassimone of
Limoges, France invented one of the earliest sharpeners, receiving
French patent number 2444 in 1828. An apparent ancestor of the
20th-century hand-cranked sharpener was patented by G. F. Ballou in
1896 (US #556709) and marketed by the A.B. Dick Company as the "Planetary Pencil Pointer." As the user held the
pencil stationary and turned the crank, twin milling cutters
revolved around the tip of the pencil and shaved it into a
point.

Love's patent #594114
shows a variation on a different kind of sharpener, in which one
would crank the pencil itself around in a stirring motion. An
earlier device of a similar type was devised in 1888 by G.H. Courson
(patent #388533), and sold under the name "President Pencil
Sharpener."

Here are several other
examples of 19th century sharpeners:
Early Mechanical Pencil Sharpeners
Mechanical Pencil Sharpener Gallery ~
1884-1899

Permanent Wave Machine
(for perming hair)

Marjorie Joyner in
1928? No!

That would be German
hairdresser Karl Ludwig Nessler (aka Charles Nestlé) no later
than 1906.

Postmarking and
Canceling Machine

William Barry in 1897?
No!

Try Pearson Hill of England, in 1857. Hill's machine
marked the postage stamp with vertical lines and postmark date. By
1892, US post offices were using several brands of machines,
including one that could cancel, postmark, count and stack more than
20,000 pieces of mail per hour (Marshall Cushing, Story of Our Post
Office, Boston: A. M. Thayer & co., 1892,
pp.189-191).

Printing Press

W.A. Lavalette invented
"the advanced printing press" in 1878? No!

In Europe, around 1455,
Johann Gutenberg adapted the screw press used in other trades such
as winemaking and combined it with type-metal alloy characters and
oil-based printing ink. Major advances after Gutenberg include the
cylinder printing press (c. 1811) by Frederick Koenig and Andreas
Bauer, the rotary press (1846) by Richard M. Hoe, and the web press
(1865) by William Bullock. Major advances do not include Lavalette's
patent, which was only one of 3,268 printing patents granted in the
US by the year 1888 (Butterworth, Growth of Industrial Art). Improvements After Gutenberg

Propeller for Ship

George Tolivar or
Benjamin Montgomery? No!

John Stevens
constructed a boat with twin steam-powered propellers in 1804 in the
first known application of a screw propeller for marine propulsion.
Other important pioneers in the early 1800s included Sir Francis
Pettit Smith of England, and Swedish-born ship designer John
Ericsson (US patent #588) who later designed the USS
Monitor.

Refrigerator

Thomas Elkins in 1879?
John Stanard in 1891? No!

Oliver Evans proposed a
mechanical refrigerator based on a vapor-compression cycle in 1805
and Jacob Perkins had a working machine built in 1834. Dr. John
Gorrie created an air-cycle refrigeration system in about 1844,
which he installed in a Florida hospital. In the 1850s Alexander
Twining in the USA and James Harrison in Australia used mechanical
refrigeration to produce ice on a commercial scale. Around the same
time, the Carré brothers of France led the development of absorption
refrigeration systems. A more detailed timeline

Stanard's patent
describes not a refrigeration machine, but an old-fashioned icebox —
an insulated cabinet into which ice is placed to cool the interior.
As such, it was a "refrigerator" only in the old sense of the term, which included
non-mechanical coolers. Elkins created a similarly low-tech device,
acknowledging in his patent #221222 that "I am aware that chilling
substances inclosed within a porous box or jar by wetting its outer
surface is an old and well-known process."

Rotary Engine

Andrew Beard in 1892?
No!

The Subject Matter
Index of Patents Issued from the United States Patent Office from
1790 to 1873 Inclusive lists 394 "Rotary Engine" patents from
1810-1873. The Wankel engine, a rotary combustion engine with a
four-stroke cycle, dates from 1954. History of the Rotary Engine from 1588
Onward

Screw Socket for Light
Bulb

Lewis Latimer? No!

The earliest evidence
for a light bulb screw base design is a drawing in a Thomas Edison
notebook dated Sept. 11, 1880. It is not the work of Latimer,
though:

Edison's long-time
associates, Edward H. Johnson and John Ott, were principally
responsible for designing fixtures in the fall of 1880. Their work
resulted in the screw socket and base very much like those widely
used today.

R. Friedel and P.
Israel, Edison's Electric Light: Biography of an Invention, (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1986).

The 1880 sketch of the
screw socket is reproduced in the book cited above.

Smallpox Vaccine

Onesimus the slave in
1721? No! Onesimus knew of variolation, an early inoculation
technique practiced in several areas of the world before the
discovery of vaccination.

English physician
Edward Jenner developed the smallpox vaccine in 1796 after finding
that the relatively innocuous cowpox virus built immunity against
the deadly smallpox. This discovery led to the eventual eradication
of endemic smallpox throughout the world. Vaccination differs from
the primitive inoculation method known as variolation, which
involved the deliberate planting of live smallpox into a healthy
person in hopes of inducing a mild form of the disease that would
provide immunity from further infection. Variolation not only was
risky to the patient but, more importantly, failed to prevent
smallpox from spreading. Known in Asia by 1000 AD, the practice
reached the West via more than one channel.

Smokestack for
Locomotives

L. Bell in 1871? No!

Even the first steam
locomotives, such as the one built by Richard Trevithick in 1804,
were equipped with smokestacks. Later smokestacks featured wire
netting to prevent hazardous sparks from escaping. Page 115 of John
H. White Jr.'s American Locomotives: An Engineering History,
1830-1880 (1997 edition) displays a composite picture showing 57
different types of spark-arresting smokestacks devised before
1860.

Steam Boiler Furnace

Granville Woods in
1884? No!

The steam engine boiler
is of course as old as the steam engine itself. The Subject Matter
Index of Patents Issued from the United States Patent Office from
1790 to 1873 Inclusive lists several hundred variations and
improvements to the steam boiler, including the revolutionary
water-tube boiler patented in 1867 by American inventors George
Herman Babcock and Stephen Wilcox.

Street Sweeper

Charles Brooks in 1896?
No!

Brooks' patent was for
a modified version of a common type of street sweeper cart that had
long been known, with a rotary brush that swept refuse onto an
elevator belt and into a trash bin. In the United States, street
sweepers started being patented in the 1840s, and by 1900 the Patent
Office had issued about 300 patents for such machines. Details...

Supercharger for
Automobiles

Joseph Gammel/Gamell in
1976? No!

In 1885, Gottlieb
Daimler received a German patent for supercharging an internal
combustion engine. Louis Renault patented a centrifugal supercharger
in France in 1902. An early supercharged racecar was built by Lee
Chadwick of Pottstown, Pennsylvania in 1908 and reportedly reached a
speed of 100 miles per hour. History of Supercharging

Toilet

T. Elkins in 1897? No!

The Minoans of Crete
are said to have invented a flush toilet thousands of years ago;
however, there is probably no direct ancestral relationship between
it and the modern one that evolved primarily in England starting in
the late 16th century, when Sir John Harrington devised a flushing
device for his godmother Queen Elizabeth. In 1775 Alexander Cummings
patented a toilet in which some water remained after each flush,
thereby suppressing odors from below. The "water closet" continued
to evolve, and in 1885, Thomas Twyford provided us with a
single-piece ceramic toilet similar to the one we know today. Who
Invented the Toilet?

Toilet for Railroad
Cars

Lewis Latimer in 1874?
No!

William E. Marsh Jr. of
New Jersey took out US patent #95597 for "Improvement in
Water-closets for Railroad Cars" five years prior to Latimer's 1874
patent with the same title. Marsh's patent specification suggests
that railroad-car water closets, i.e., toilets, were already in
use:

In the closets or
privies of railroad cars, the cold and wind, especially while the
train is in motion, are very disagreeable... My invention is to
remove these objectionable features....

W. Marsh, US patent
#95597, 1869

Tricycle

M.A. Cherry in 1886?
No!

In Germany in the year
1680 or thereabouts, paraplegic watchmaker Stephan Farffler built
his own tricycle at 22 years of age. He designed it to be pedaled
with the hands, for obvious reasons. History of the tricycle

Typewriter

L.S. Burridge &
N.R. Marshman in 1885? No!

Henry Mill, an English
engineer, was the first person to patent the basic idea of the
typewriter in 1714. The first working typewriter known to have
actually been built was the work of Pellegrino Turri of Italy in
1808. Americans C. L. Sholes and C. Glidden patented the familiar
QWERTY keyboard in 1868 and brought it to market in 1873. In 1878
change-case keys were added that enabled the typing of both capital
and small letters. Typewriter History

All material copyright the National Alliance
2005.