Day - 25 - Valerie Thomas - She Helped Us See Earth from Space

Valerie Thomas

Another space scientist! It took me a while to be able to write this one because I didn't have enough science under my belt.

Valerie Thomas was born in 1943 in Maryland. She was a born scientist. She was fascinated by all things science. Unfortunately, she was born into a world where girls were not supposed to do science. I mean, we had other pursuits that fit us better.

She did not let the lack of support stop her. At the age of eight, she went off to the public library.

An aside - FUND PUBLIC LIBRARIES! For some kids, it is the only place they will find a window into a wider world!

Valerie checked out The Boy's First Book of Electronics. She loved it. Her father noticed her love of electronics, but he was just as uninterested in helping her out like everybody else. Nobody encouraged her to pursue her love of science!

Luckily this did not deter her. She found ways outside of school to indulge in her passion.

(Libraries. (cough, cough. Fund libraries!) Aren't you glad her local public librarian wasn't as close-minded as the rest of the people in her world?

She went to an all-girl high school! They were as uninterested in helping Valerie as everyone else in her life, and they did not offer much in the way of encouragement for her scientific heart.

source

Despite this constant beat of telling her that science wasn't for girls or girls like her, anyway, she did what all determined women do. She ignored them.

When she got to Morgan State University, she threw caution to the wind and enrolled in the physics program. She was only one of two women studying physics. I can only assume that she was tickled to have found some other girl who put her fingers in her ears and said, "la, la, la!" when people were telling her that science was only for boys!

Well, anyone who has seen the movie Hidden Figures knows what happened next. She was hired to work at NASA. She was brought in as a computer.

The black women who were hired early in NASA's existence had to have all sorts of wicked math skills. Valerie Thomas most certainly did.

I could spend pages and pages trying to explain what and how she did what she did.

If you want to get into how in the 1970s she became the international expert and go-to source for pretty much everyone in the world for information on how to interpret and use Landsat technology - this is the system of satellites that takes pictures of the earth. She was also instrumental in developing the LACIE program - Large Area Crop Inventory Experiment. - Click here and read the fascinating interview she did about both of these things. The point of LACIE was to measure wheat yields across the globe.

And I'll bet you thought NASA was only concerned with outer space.

Before she retired in 1995, she had been -

- Project manager of the Space Physics Analysis Network
- Associate Chief of the Space Science Data office
- Manager of the NASA Automated System Incident Response Capability
- Chair of the Space Science Data Operations office Education Committee
- Helped to develop the computer designs that supported research on Halley's Comet, studying the Ozone Layer, satellite technology, the Voyager program, and studying a supernova.

What did she invent?

She invented the Illusion Transmitter...obviously.

source

"What is that?" you ask.

1980 - Illusion Transmitter for transmitting 3D optical illusions developed

Valerie Thomas

The “Illusion Transmitter” is basically a device that would simulate a real-time, 3-dimensional viewing of an object through optical illusions with parabolic mirrors.

What did this do?

Well, it allows NASA to look at everything from outer space objects to a section of the globe as if that thing is right in front of them. They can look at it from all sides in great detail. It would be like getting a big slice of Mars as if you could reach out and touch it.

It sends images from space to earth.

NASA uses this technology to this day. It is also used in televisions and has been adapted for hospitals.

Post NASA, Valerie has been busy.

She earned:

The GSFC - Goddard Space Flight Center Medal of Merit
NASA Equal Opportunity Medal - For her work with getting women and minorities in the sciences

She works with:

satellite

The National Technical Association - NTA
Science Mathematics Aerospace Research Institute
Shades of Blue - is a non-profit educational organization dedicated to mentoring, tutoring, counseling, and arranging internship and employment referrals for young people who desire to pursue Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) careers.like

I am happy to share Valerie Thomas with you.

She made it possible for us to speak to our satellites and see the picture they sent back to us!

Day 24 - Emmett Chappelle - The Bio Luminescent Chemist

Emmitt Chappelle

At some point in your life, you've most likely had to pee in a cup for a doctor. I am talking about annual physicals, not the type where someone is checking to see if you've been extra experimental with your recreation.

Then there are all of those other fluids that have to be checked. Spinal fluid, fluid around the lungs, or any other place you've got fluid you might not oughta have. The kind of fluid some doc might want to test.

What exactly are they testing for, and how are they testing for it?

I have to admit before we begin, that I was geeking out over this scientist so much that I got really sidetracked. I've culled the worst of it, but I left some of it in so you could see how nuts my brain went!

The journey to the answer to how docs are testing your urine starts in Phoenix, AZ in 1925.

Emmitt Chappelle was born to farmers. They planted cotton and herded cattle. Emmitt was a kid who was keenly interested in nature and spent his childhood roaming the desert looking at the wildlife there.

He attended a segregated one-room schoolhouse for most of his early education. He graduated top of his class of 25 from Phoenix Colored High School.

By then it was 1942, so he was drafted into the army. He was put into a special unit - I was unable to discover what this special unit was or what it did. The only thing I know for sure is that because he was in this unit he got to take engineering classes. That makes perfect sense, right?

He left the special unit - again, there is no info about why or anything - and was sent to Italy with the 92nd Infantry Division. It was a black unit that called itself the Buffalo Soldiers and had a buffalo as its patch.

92nd Infantry

Emmett was wounded twice and sent back to America.

This is my favorite part - He went to college on the GI Bill! That's right. Did you know that the GI Bill is one of the BEST investments the United States could make in its soldiers? The GI bill has paid this country back one thousandfold by giving soldiers who have fought for our country access to new careers and opportunities. Without this valuable program, our country would be poorer in so many ways. The GI education benefit should be bigger and far more generous than it is! My dad would never have managed what he has accomplished if not for the GI Bill.

Okay, so it hasn't always been administered colorblind and it has been downright discriminatory at times, but it has been successful in helping soldiers.

That said, off of my soapbox.

With the GI bill, Emmett Chappelle was able to get his BS in biochemistry from the University of California at Berkley in 1950. He got his Masters in biochemistry from the University of Washington. He worked as a scientist and biochemist for the Research Institute of Advanced Studies at Stanford between 1955 -1958.

In 1958 he left academia and became a research scientist in corporate America. He joined the research institute of Martin Marietta Corporation in Baltimore. They were all about airplanes and spacecraft.

An aside here - I love how many of these scientists I've looked at this year have some connection to space. Of course, it is possible that I have been subliminally picking space folk because I am completely and utterly in love with astrophysics. Nah. I'm sure that's not it.

Back to it! At this point in his career, Emmett Chappelle made a huge leap forward in cellular biochemistry.

He discovered that single-celled algae are photosynthetic. In other words, photosynthesis is happening on a cellular level.

This discovery enabled a couple of revolutions in space flight.

What? Yeah, I know, stay with me.

Algae could be incorporated into the environmental systems that clean and recycle the astronaut's air and could also be a replenishing source of food that could be cultivated on the spacecraft. (That doesn't sound yummy, but I suppose if you are hurtling through space in a metal container, gourmet food might not be a major concern)

This discovery also allowed scientists to learn more about all other single-celled organisms.

It was a huge discovery...but it didn't stop there.

In 1963 he ended up at NASA as an exobiologist - looking for life beyond the earth - and an astrochemist.

Astrochemist? I didn't even know that was a thing!

I need to write a book about a brilliant kid who is an amateur astrochemist! I am getting so sidetracked with this!

Viking Image

In 1966 he worked on the Viking Spacecraft. I am totally geeking out with all the pictures!! Here's a great one!

In 1977, he went to the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD. He became a remote sensing scientist. A what???

(In my brain I see him playing a cosmic game of Marco Polo with other scientists throughout the cosmos. I know that's not what it means, but that is what popped into my head.)

What a remote sensing scientist does is find ways to remotely monitor natural elements in order to improve environmental management. (I like the cosmic Marco Polo game better) These days they also look at threats from enemies and monitor urban areas for various scientific reasons.

This is where he made another huge mark on history. It began with his fascination with bioluminescence. Bioluminescence is a naturally occurring chemical reaction in some biological entities that creates light without heat. He wanted to understand it better.

I am sorry to say that many fireflies were sacrificed on the altar of science at this point.

RIP Little Dudes

So, what did he discover?

Well, when you mix the satanic compounds - luciferase and luciferin - found in a firefly's blinking butt - with a chemical called Adenosine Triphosphate (ATP) - which is a compound found in all living cells - the ATP will fluoresce.

 Why is this important?

Well, if you are an exobiologist and you are looking for life on Mars, and your robot has a scrapy, scrapy tool for scraping rocks, and you put the satanic compounds from a firefly's blinking but on one of the scraped rock and it fluoresces, then there is a good chance you have just found bacterial life on Mars!

Theoretically.


Yes, yes, yes, but what practical application does any of this have?

Well, Emmett Chappelle discovered that you could find bacterial life in any substance using this technique, not just on scraped rocks on Mars.

He proved this using semen. (I decided I didn't need to know more about this particular choice of substance)

What is the repercussion of this?

For the first time in history, it was possible to find the most remote traces of bacteria in any substance. That includes identifying whether we have undetected bacterial infections in our bodily fluids, foods, water - anything that might be contaminated.

He's the reason it is worthwhile for you to pee in a cup, and why a doctor can detect the earliest signs of something gone amiss with your system. Every single test a doctor does to check to see if you have a bacterial infection is successful because of Emmitt Chappelle's work.

source

It also revolutionized remote sensing science for plants. He discovered that you could use bioluminescence to check plant health. You can tell if a forest is healthy, in drought, whether your crops are healthy, when the best time to pick them might be, whether they are getting enough water and anything else you might need to know about large swaths of plant life.

This discovery changed how everyone in the world manages forests and crop yields. It increased successful food production.

Emmett Chappelle died in October of 2019 at the age of 93.

- He is often cited as one of the most important scientists of the 20th Century.

He accrued fourteen patents for his various discoveries, wrote books and scholarly articles, and mentored and encouraged a generation of African American youth in the sciences.

- Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal from NASA
- Member of the American Chemical Society
- Member of the American Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
- Member of the American Society of Photobiology
- Member of the American Society of Black Chemists
- 2007 Inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for his work on bioluminescence

Emmett Chappelle

I happily give you Emmette Chappelle.

His jobs had cool titles. He was fascinated with nature and fascinating as a person.

Thank you for giving us some tools to see the world in a different light!

Celebrate Black History!

Day 23 - Dr. Percy Julian - One of the Most Important Chemists In American History

Dr. Percy Julian

The most frustrating thing to me about some of the inventors I research is the question that hangs over me as I learn about them.

What could this person have accomplished if the world he or she was born into had been more co-operative?

What might this person have been able to focus on if their early lives had been more amenable to study?

Well, nothing can be done about it now.

Dr. Percy Julian was born in 1899 in Montgomery, Alabama. He was the grandson of enslaved Americans. His father worked as a postal clerk on the railroad, and his mother was...wait for it...a school teacher.

School teachers absolutely rock. Just thought I would throw that in here.

Anyway, Percy's parents encouraged him to study and work hard in school. Unfortunately, there were no schools for black children beyond the eighth grade. His parents encouraged him to apply to DePauw University in Greencastle, IN as a "sub freshman".  I'd never heard this term before. The word means a person preparing to be a freshman.

He had to take high school classes on top of his college classes so he could keep up with his classmates.

His biggest challenge was housing. He could not stay in the dorms on campus because they didn't have any negro accommodations. The boarding house he found would let him stay there, but the woman absolutely refused to cook for him. It took some time before he found a place he could eat.

Eventually, he cleaned a frat house and served meals in return for a room in the attic.

This problem of there being no infrastructure or willingness to deal with a black man was a theme throughout his career in America.

Despite all of the nonsense of trying to find a place to live and eat while taking remedial classes and college classes, Percy graduated Phi Beta Kappa and valedictorian of his class in 1920.

His first teaching job was at Fisk University. It was all right, but what he really wanted was to get a doctorate. He applied to and was accepted to Harvard in 1923. He was given a teaching fellowship.

Harvard was quite shocked when he showed up and turned out to be a black man. They allowed him to get his masters in chemistry, but they were uncomfortable letting a black man teach white students, so they withdrew his teaching fellowship and did not allow him to get his doctorate. Time to get another job.

He got a job at Howard University in the chemistry department.

While working at Howard, he obtained a scholarship to study at the University of Vienna in Austria. He loved living in Europe. For the first time, he was accepted by the intellectual community of students as a peer. It was helpful that he spoke fluent German.

In 1931, Dr. Julian was awarded his P.H D. in Chemistry from the University of Vienna.

He returned from Europe - got involved in some seriously shady nonsense at Howard and was asked to leave.

Calabar Beans

He ended up going back to DePauw University as a teaching assistant. While there, he made his first huge chemical discovery.

In 1935, he isolated Physostigmine from Calabar Beans. You might ask, as I did, what the heck does that do?

It treats glaucoma.

Dr. Percy Julian synthesized the drug that treats glaucoma.

You would think that DePauw University would be falling all over itself to put this man front and center. You would be wrong.

They refused to make him a full professor.

By this time, Dr. Julian had had it with academia. He decided to try his hand in private industry. This turned out to be more difficult than it should have been.

His credentials were stellar, and he'd created the freaking treatment for glaucoma. He was offered a couple of prestigious jobs. Dupont hired him, but when he showed up they apologized to him. They had no idea he was negro, and they could not hire him.

He was also hired by the Institute for Paper Chemistry (IPC) in Appleton, WI. Unfortunately, Appleton was a sundown town. Basically, the law said that no minority was allowed to be in the city limits after sundown, so he couldn't take that job either.

Soybeans

That didn't mean he wasn't still doing research. In fact, he'd started trying to extract chemicals from soybean oil. He put in a huge order for soybean oil from the Glidden company. This large order piqued the interest of the president of the company. He phoned Percy to inquire what he was doing with that much soybean oil.

Over the course of a few conversations, he hired Dr. Julian to be Head of Research in the Soya Department, and that's when things got wild.

German scientists were isolating hormones that might be able to control sex hormones in females, other scientists were discovering that cortisols could be used to treat ailments like rheumatoid arthritis.

The biggest problem with these discoveries is that the process of producing even small amounts of these hormones was expensive and there was no way to make them practical.

Enter Dr. Julian. He not only figured out how to synthesize these hormones from soybeans, but how to do it on an industrial scale. The process he created is still in use today.

For the first time, medicines like cortisone, steroids and the birth control pill became available in large enough quantities to make them affordable for everybody.

He stayed with Glidden until 1953. In 1954 he established Julian Laboratories. In 1961 he sold it and became one of the first black millionaires.

He holds numerous patents for his discoveries.

He spent his later life advocating for more diversity in the sciences and in education.

He founded the Julian Research Institue which he chaired and ran until his death in 1975.

As you can imagine, now that he is dead, his accomplishments have been trumpeted from every corner. People have said things of him like:

in 1999 his synthesis of physostigmine was recognized by the American Chemical Society as “one of the top 25 achievements in the history of American chemistry.”

He's been given a gigantic list of honors. He's in the Inventor's Hall of Fame, of course. Here is a copy and paste from Wikipedia.

Though it is a long list, I kept finding other things people had awarded him that aren't on this list. I stopped looking. That's a rabbit hole I wasn't certain I could escape.

• In 1950, the Chicago Sun-Times named Percy Julian the Chicagoan of the Year.^[21]
• Since 1975, the National Organization for the Professional Advancement of Black Chemists and Chemical Engineers has presented the Percy L. Julian Award for Pure and Applied Research in Science and Engineering.^[48]
• In 1975, Percy L. Julian High School was opened on the south side of Chicago, Illinois as a Chicago public high school.
• In 1980, the science and mathematics building on the DePauw University campus was rededicated as the Percy L. Julian Mathematics and Science Center. In Greencastle, Indiana, where DePauw is located, a street was named after Julian.
• In 1985, Hawthorne School in Oak Park, Illinois, was renamed Percy Julian Middle School.^[49]
• Illinois State University, where Julian served on the board of trustees, named a hall after him.^[50]
• A structure at Coppin State University is named the Percy Julian Science Building.
• In 1990, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.^[51]
• In 1993 Julian was honored on a stamp issued by the United States Postal Service.^[52][53]
• In 1999, the American Chemical Society recognized Julian's synthesis of physostigmine as a National Historic Chemical Landmark.^[54]
• In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Percy Lavon Julian on his list of 100 Greatest African-Americans.^[55]
• In 2011, the qualifying exam preparation committee at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine was named for Percy Julian.
• In 2014, Google honored him with a Doodle.^[56][57][58]
• In 2019, asteroid 5622 Percyjulian, discovered by Eleanor Helin at Palomar Observatory in 1990, was named in his memory.^[59] The official naming citation was published by the Minor Planet Center on 27 August 2019 (M.P.C. 115893).^[60]
• (Click this link to go to Wikipedia and use all of the above links!)

Depauw University seems to have found it in their heart to embrace Dr. Julian's accomplishments after all.

Thank you for making this possible

Dr. Percy Julian was a remarkable man. He spent most of his life fighting a society that actively tried to stop him from discovering cures and making everybody's life more pain-free and bearable.

We owe him a huge debt of gratitude for not giving up on himself or us.

Celebrate Black History!

Day 22 - James Edward Mateo West - Testing, 1,2,3 Testing

James West

I am a fierce advocate of using a microphone when you are performing. It is an amazing tool that allows you to fill a room without straining your instrument. Who knew there was an African American inventor to thank for it?

James West was born in Farmville, Prince Edward County, VA in 1931.

He was a smart kid who was fascinated with - wait for it - taking things apart. Because of his love for dismantling things, he had a bad experience with electricity when he was a kid. It had something to do with taking a radio apart.

"If I had a screwdriver and a pair of pliers, anything that could be opened was in danger,"  James West

Me? I stuck a knife in a toaster when I was a kid and got a bad shock up my arm. What did I learn? Electricity is not a thing to play with. Oh, and I never stuck a knife in a toaster again.

What did James West learn from getting shocked while taking a radio apart? He shocked himself badly and decided he really needed to play with electricity some more.

This is why he is an amazing inventor, and I am a person who just points at amazing inventors and says, "Wow, look at that."

West's parents were not too keen on his love of tinkering. They knew their son was brilliant, and they were worried if he wasn't careful he wouldn't be able to get a job. Jim Crow was still ravaging the southern United States and his parents couldn't think of any black scientists who were working or making a living.

They wanted him to be a doctor.

He wanted to play with electricity.

So, he went off to Temple University and in 1957 he got a Masters in Physics.

Bell Labs hired him.

(An aside here - we owe quite a bit to Bell Labs. They were clearly more worried about getting trained scientists than having a homogenous workforce.)

Electric Transducer

In 1962, James Edward Mateo West, physicist, invented electric transducer technology. He was working to improve hearing aids. Today, this technology is in use in baby monitors, telephones, camcorders, hearing aids, audio recording devices, and microphones.

That's right! West is responsible for the technology that you can find in ninety percent of the microphones manufactured in the world.

Look at all of these storytellers using microphones!

Sherry Lovett

Nancy Donoval

Donald Davis

me

Lyn Ford

I have never James West. I love him.

He is something called an acoustician. He helps balance acoustics in a space and measures sound levels in people's workplaces. Spaces can be designed to either increase the pleasures of a sound in a performance space or decrease the stress of a work environment by tempering the level of noise.


He has also done a great deal of activism work encouraging minority middle and high school students who are interested in going into the sciences.

He co-founded the Association of Black Laboratory Employees (ABLE) which deals with placement and promotional concerns of minority staff members.

He established the Corporate Research Fellowship Program  for Grad Students In Science as well as a summer institute for non-white students

In 2015 Dr. West served on the board of directors for the Ingenuity Project in Baltimore that supports talented middle school students who want to go into the sciences.

Aside from holding over 250 patents that deal with acoustics, he also has been given tons of awards. Here are a few:

National Medal of Technology

- National Medal of Technology and Innovation
- 2010 The Franklin Institute - The Benjamin Franklin Medal in Electrical Engineering
- He's been elected into the National Academy of Engineers
- In 1999 he was inducted in the National Inventors Hall of Fame

Thank you, for the microphone Dr. James West!

Celebrate Black History!

Day 21 - Richard Spikes - Teaching, Barbering, Beer, and Busses

automatic gear shift

As I do these spotlights on African American inventors, I am struck by how incredibly practical-minded they are. Yes, they've created some out of this world things, but they don't start at spectacular even if that's how it ends.

Richard Spikes is a perfect example of what a practical mind does when it encounters a problem of inefficiency.

There is some disagreement about where Spikes was born. In the census, it states that he was born in Dallas, TX, but he always claimed he was born in "Indian Country", which translates in 2020 to Oklahoma.

His father was a barber, and Richard was one of many children. The number is given as high as nine and as low as six. 

Two of his brothers were famous Jazz performers. John Curry Spikes and Reb Spikes. 

Richard was said to be a competent musician in piano and violin, but that was not where his practical mind took him. He became a school teacher in Beaumont, TX. Ultimately he married Lula B. Charlton who was the daughter of Charles Napoleon Charlton who established the first schools for black children in Beaumont. (Incidentally, my mother was a graduate of Charlton Pollard High School in Beaumont.)

After they were married, Richard and Lula moved several times. Each time they went further west. Richard seems to have tried his hand at business as they moved. 

In 1907 in Bisbee, AZ, Spikes opened a saloon. He was displeased with the taps for kegs. The beer didn't flow evenly, and it went bad. Surely there was a way to get a smoother flow and keep it fresher longer.

 His very practical mind decided there had to be a better way, so, he invented one and patented it. The patent was bought by The Milwaukee Brewing Company. They are still using the same design Spikes came up with to this very day. Everyone who has ever tapped a keg is using it.

After fixing keg technology, he moved to California. He did a whole host of things in California. He ended up running a number of businesses and patenting inventions. I won't go through all of them, but I will post a list of all of the things he patented below. 

There are three inventions I want to highlight. They were all for automobiles. One is controversial, one was quite timely, and the last is still in use today. 

Pierre Arrow Car

The controversial one - in 1913, he created a signaling system for cars and installed it in his Pierre-Arrow. Car manufacturers loved it and had it installed in their cars. 

This is controversial because six years before Spikes created his signaling system, somebody else had already invented one. Richard did not invent this originally. Why didn't he know someone else had invented the device? Because nobody used it before he put it in his own car and started driving around with it.  The original inventor? Percy Douglas-Hamilton. You will see sites that claim Spikes was the first inventor. 

The second automobile invention was the automatic gear shift that went into the automatic transmission. He was paid one hundred thousand dollars for this invention. Not a small sum in the 1930s.

The most common one - aside from the spout that taps kegs, was an automatic safety brake system. He was going blind while he was inventing it, so he also invented a drafting machine for blind designers so he could finish his work. 

source

His final invention - the automatic safety brake system - is installed in school busses all over this nation.

Here is a list of what he either invented or innovated:

• railroad semaphore (1906)
• automatic car washer (1913)
• automobile directional signals (1913)
• beer keg tap (1910)
• self-locking rack for billiard cues (1910)
• continuous contact trolley pole (1919)
• combination milk bottle opener and cover (1926)
• method and apparatus for obtaining average samples and temperature of tank liquids (1931)
• automatic gear shift (1932)
• transmission and shifting thereof (1933)
• automatic shoe shine chair (1939)
• multiple barrel machine gun (1940)
• horizontally swinging barber chair (1950)
• automatic safety brake (1962)

source

Hats off to a very practical man who couldn't help but find things to fix, improve existing technology, or simply create necessary devices out of thin air!

Thank You, Richard Spikes!

Celebrate Black History!

Day 20 - Dr. Mark Dean - Father of Interconnected Tech

Hilton Business center

I don't often use business centers in hotels anymore. Back in the day, I found myself in there printing things, sending off faxes, or accessing my emails. These days I travel with a laptop. I have used the business center to print out tickets, but I recently gave in to the last vestige of technology and now I just get my boarding passes digitally. 

It feels like the whole world is one huge interconnected business center at times.


We have Dr. Mark Dean to thank for that.

Mark was born in Jefferson City, TN in 1957. He loved building things from an early age. This should surprise nobody! So many of these incredible engineers I've studied this month had an insatiable desire to build things out of what came to hand.

Mark built a tractor. As a kid, he built a working tractor. His dad helped, apparently, but honestly, what kid decides to build a tractor and then does it?

Unsurprisingly, he was an amazing student, graduating with straight A's from Jefferson High School. Oh, and just in case I am giving the idea that he was a straight-up geeky nerd, or possibly a nerdy-geek, which I have no doubt he was, he was also a gifted athlete.

In 1979 he graduated with a BS in Engineering from the University of Tennessee.

IBM hired him fairly quickly after that, and he spent most of his adult life working with them.

In 1984, Mark Dean teamed up with Dennis Moeller on a project to make it easier to connect computers to auxiliary devices. The end result was that the two of them patented the Industry Standard Architecture or ISA. Basically, what this means is that you can attach a monitor, keyboard, fax, copier, scanner or whatever you want to your PC by simply plugging it in.

color monitor

It also made it possible for you to fit most keyboards, printers, faxes and the like to any type of computer.

That system alone would have been enough to put Dean into the history books as a pretty important inventor. He was just getting started.

His work also led to the color monitor. Some of us are old enough to remember what monitors used to be like before they were in color!

Pretty cool, but not enough, apparently.

In 1999, Dean led a team at the IBM facility in Austin, Texas that developed the first gigahertz chip. This thing does one billion calculations a second.

Dr. Dean holds three of the nine original patents for IBM.

While he was working for IBM, he also got his Masters in Engineering from Florida Atlantic, and then a Doctorate in Engineering from Stanford. You know, because you can never know too much.

In 1996, Dr. Dean was named an IBM Fellow. He was the first African American to be given that honor. (Though, to be honest, that shouldn't have been a hard call to make.)

In 1997 he was given the Black Engineer of the Year Presidential Award. He was also inducted into the National Inventor's Hall of Fame that year.





Dr. Mark Dean - He made the PC what it is today.

#Celeberateblackhistory.

Day 19 - Dr. Patricia Bath - Super Hero of Sight!

Patricia E. Bath at her Los Angeles home office, 1994

Sometimes it is amazing to be the first. The Wright Brothers were the first to fly a plane. John Glenn was the first American in space. Neil Armstrong was the first man on the moon.

They had to be the first because nobody had ever done those things before.

What if their whole lives had been about being the first of something?

Enter Dr. Patricia Bath - Super Hero




"Do not let your mind be imprisoned by majority thinking. Remember that the limits of science are not the limits of imagination." - Dr. Patricia Bath (source)

Patricia Bath was born in Harlem, NY in 1942. Her parents worked hard to provide for the family, but there was never much money.

They instilled in their daughter the importance of education. Her father had been a Merchant Marine, a writer who helped her appreciate travel and culture. Her mother worked as a domestic and she stressed how important it was to get an education. She also bought her daughter a chemistry set.

Patricia attended Charles Evans High School. (This school is no longer in operation.)

At sixteen, she won a National Science Foundation Scholarship. It allowed her to work at Yeshiva University and Harlem Hospital Center. She studied the effects of stress, and diet on cancer patients. The head of the program, Dr. Robert Bernard, was so impressed with her work that he included some of her research in his final paper.

source

Her work was so phenomenal that in 1960 she won a merit award form Madamoiselle Magazine.

She achieved her BA in chemistry from Hunter College in 1964 and graduated from the College of Medicine at Howard University in 1968.

She was an activist at Howard. It was the height of the Civil Rights Movement, and she was in the thick of it. She organized and led Howard University medical students in providing volunteer health care services to the Poor People's Campaign in Resurrection City in the summer of 1968.

After Howard, she returned to New York to do a residency at New York University. She was the first African American woman to ever complete a residency in Opthalmology.

Afterward, she did a fellowship at Columbia University in the ophthalmology department. She discovered that African Americans were twice as likely to go blind, and eight times as likely to suffer from glaucoma. Dr. Bath was frustrated that many of the conditions that lead to blindness could be prevented with basic treatments. To combat this problem, she designed a community system to bring basic medical care to underserved populations that could not easily afford to see a doctor.

The system she pioneered? Community Opthalmology. The model she created is now a worldwide system.

From this point on, Dr. Bath started down a path that meant that almost everything she did was harder because she was either the first woman, African American woman, or African American person to achieve it. She said of her life that her biggest obstacles were the racism and sexism she encountered at every turn. Luckily, this did not stop her.


 1975 - Dr. Bath was the first female faculty member in the Department of Opthalmology  at UCLA's Jules Stein Eye Institute

1976 - Dr. Bath Cofounded the American Institute for the Prevention of Blindness. It was founded on the belief that sight is a human right. Their goal was and is to work to preserve people's sight. Today, this is a huge international organization that works to bring ophthalmological care to people who might not be able to get it. They work everywhere from third world countries to poor neighborhoods right here in America. She also instituted something called telemedicine into the organization.

Dr. Bath spent the rest of her life fighting what she felt was unnecessary blindness.

- 1983 Bath helped create the Opthalmology Research Training Program at UCLA and Drew University. She also chaired the program, becoming the first woman in the nation to hold such a position.

source

In the 1980s Dr. Bath became interested in lasers. She had an idea that lasers could be used to help
people with cataracts. She ducked out of America for a few years and went to do research in Germany and France.

"In 1986, Bath did research in the laboratory of Danièle Aron-Rosa, a pioneer researcher in lasers and ophthalmology at Rothschild Eye Institute of Paris,^[19] and then at the Laser Medical Center in Berlin, where she was able to begin early studies in laser cataract surgery, including her first experiment with excimer laser photoablation using human eye bank eyes." source

The end result of her research?



- 1988 - Dr. Bath patented the Laserphalco Probe for cataract surgery.
- Dr. Bath is the first African American woman to receive a patent for a medical device.
She also holds patents for this device in Japan, Canada, and Europe.

One of Dr. Bath's most amazing moments was using the probe to remove cataracts from the eyes of a woman who hadn't been able to see for thirty years.

- 1993 Dr. Bath retires and became a Howard University Pioneer in Academic Medicine.

The Laserphalco Probe is used worldwide today. If you hear that someone is going in for cataract surgery...they are about to come face to face with Dr. Bath's brainchild.

She was the first in lots of things because she didn't let anyone stop her.

Dr. Bath was a superhero who fought for the right to see.

#celebrateblack history

Day 18 - Dr. Shirley Jackson - Who's Calling?

who first tamed fire???

Every single piece of technology you have ever used had to be invented by someone. Everything you wear had to be woven or created by some other process. The names of people who first figured out how to create those things are lost to us. We don't know the name of the first person who figured out how to cook over open flames, or created writing or made the first paintings, or anything like that.

That is understandable. Most of those things were invented so long ago, nobody has any idea when and how they came into being.

What about some of the things you use every day? Do you know much about who created the technology we take for granted?

Dr. Jackson

Once you meet Dr. Shirley Jackson, you will know a great deal more about some everyday things!

Dr. Jackson did so many things and is still doing so many things that there is no way to encapsulate it in this quick bite.

Shirley Ann Jackson was born in 1946. She graduated as the valedictorian from her high school, and was pleased to be accepted into MIT!

That's when things got difficult. Not because of the work. That was hard, but that wasn't the biggest thing. Her classmates shunned her.

She tells a tale of being told to go away the first time she tried to join a study group with her white peers.

Being the only black woman getting a physics degree did not make her a popular person in the 1960s.

If you want to read about the journey that saw her decide to stay at MIT, fight to get more minority students admitted, create the first Black Student Union on campus, and keep excelling until she'd become the very first African American woman to graduate with a PH.D. from MIT in 1973, click here.

Her Ph.D. is in Theoretical Elementary Particle Physics!

Once she left MIT, she did a whole bunch of very cool stuff.

She did her post-doc work with Fermilab and CERN. CERN is the European organization for nuclear research. It is where they have the Large Hadron Collider! I am seriously geeked out by that! Fermilab is the American particle physics laboratory.

Where did she go from there?

Bell laboratories - for those of you who don't know, this means she went to work in telecommunications.

What on earth is a particle physicist going to do at a telephone company?

Simple -

Dr. Shirley Jakson is responsible for a few wee bits of technology that you might have used in your lifetime.

- Touch Tone Telephones
- Portable Fax Machine
- Caller ID
- Call Waiting
- Fiber Optic Cables

After she left Bell Labs. she did some other stuff.

1995 - President Clinton appointed her to the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. She led international efforts to promote nuclear safety.
1997 - She helped establish the International Nuclear Regulators Association. She served as the first chairperson.
2001 - She was the first African American Woman elected to the National Academy of Engineering
2004 - She was the President of the Association for the Advancement of Science

National Medal of Science

2009 - President Obama appointed her to the President's Council of Advisors on Science.
2015 - President Obama awarded Dr. Jackson the National Medal of Science, the nation's highest honor for contributions in science and engineering.

She currently holds 53 honorary degrees and is president of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institue in Troy, New York.

So, the next time you don't have to answer the phone for that annoying telemarketer, or you get a beep because someone else is trying to reach you, give a silent thank you to Dr. Jackson!

#Celebrate Black History!