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.

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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.

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"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 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.

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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.

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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 17 - Lonnie G. Johnson - Not Just A Super Soaker

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You might have heard that one of the best selling toys of all time was made by a black man. I'm talking about the Super Soaker.


My son had one of these things when he was little. He and my daughter used to invite hoards of kids to our house and they would have water fights. Water balloons, super soakers, the hose, and the Slip n' Slide.

They had a big time.

When I was looking for African American inventors, I didn't even bother with the "Father of the Super Soaker".

His story sounded like a David and Goliath type of tale.

He invented the Super Soaker, Hasbro didn't give him credit for it -  by which I mean that didn't want to pay him - he sued them, won, and got a huge payday.

How many African American inventors had to go through this? Lots. As much fun as the Super Soaker is, I wasn't certain it merited an entire blog post.

Then, I learned about Lonnie Johnson.

All I could think as I read through his biography is - You've got to be kidding me! This is the guy who created the Super Soaker? This guy? How come we only know about the Super Soaker?

I don't even know where to begin!

He was born in Mobile, Al on October 6th (that's my birthday too) in 1949. His father, a WWII vet who became a handyman after the war, noticed that Lonnie liked to tinker with things. So, at a young age, his father explained how electricity worked.

The kids in Lonnie's neighborhood called him "The Professor" because he was always tinkering and inventing things.

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He made a go-kart with a working engine when he was a kid. He created it out of scrap metal. They had to push it to get it going, but once it was going, it could sustain itself. Eventually, the police made them stop using it. Apparently, when children create a motorized vehicle it isn't likely to come up to basic road standards.

He continued to tinker the entire time he was growing up. He even made his own toys.

He attended segregated Williamson High School in Alabama. He actually graduated in the last segregated class.

He was fascinated by robots he saw on television. He had no idea they were just suits with actors in them. So, he decided to build one for himself. It took him a year, and at the end of his senior year, his school entered Lonnie's creation, Linex, into the Junior Engineering Technical Society (JETS) Science Fair held at the University of Alabama in 1968.

Incidentally, this is the same university where George Wallace attempted to prevent the first two black students who were enrolled there from entering about five years earlier.

Linux and Lonnie

Lonnie's high school was the only black school that entered the competition. Linex, Lonnie's robot, won first prize. The people who were judging the competition were not from the university.

The university officials didn't seem too happy about Lonnie's win. He recalls that nobody from the university said anything to him aside from "Good-bye" and "Ya'll drive safe."

They were not interested in the senior who had built his own working robot. Well, who would be? I mean, that wasn't such an incredible thing for an eighteen-year-old to do in 1968.

Anyway, he ended up at Tuskeegee where he achieved advanced degrees in mechanical and nuclear engineering.



What he discovered once he got out into the working world was that Tuskeegee had prepared him better to be an engineer than some of the white engineers he encountered who'd gotten educations at some of the most prestigious schools in the country.

I would like to editorialize here: I suspect that this was not because the other schools lacked solid education. Lonnie G. Johnson is freaking brilliant. That might have had something to do with it.

I know, you're thinking, "So, after all of that he made the Super Soaker, and that is his claim to fame after all of that fancy education?"

Well, I suppose so, but on the way there he also:

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- Helped develop systems for the stealth bomber for the military

Galileo Spacecraft

- In 1979 he was the systems engineer for Galileo - You know, for NASA









- Then, in the 1980s while working on some other projects, he accidentally created the basis for the Super Soaker. He sold it to a company that Hasbro acquired.

- In 1991 The Super Soaker made over 200 million dollars.

- He holds over one hundred patents

He made a mint after Hasbro paid up. He left industry and opened his own company.

Johnson Research and Development.

He started working on something he calls the Johnson Thermo Electric Energy Converter. This thing would turn heat energy into electricity.

It has generated a ton of interest. If he gets this thing working it will revolutionize the green energy industry.

He's already made a huge mark on the world culturally, militarily, and astronomically...I suppose it is time to do it ecologically.

Lonnie G. Johnson - So much more than a Super Soaker!

Still, that thing is really cool. I'm just sayin'

In 2011, Johnson was inducted into the Alabama Engineering Hall of Fame - The first black engineer ever to have been so honored.

Lonnie G. Johnson

Celebrate Black History!

Day 13 - Benjamin Montgomery - On His Own Terms

Benjamin Montgomery

What does it look like when you are so brilliant and capable people have no choice but to acknowledge it no matter what or who they think you are?

It looks like Benjamin Thornton Montgomery. (1819 - 1877)

Benjamin was born in 1819 to an enslaved woman in Loudon County, VA. The first enslaver used Benjamin as a companion for his young son. I have to assume they were little boys together. This was not an unusual thing.


What was unusual was that the enslaver's son taught Benjamin how to read and write.

I could find no reason for this, but at some point, the first enslaver decided to, as Mark Twain called it in his book Puddin' Head Wilson, "sell Benjamin down the river".

These days we use the phrase - Selling someone down the river - as a way of saying that someone betrayed them.

Always Had Mixed Feelings About This

Back in the days of enslavement when the phrase came into the vernacular, it was used to denote an enslaved person who was sold from the northern states to the southern states because they were a problem. They would be sold to the cotton plantations as a punishment. The southern states were seen as a place where enslaved people would be treated inhumanely.

There is absolutely no information that I could find that explained why Benjamin was sold further south. I just thought I'd throw that lovely little piece of etymology in there.

Benjamin was sold to Joseph E. Davis, brother of Jefferson Davis - who was the first and only president of the Confederacy - in Natchez, MS in 1836.


I didn't know much about either Joseph or Jefferson Davis before I wrote this. I ended up having to research them to really get a good picture of why what happened next happened.

Joseph E. Davis

Before we go further, let me state that both Jefferson and Joseph - based on what they did - seem to have been morally upright, civic-minded citizens. They worked in their communities, they loved America, they held office, and they were saddened that the abolitionists made them have to withdraw from the Union.

 Joseph believed in the "Jeffersonian philosophy" about enslaved people. In summary, enslavement is wrong. Though negroes are a "lesser race" they should be eased out of enslavement.





Joseph Davis provided the enslaved people on his land with medical care and allowed them to sell their own products and keep the money so long as they paid him for the lost labor he experienced when they were working for themselves. He created a court on his lands so they could settle legal problems, provided them enough to eat, and trusted them to police themselves instead of hiring overseers. It was a community of enslaved people that worked the land and took care of his business while also taking care of themselves.

Benjamin Montgomery delighted and surprised Joseph Davis. When the enslaver discovered Benjamin could read, he encouraged him to use the library on Hurricane Plantation. 

Hurricane Plantation

The more Joseph knew of Benjamin, the more impressed he became. Eventually, he put Benjamin in charge of both his and Jefferson Davis' plantation which was right next door.

Benjamin was not only a reader, organizer, and leader, he learned about land surveying and management, taught himself how to create and read architectural designs, and learned about flood management. He was also mechanically minded. He repaired machines and did everything on the plantation that needed doing. He also ran the commissary where the enslaved people could sell their products and buy things on credit from Joseph Davis.

Okay, and now we get into the potential mythology part as I could find only one source for this story.

Apparently, Benjamin escaped from Hurricane Plantation at some point. He was captured and returned to Joseph. The two men were supposed to have had a long, involved conversation, about why Benjamin decided to run away and the end result was that they came to some kind of mutual agreement.

(I would like to interject at this point that I have written and deleted several paragraphs about how infuriating it was to realize that Joseph Davis had no idea that Montgomery might find being enslaved onerous even if the enslaver was beneficent! Still, I wasn't in that conversation, so I don't know how it went. Heck, I don't even know if it actually happened!)

Joseph allowed Benjamin to open his own store on Hurricane Plantation. Benjamin did business with everybody. The enslaved and the enslavers came to his mercantile. He opened a line of credit in his own name and bought and sold products from as far away as New Orleans. He became a wealthy man. He even paid Joseph Davis for his wife's labor so that she could stay home and raise the children.

Montgomery's Propeller

Because Benjamin was doing business on the Mississippi River, he noticed that sometimes the riverboats that brought his goods ran into shallow water and got stuck, or had to make long trips to avoid shallow areas. This delayed his shipments.

At this point in his life, it was generally accepted that nobody, black or white, was as skilled a mechanic as Benjamin Montgomery. He put his mind to the problem and came up with a solution.


He modified a propeller for steamboats that could adjust its angle and how it moved so that it could even maneuver in shallow water. It changed the steamboat industry on the Mississippi.

In 1858 Benjamin attempted to patent his upgrades. The United States patent office refused his patent. He was enslaved, and therefore not a citizen of the country, and therefore not allowed to hold a patent.

In years to come, both Jefferson and Joseph Davis attempted to patent the device under their own names, and both were denied because they were not the original inventors.

After the Civil War, Benjamin was a freedman. He returned to Hurricane Plantation and started farming it with other freedmen.

Joseph sold the plantation to Benjamin for 300,000 dollars.

Montgomery was potentially the first freedman to assume an elected office. In 1867, he was appointed as Justice of The Peace for Davis Bend, the name that was given to the settlement of freedmen living on the land that had been Joseph and Jefferson Davis' plantations.

Davis Bend

Benjamin wanted to turn it into a community for freedmen.

His dream did not come true. After he died,  his sons continued his legacy.

After the Civil War, Benjamin Montgomery was one of the wealthiest plantation owners in the southern United States.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it!


Joseph Davis and Benjamin Montgomery became close friends in the years they spent together.

In fact, when Joseph Davis died, Benjamin oversaw having his body transported to Davis Bend and buried him with honor on Brierfield Plantation Cemetery which was part of Hurricane Plantation at the time.

So, here is to Benjamin Thornton Montgomery. He was an amazing man in his own right and on his own terms. He wasn't successful because somebody gave him a boost. He was successful because nobody stopped him.

Celebrate Black History!

Day 14 - Dr. Betty Wright Harris - Environmentalist, Explosives Expert, Girl Scout, and All Around Bad Ass Chemist

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You are watching an intense movie in the theatre. There is a bomb somewhere in the city, and nobody knows who planted it or where it is.

Some gorgeous actress who is the child/spouse/sister/lover or whatever of some actor that radiates mature father figure, public servant out of every pore is demanding that the police/government agency/rogue agent "I can find you" character locate the actress and the bomb in time.

You Know, Like Liam Neeson

The handsome, incredibly cut, neatly coiffed government agent or possibly the handsomely disheveled, sarcastic detective happens to pick up someone who looks suspicious.

His instincts are telling him something is wrong with this odd suspect. THEN...

Well, that is where Dr. Betty Wright Harris enters the scene.

Not literally, but she is there. Let me explain.

Betty Wright was born in 1940 in Louisiana by the Ouachita River. She was the seventh child out of a family of eleven kids. Her father was a tenant farmer who eventually earned enough to buy his own land. Her mother was an educator.

Betty was raised with a very strong work ethic and a firm belief that education is one of the most important things in the world.

She graduated from high school at sixteen and achieved her first degree at nineteen. She got her BS in Chemistry with a Minor in Mathematics from Southern University.

Then, because this life long learner needed more learning, she got a Master's degree in Chemistry from Atlanta University in Georgia. 

Giving back to the community was equally important in her life. Betty Wright Harris spent a decade teaching Chemistry at the college level.

Eventually, she needed to spend more time learning. She went to work at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Her interest was caught by using chemistry to clean up industrial sites, nuclear disasters, and trying to figure out how to restore the environment.

Well, if you are going to go into a field where more research is needed, there is only one reasonable path. Learn some more so you can come at it with more knowledge. Time for a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of New Mexico.

When she'd learned all they could teach her, Dr. Harris started pioneering some science.

She is a badass chemist who has spent her life working to clean up the planet, recruit more women and minorities into the world of science, and has generally made the world a safer, cleaner place.

She designed the Girl Scout Badge in Chemistry. Of course she did.






Wait, I've forgotten something. Oh yes, back to the opening. What does Dr. Betty Wright Harris have to do with our culprit who has been collared, but has a deeper secret that he has not divulged?

Well, in the early 1980s, while becoming an internationally recognized expert in chemical explosives, Dr. Harris discovered that there was a way to detect the merest traces of a certain type of compound used in explosives on the ground, people, and clothing. It is called the TATB Spot Test. She patented it in 1984.

Dr. Wright's test can check for the presence of chemicals used in making nitroaromatic explosives.

Nitroaromatic explosives - like TNT - are extremely bad for the body. They are incredibly stable, need an igniter, and once they've exploded, they can be absorbed into your skin. They cause all sorts of health problems.

"Nitroaromatic compounds are hazardous to human health and are registered on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's list of priority pollutants for environmental remediation. Although the majority of these compounds are synthetic in nature, microorganisms in contaminated environments have rapidly adapted to their presence by evolving new biodegradation pathways that take advantage of them as sources of carbon, nitrogen, and energy." 

The TATB test can be used when the military or a commercial enterprise is called in to clean up a contaminated site. This test will let the organization know if there is a nitroaromatic compound present. This knowledge has saved many lives.

It can also detect nitroaromatics on someone if they have been handling them.

Back to our movie!

Our hunky police officer tests the culprit with a simple test that is done by running a piece of reactive paper over the suspect's hands discovers that he has been handling explosives and the movie builds to a climax as various characters are enjoined to find the bomb and the beautiful actress before everything goes up in smoke!

Dr. Betty Wright Harris

The movie? Far fetched.


The reality? Cleaning up contaminated sites, spot checks at airports or any other place there is a need to make sure someone hasn't been in contact with specific, dangerous explosives is a real application of this technology.

Thank you, Dr. Harris, for helping us clean up our messes, giving the Girl Soucts a cool badge, inspiring a generation of women and minorities to go into the sciences, and keeping those who have to go after the worst contamination on the planet as safe as they can possibly be!

Celebrate Black History!

Day 11 - Thomas L. Jennings - The Dry Clean King

Old Clothes Press

One of the most terrifying things you can find in an object of clothing is that little tag that says, "Dry Clean Only".

You see that tag, and you know you have a finicky fabric on your hands. Well, at least you can get it clean. There was a time when you would just have to put up with the stains.


Thomas L. Jennings (1791 - 1859) was born a free man in New York, NY.






He was a successful businessman who owned and operated his own tailoring shop. He was married to an enslaved woman named Elizabeth. This was difficult because even though Thomas was free, legally, his children belonged to Elizabeth's enslaver.

One of the things Thomas noted was that customers were often dissatisfied with the cleaning methods of the day. They would complain about the stains that marred their nice outfits.

Dry Clean Only

Thomas began experimenting with chemicals that would clean clothes without damaging the fabric. In 1821 he filed a patent for the solution he created. He called the process he'd invented Dry Scouring.

He was the first African American to ever be granted a patent under the Patent Act of 1793.

When the government approved his patent, it caused quite a stir.

In order to get the patent, Jennings had to swear that he was an American Citizen. There were any number of people who were offended by this because it never occurred to them to think of black people as American Citizens. It was a huge admission by the government that many thought overstepped the law.

The patented formula for Dry Scouring was a huge success and it was adopted far and wide. With the proceeds from his invention, Thomas Jennings bought his wife and child out of enslavement.

He spent the rest of his life as an abolitionist.

in 1831, he was the secretary of the First Annual Convention of the People of Color in Philadelphia,, PA. 

NIHF

In 1855 he helped found the Legal Rights Association. This organization took on discrimination cases.

Jennings died in 1859, a year before the Civil War began, and six years before that most hated institution of government-sanctioned human chattel was finally abolished for good.


In 2018 Thomas Jennings was inducted into the Inventor's Hall of Fame for his patented formula for Dry Scouring - or as we call it today - Dry Cleaning!


Here's to Thomas Jennings!

A man who paved the way and fought until his last breath for the good of society.

Celebrate Black History!

Day 9 Bessie Blount Griffith - Physical Therapist and Graphologist

Bessie Blount Griffith (1914 - 2009) has got to be one of the coolest people I've researched this month. Absolutely fascinating.

Bessie was born in Hickory, VA.

She attended Diggs Chapel Elementary School in Hickory. It was one of the institutions created after the Civil War to educate black children.

It was like every other school in America in those days. It taught conformity in all of its bland, mundane and sometimes cruel ways. To be different was to be maladapted, and everyone knows that the best way to deal with maladaptives was to beat them.

Bessie was left-handed.

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Her teacher would rap her knuckles with a ruler in order to make her use her "right" hand.

Bessie forced herself to use her right hand in school, but she was clearly the type of kid who would look you dead in the eye and think "challenge accepted".

She kept using her "wrong" hand when she wasn't in school. She trained herself to be ambidextrous.
That clearly wasn't enough.

She taught herself to write while holding the pen in her teeth.
She also taught herself to write with her feet.

Why? Who knows? Possibly she just wanted to see how many other "wrong" ways she could write.

Unfortunately for Bessie, when she got to sixth grade, Hickory ran out of money to fund her school, so they closed it.

Her family moved to New Jersey,

Bessie finished her education through homeschooling. Eventually, she earned her GED and enrolled in Community Kennedy Memorial Hospital's Nursing Program.

She attended Panzar College of Physical Education and then Union Jr. College.

She trained to be a physical therapist.

She was one of the few African American physical therapists at the time. She blended interpretive dance into her work.

Then, WWII slammed the world. Soldiers with broken bodies flooded the VA system. Physical therapists were needed to help these wounded warriors find their way back to some kind of normalcy.

Bessie worked with lots of soldiers. She realized that there were some basic functions that amputees could not do alone and they were the very functions that would help them live independently or at least gain some sense of self.

So, she started employing skills that she'd gained in elementary school. She taught amputees how to write with their teeth. She taught them how to use their feet instead of their hands, and she started inventing devices to help them live better lives.

One of her devices was a self-feeding machine. It consisted of a device with the food in it and a tube that went to the mouth. An amputee only had to bite down on the tube, and the machine would dispense a bite of food.

source

She patented the device, but the VA in America was not interested in using it. So, she sold it to the French. The French employed it in all of their hospitals and their colonies. She started making a name for herself in the field of physical therapy devices.

During her career, she worked as a physical therapist for Thomas Edison's son Theodore. She was a frequent guest in his home and talked over her ideas for inventions with the family.

She created an emesis basin and had the design patented. Again, the American hospitals were not interested. She sold the idea to the Belgiums. They still use this device in their hospitals to this day.






In 1969, Bessie decided on a career change. She went into law enforcement doing forensic work.

She'd spent so much time writing with every single limb of her body and retraining others on how to do it in various states of emotional distress that over the years she'd become an expert on handwriting.

Bessie was hired as a medical graphologist.

source

She worked freelance for a number of years with the police departments in New Jersey and Virginia. In 1977 she was invited to train and work with Scotland Yard. 





After her stint at Scotland Yard, she applied to work with the FBI. They were not interested.


So, she opened her own business where she used her extensive forensics training to authenticate pre-Civil War documents. Bessie continued to run this business until she was 83.

Respect!

Bessie Blount Griffith earned it.

Celebrate Black History!

27 - Alexander Miles - Hold The Door, Please!

Alexander Miles

Alexander Miles

1838? - 1918

Who Was He?

The Brownstone Miles Built

His biography is one of a successful man doing businessman things. If this blog was about that, this would be a really long entry. It isn't, so I am going to summarize:

Alexander Miles was born someplace around 1838. Sites vary, but truthfully, this information seems to be unknown.

He was in an interracial marriage with an older woman and had one child with her and at least two stepchildren.

He was a barber.

He sold insurance to black folks who could not get it.

He built a brownstone in a place that is called Miles Block because of the properties he owned there.

He was a landlord.

He was very successful.

At one point he was considered the richest African American in the Northwest.

What Did He Invent?

The story goes that he and his daughter Grace were riding in an elevator, and the doors had not been properly closed, and he felt it was quite dangerous.

In fact, elevator travel was quite dangerous. There was a system for closing the doors, but it required the person in the elevator to activate it.

Miles set out to improve the system.

Alexander Miles designed and patented a design for fully automatic elevator doors.

What Is His Legacy?

Miles' design is still in use in every single elevator you have ever gotten into that has an automatic door. Every. Single. One.

In 2007 he was inducted into the National Inventor's Hall of Fame.

The next time you encounter an elevator, say a thank you to Alexander Miles.

He's the reason the door closes and doesn't open again until the elevator arrives.

It doesn't open on your trip up or down either...unless it is broken, and that is not his fault!

Celebrate Black History!

Day 1 - The ABC's of Black History Month

Day 2 - Archie Alphonso Alexander - Mathematician/Engineer

Day 3 - Sarah Boone - Inventor and Domestic Goddess

Day 4 - Charles R. Drew - Blood Man

Day 5 - Mary Beatrice Davidson Kenner - Inventor of The Sanitary Pad

Day 6 - Ernest Everett Just - Biologist, Zoologist, Cell man
Day 7 - Frederick McKinley Jones - The Coolest Man in Modern History

Day 8 - Sarah Goode - A Practical Bed For Small Spaces
Day 9 - William Henry Cling - Did He Invent The Hospital Bed Before Gatch?
Day 10 - Inez Beverly Prosser and Brown V.S. The Board of Education
Day 11 - Jan Ernst Mateliger - Mechanical Engineer/Sole Man
Day 12 - Samuel L. Kountz Jr. - Revolutionized Transplant Surgery
Day 13 - Lewis Howard Latimer - Incandescent Inventor
Day 14 - Marie Van Brittan Brown - Home Security
Day 15 - Norbert Rillieux - Sugar Man
Day 16 - Otis Boykin - He Kept Hearts Beating
Day 17 - Alice H. Parker - Heating It Up!
Day 18 - Lloyd Quarterman - Chemist and Atom Man

Day 19 - Robert F. Flemming Jr. - Guitar Man

Day 20 - Charles S. L. Baker - The Friction Radiator 
Day 21 - Granville T. Woods - The Black Edison
Day 22 - Alfred L. Cralle - Next Time You Have Ice Cream...
Day 23 - Ellen Elgin - Through The Wringer
Day 24 - Dr. Daniel Hale Williams - Holding A Heart In the Palm of His Hands
Day 25 - Benjamin Bradley - Steam Engine Dominance
Day 26 - Elijah McCoy - The Real One
Day 27 - Alexander Miles - Hold The Door, Please!

26 - Elijah McCoy - The Real One

Elijah McCoy

Elijah McCoy

1844 - 1929

Who Was He?

Elijah McCoy's parents escaped to Canada on the Underground Railroad and started a new life in freedom. Elijah was born in Colchester, Ontario. 

McCoy was educated in segregated schools in Colchester Township in Ontario. He had a natural aptitude for mechanical things, and he would often take things apart and then put them back together.

His parents decided he needed more education, and they saved their money to make sure he got it. At the age of 15, they sent him to Edinburgh Scotland to study mechanics as an apprentice.

After a few years, he was certified as a mechanical engineer. He did not return to America until the end of the Civil War.

He moved to Michigan and the only work he could get was on the Michigan Central Railroad.

He worked as a fireman (one who shovels coal into the engine) and an oiler. An oiler's job is to oil down the moving parts of a machine.

The locomotive had to stop frequently and the oilers would have to walk along the track and check the axels and bearings to make sure they were properly oiled. This added lots of time to train travel.

McCoy decided that there had to be a better way to handle the oiler's job.

What Did He Invent?

Automatic Lubricating Cup

Elijah's first invention was the automatic lubricating cup. It allowed trains to run for longer periods of time without maintenance.

The automatic lubricating cup dripped oil onto the moving parts of machines and could be adjusted for different needs.

After he filed his patent, railroads all over America and Europe went nuts for it.

He transformed train travel all over the world. There were other oil lubricating systems, but none worked as well as McCoy's.

McCoy spent his life tinkering with his lubricator and other inventions that pertained to lubricating systems.

For most of his life, though people knew he was an inventor and had invented useful things, they had no idea how much McCoy changed how machines worked because he did not have the capital to finance his own construction of the devices.

He sold his patents to railroads and other employers.  It wasn't until 1920 that he established his own company.

Because he sold his patents, McCoy's name is not associated with most of the systems he invented, but people certainly knew about the lubricating cup.

McCoy filed 60 patents with the patent office and many of them were used by the railroad service. 

What Is His Legacy?

McCoy's lubricating system didn't just make train travel more convenient and faster, it was used on all sorts of mechanical devices that needed lubricating. 

His real legacy, of course, was his detailed craftsmanship, and clever mind. 

Then, there is this.....

There were a number of people who realized that McCoy's lubricating cup was brilliant, and they pirated the idea without actually making the patented design. Their devices did not work as well.

So, when people bought the lubricating cups, it became important to have "The Real McCoy".

When we use this phrase today, that is the etymology of it, but it could be based on some earlier phrases that were similar that got co-opted by the sound of McCoy's name and his particular history.

Celebrate Black History!

Day 1 - The ABC's of Black History Month

Day 2 - Archie Alphonso Alexander - Mathematician/Engineer

Day 3 - Sarah Boone - Inventor and Domestic Goddess

Day 4 - Charles R. Drew - Blood Man

Day 5 - Mary Beatrice Davidson Kenner - Inventor of The Sanitary Pad

Day 6 - Ernest Everett Just - Biologist, Zoologist, Cell man
Day 7 - Frederick McKinley Jones - The Coolest Man in Modern History

Day 8 - Sarah Goode - A Practical Bed For Small Spaces
Day 9 - William Henry Cling - Did He Invent The Hospital Bed Before Gatch?
Day 10 - Inez Beverly Prosser and Brown V.S. The Board of Education
Day 11 - Jan Ernst Mateliger - Mechanical Engineer/Sole Man
Day 12 - Samuel L. Kountz Jr. - Revolutionized Transplant Surgery
Day 13 - Lewis Howard Latimer - Incandescent Inventor
Day 14 - Marie Van Brittan Brown - Home Security
Day 15 - Norbert Rillieux - Sugar Man
Day 16 - Otis Boykin - He Kept Hearts Beating
Day 17 - Alice H. Parker - Heating It Up!
Day 18 - Lloyd Quarterman - Chemist and Atom Man

Day 19 - Robert F. Flemming Jr. - Guitar Man

Day 20 - Charles S. L. Baker - The Friction Radiator 
Day 21 - Granville T. Woods - The Black Edison
Day 22 - Alfred L. Cralle - Next Time You Have Ice Cream...
Day 23 - Ellen Elgin - Through The Wringer
Day 24 - Dr. Daniel Hale Williams - Holding A Heart In the Palm of His Hands
Day 25 - Benjamin Bradley - Steam Engine Dominance
Day 26 - Elijah McCoy - The Real One
Day 27 - Alexander Miles - Hold The Door, Please!