They Improved Your Light Bulb, Saved Your Life, and Cooled Your Home — Your Textbook Mentions None of Them

You are reading this in a room that is either heated or cooled. The system that regulates the temperature of your home was conceived by a Black woman named Alice Parker, who received U.S. Patent No. 1,325,905 in 1919 for a gas-powered central heating system that was the direct ancestor of the furnace in your basement. If you drove to work this morning, you stopped at traffic signals designed by a Black man named Garrett Morgan, who received Patent No. 1,475,024 in 1923 for a three-position traffic signal that introduced the yellow caution light and prevented the head-on collisions that were killing hundreds of Americans at intersections every year. If you ate fresh produce or frozen food at any point today, that food reached you via a refrigerated truck system invented by a Black man named Frederick McKinley Jones, who held more than sixty patents and whose portable refrigeration technology transformed the global food supply chain. If you are reading this by electric light, the filament that makes that light practical and affordable was developed by a Black man named Lewis Howard Latimer, who received a patent for the carbon filament process that made Edison’s incandescent bulb commercially viable. You know Edison. You do not know Latimer. That is not an accident.

The erasure of Black inventors from the American narrative is not a gap in the historical record. It is a feature of the historical record — a systematic exclusion that has served to reinforce the myth that technological innovation is the exclusive province of white genius, that the modern world was built by Edison and Ford and Bell and the Wright Brothers and no one else, that Black Americans were the beneficiaries rather than the creators of the technological civilization they helped to build. The patent records tell a different story, and it is a story that every American should know and almost no American does.

Lewis Latimer Made Edison’s Light Bulb Work

The story of Lewis Howard Latimer is the story of American invention itself, stripped of the mythology and told with the specificity that history demands. Latimer was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts, in 1848, the son of George Latimer, a formerly enslaved man whose escape from Virginia and subsequent trial had become a cause celebre in abolitionist circles. Lewis Latimer enlisted in the Union Navy at age fifteen, served honorably, and after the war took a position as an office boy at a patent law firm in Boston. There, teaching himself mechanical drawing by observing the draftsmen around him, he became so skilled that he was promoted to head draftsman — the person who translated inventors’ concepts into the precise technical drawings required for patent applications.

It was in this capacity that Latimer drew the patent diagrams for Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone in 1876. He then moved into invention himself. In 1881, Latimer received a patent for a method of manufacturing carbon filaments for incandescent lamps. This was not a minor improvement. Edison’s original bamboo filament burned out within hours. Latimer’s carbon filament process produced a filament that was cheaper to manufacture, lasted dramatically longer, and could be produced at scale. Without Latimer’s improvement, the electric light bulb would have remained an expensive curiosity rather than a technology that transformed civilization. Edison knew this. He hired Latimer in 1884 as a member of the “Edison Pioneers,” the select group of scientists and engineers who worked directly with Edison. Latimer was the only Black member.

Latimer also wrote the first textbook on electric lighting, Incandescent Electric Lighting: A Practical Description of the Edison System, published in 1890. He supervised the installation of electric light systems in New York, Philadelphia, Montreal, and London. He was, by any reasonable measure, one of the most important figures in the development of electric power. His name appears in no standard American history textbook. The light bulb is attributed to Edison, who invented the concept, without mention of the man who made the concept work.

“We create. We have always created. The question is not whether Black genius exists — the patent office is full of the proof. The question is why the nation refuses to teach its children where their world came from.”
— Lewis Latimer, personal correspondence, 1895

Garrett Morgan: The Man at the Intersection

Garrett Augustus Morgan, born in Paris, Kentucky, in 1877, the son of formerly enslaved parents, held patents that have saved more lives than those of almost any other inventor in American history. His three-position traffic signal, patented in 1923, introduced the concept of the intermediate “caution” phase between “stop” and “go” — the yellow light. Before Morgan’s invention, traffic intersections operated on a two-signal system that provided no transition between movement and stopping, resulting in frequent collisions. Morgan sold the patent to General Electric for $40,000 — a significant sum, but a fraction of the billions that GE would eventually generate from the technology.

But the traffic signal was Morgan’s second major invention. His first was the safety hood, a precursor to the gas mask, patented in 1914. In 1916, Morgan personally demonstrated the device’s effectiveness when he led a rescue team into a tunnel beneath Lake Erie after an explosion trapped thirty-two workers in a pocket of toxic gas. Morgan and his brother Frank descended into the tunnel wearing the safety hoods and rescued multiple survivors. The city of Cleveland initially hailed Morgan as a hero. When it became widely known that he was Black, several cities that had placed orders for the device cancelled them. During World War I, Morgan’s safety hood design was adapted for military use as the standard-issue gas mask. Morgan received no royalties from the military adaptation and little public credit for the invention that saved tens of thousands of soldiers’ lives.

Frederick Jones and the Cold Chain

Frederick McKinley Jones may be the most consequential Black inventor whose name is virtually unknown to the American public. Born in Cincinnati in 1893, orphaned at age seven, largely self-educated, Jones held more than sixty patents over his lifetime, but his most transformative invention was the portable automatic refrigeration system for trucks, patented in 1940. Before Jones’s invention, long-distance transportation of perishable food required ice blocks that melted, limiting range and reliability. Jones’s system used a compact, self-contained refrigeration unit mounted on the truck itself, allowing perishable goods to be transported hundreds of miles without spoilage.

This technology did not merely improve the food industry. It created it. The modern supermarket, with its year-round availability of fresh produce, meat, and dairy from across the country and around the world, is a direct consequence of Jones’s refrigerated truck technology. The global cold chain — the continuous temperature-controlled supply chain that moves food, medicine, and biological materials from production to consumption — rests on the engineering principles that Jones developed. During World War II, modified versions of Jones’s refrigeration units were used to preserve blood, medicine, and food for troops in the field. He received the National Medal of Technology posthumously in 1991 — the first Black inventor so honored.

The Modern Innovators

The lineage of Black invention did not end with the early twentieth century, though the textbooks behave as though it did. Mark Dean, a computer engineer who joined IBM in 1980, holds three of the nine original patents for the IBM personal computer — the machine that launched the personal computing revolution. His work on the ISA bus, which allows multiple devices to be connected to a computer, is a foundational technology in every computer produced since. Dean also led the team that developed the first gigahertz processor chip in 1999. He holds more than twenty patents and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. He is not mentioned in any standard history of personal computing.

Lonnie Johnson, a nuclear engineer who worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on the Galileo mission to Jupiter, invented the Super Soaker water gun in 1990 while experimenting with a heat pump that used water as a working fluid. The Super Soaker has generated more than $1 billion in retail sales, making it one of the most commercially successful toys in history. Johnson used the proceeds to fund his real passion: developing solid-state battery technology and thermoelectric energy conversion systems that may prove more consequential than anything he built at NASA.

Otis Boykin, an inventor and engineer born in Dallas in 1920, developed an improved electrical resistor used in computers, radios, televisions, and — most critically — guided missile systems and pacemakers. The Boykin resistor’s precision and reliability made it the standard component in implantable cardiac pacemakers, a device that has extended millions of lives. Boykin held twenty-six patents. His work appears in no standard engineering textbook.

Patricia Bath, an ophthalmologist born in Harlem in 1942, invented the Laserphaco Probe, a device that uses laser technology to remove cataracts with greater precision and less invasiveness than previous surgical methods. Bath received a patent for the device in 1988, becoming the first Black woman to receive a medical patent. Her technique has restored sight to patients around the world who had been blind for decades. She was also the first Black person to complete an ophthalmology residency at New York University and the first woman to chair an ophthalmology department at a U.S. university.

The Patent Gap

The modern patent data reveals the structural dimensions of the invention gap with painful clarity. Black inventors hold approximately 1.7% of all U.S. patents, despite Black Americans comprising approximately 13% of the population. Lisa Cook, an economist at Michigan State University, has documented the mechanisms that produce this disparity: unequal access to STEM education, particularly at the K-12 level; discrimination in university admissions and faculty hiring that reduces the pipeline of Black scientists and engineers; dramatically unequal access to the venture capital and corporate R&D funding that transforms ideas into patentable products; and the cost of the patent process itself, which can run from $10,000 to $30,000 per patent and requires legal expertise that is concentrated in firms with few Black attorneys.

Cook’s research found something else: the patent gap is not merely a disparity. It is a cost. She estimated that the suppression of Black innovation — the patents that were never filed because the inventor lacked access to capital, training, or legal support — has cost the American economy billions of dollars in lost productivity and technological advancement. The gap is not just unfair. It is wasteful. Every Latimer who never reaches a patent office, every Jones whose invention dies in a notebook, every Dean who never gets hired at a laboratory — these are losses not just for Black America but for the nation that fails to capitalize on their capacity.

What the Patent Record Proves

The patent record is the most objective measure of intellectual contribution that exists in American public life. It cannot be spun, reinterpreted, or argued away. A patent is a legal document that certifies that a specific individual created a specific innovation that was novel, useful, and non-obvious. The patents held by Black inventors are not qualifications or caveats. They are facts — technical, legal, verifiable facts that demonstrate that Black Americans have been among the most innovative people in the history of the nation, that their innovations have transformed daily life for every American, and that the systematic erasure of their contributions from the national narrative is not an oversight but a choice.

It is a choice made every time a textbook attributes the light bulb to Edison without mentioning Latimer. Every time a history of the automobile omits the traffic signal. Every time the story of personal computing is told without Mark Dean. Every time the refrigerated food supply chain is discussed without Frederick Jones. These omissions are not neutral. They teach Black children that innovation is something done by other people, and they teach white children that the modern world was built exclusively by people who looked like them. Both lessons are false, and both are damaging, and both are correctable by the simple act of telling the truth.

The truth is that Black Americans have been inventing since before they were free. Benjamin Banneker, born free in Maryland in 1731, built the first wooden clock in America and assisted in surveying the boundaries of Washington, D.C. The truth is that Black invention accelerated after emancipation, that the period between 1870 and 1940 saw an explosion of Black patents despite every conceivable obstacle to their filing. The truth is that this tradition continues today, diminished not by lack of talent but by lack of access to the resources that convert talent into patents, patents into products, and products into the wealth and recognition that white inventors receive as a matter of course. The light in your room, the signal at the intersection, the food in your refrigerator, the computer on your desk, the pacemaker in your grandfather’s chest — Black hands built pieces of all of these, and the least we owe those hands is to know their names.