Black Invention Myths

Black Invention Myths

Perhaps you've heard the claims: Were it not for the genius and energy of African-American inventors, we might find ourselves in a world without traffic lights, peanut butter, blood banks, light bulb filaments, and a vast number of other things we now take for granted but could hardly imagine life without. Such beliefs usually originate in books or articles about black history. Since many of the authors have little interest in the history of technology outside of advertising black contributions to it, their stories tend to be fraught with misunderstandings, wishful thinking, or fanciful embellishments with no historical basis. The lack of historical perspective leads to extravagant overestimations of originality and importance: sometimes a slightly modified version of a pre-existing piece of technology is mistaken for the first invention of its type; sometimes a patent or innovation with little or no lasting value is portrayed as a major advance, even if there's no real evidence it was ever used. Unfortunately, some of the errors and exaggerations have acquired an illusion of credibility by repetition in mainstream outlets, especially during Black History Month (see examples for the traffic light and ironing board). When myths go unchallenged for too long, they begin to eclipse the truth. Thus I decided to put some records straight. Although this page does not cover every dubious invention claim floating around out there, it should at least serve as a warning never to take any such claim for granted. Each item below is listed with its supposed black originator beneath it along with the year it was supposedly invented, followed by something about the real origin of the invention or at least an earlier instance of it.

Traffic Signal
Invented by Garrett A. Morgan in 1923? No! The first known signal device for regulating street traffic was installed in 1868 in London, at the intersection of George and Bridge Streets near the Houses of Parliament. Designed by railroad signal engineer JP Knight, it had two semaphore arms which, when extended horizontally, meant "stop"; and when drooped at a 45degree angle, meant "caution." At night, red and green gas lights accompanied the "stop" and "caution" positions (Sessions 1971; Mueller 1970). By the signal "caution", all persons in charge of vehicles and horses are warned to pass over the crossing with care and due regard to the safety of foot passengers. The signal "stop" will only be displayed when it is necessary that vehicles and horses shall be actually stopped on each side of the crossing, to allow the passage of persons on foot; notice being thus given to all persons in charge of vehicles and horses to stop clear of the crossing. Proclamation of Richard Mayne, London Police Commissioner, in 1868; quoted in Mueller 1970

JP Knight Traffic Signal

Gas Mask
Invented by Garrett Morgan in 1914? No! The invention of the gas mask predates Morgan's breathing device by several decades. Early versions were constructed by the Scottish chemist John Stenhouse in 1854 and the physicist John Tyndall in the 1870s, among many other inventors prior to World War I. Perhaps the most common misconception about gas mask history is that it began with a device invented by Garrett A. Morgan. In fact, Morgan's invention (patented in 1914, Nos. 1090936 and 1113675) was less like a modern gas mask than many others that preceded it. It consisted of a hood, to which was attached a long, bifurcated breathing tube that hung almost to the ground. Similar smoke protectors with a low-hanging tube had previously been patented by a number of inventors throughout the 19th century. These devices allowed the wearer to draw breath from the cleaner layers of air beneath the rising smoke. To further protect the wearer against smoke, Garrett Morgan lined the inner surface of the far end of the tube with a layer of sponge. When soaked with water, the spongy lining acted like a nasal mucous membrane, serving to moisten the air and to trap soot or smoke particles before they could be inhaled. While the sponge offered some extra protection against solid particulates, the hood's defense against gases relied exclusively on the inlet of the inhaling tube being physically positioned away from the gas itself. To avoid inhaling lighter-than-air gases such as ammonia that concentrate near the ceiling, the wearer would let the breathing tube hang to the floor. For situations involving heavier-than-air gases, Morgan suggested that "the mouth of the tube can be elevated above the level of the gas." Perhaps a more appropriate designation for his apparatus would be a "gas snorkel," rather than a true gas mask. It appears that in later years Morgan modified his design beyond what is specified in his two patents of 1914. A picture in Held's book shows a Morgan Safety Hood in which the breathing tube, rather than extending all the way to ground level, terminates in a sac-like structure behind the wearer's thighs. The sac likely held the fresh air supply said to have been included on some of Morgan's later models. Since the Morgan Safety Hood bore little resemblance to a gas mask as we know it, and true gas masks existed several decades before his invention, it is odd that Morgan would ever be credited as the inventor of the gas mask. That is not to say his invention wasn't useful: In 1916, after a gas explosion in a waterworks tunnel beneath Lake Erie, Morgan and other rescuers wore the apparatus to save trapped workers and recover the bodies of victims.

Did Garrett Morgan's hood become the US gas mask in World War I?
The story that the US Army equipped its troops with Garrett Morgan's mask during World War I is not true. Finding no civilian mask suitable for the rigors of chemical warfare, the Army initially had to borrow gas masks from its British and French allies who, having been in the war longer, had developed superior chemical defense technology. When the US did start producing its own military masks, they were merely copies of the British Small Box Respirator. Although there are indications that Morgan tried to interest the Allied forces in his equipment, none of the masks officially adopted during the war show the distinctive features (such as the split breathing tube) of the Morgan device.

The Stenhouse gas mask, 1854

George Washington Carver Peanut Butter

George Washington Carver (who began his peanut research in 1903)? No! Peanuts, which are native to the New World tropics, were mashed into paste by Aztecs hundreds of years ago. Evidence of modern peanut butter comes from US patent #306727 issued to Marcellus Gilmore Edson of Montreal, Quebec in 1884, for a process of milling roasted peanuts between heated surfaces until the peanuts reached "a fluid or semi-fluid state." As the product cooled, it set into what Edson described as "a consistency like that of butter, lard, or ointment." In 1890, George A. Bayle Jr., owner of a food business in St. Louis, manufactured peanut butter and sold it out of barrels. J.H. Kellogg, of cereal fame, secured US patent #580787 in 1897 for his "Process of Preparing Nutmeal," which produced a "pasty adhesive substance" that Kellogg called "nut-butter." "Discovered" hundreds of new and important uses for the peanut? Fathered the peanut industry? Revolutionized southern US agriculture? No! Research by Barry Mackintosh, who served as bureau historian for the National Park Service (which manages the G.W. Carver National Monument), demonstrated the following:

Most of Carver's peanut and sweet potato creations impractical, or of uncertain effectiveness. No product was widely adopted. The boom years for Southern peanut production came result of, Carver's promotion of the crop. Carver's work to improve regional farming practices scientific importance and had little demonstrable impact.

were either unoriginal, born in his laboratory prior to, and not as a was not of pioneering

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

George Washington Carver: The Making of a Myth

IN SCIENCE AS IN OTHER FIELDS OF HUMAN ENDEAVOR ABLE AND accomplished black Americans usually found recognition slow in coming and meager when it came. The careers of biologist Ernest Everett Just and entomologist Charles Henry Turner exemplified this tendency, and their names remain anything but household words. George Washington Carver, on the other hand, became a legend in his own lifetime, with a popular reputation for transcending the significance of his accomplishments. His agricultural education and extension work at Tuskegee Institute in behalf of rural southern blacks was praiseworthy but unspectacular in nature and impact. The uses for soils and plants he developed or advocated were not of pioneering importance in science, nor were they widely adopted. Yet he was acclaimed a scientific genius for discovering hundreds of valuable applications for peanuts and sweet potatoes and for revolutionizing the southern economy. In reality, his legendary reputation depended less on these supposed achievements than on his psychological and social utility to both whites and blacks. From his Missouri childhood on the farm of Moses Carver, his owner until emancipation, George Carver had a special affinity for plants. "Day after day I spent in the woods alone in order to collect my floral beauty[e]s and put them in my little garden...," he later wrote. "...strange to say all sorts of vegetation seemed to thrive under my touch until I was styled the plant doctor, and plants from all over the country would be brought to me for treatment." What he called his "inordinate desire for knowledge" extended to music and painting as well as the sciences. [1] After varied experiences, including a try at homesteading in Kansas, he attended Simpson College and worked his way to a Bachelor of Science degree from the Iowa Agricultural College at Ames in 1894. Then in his early thirties (his birth date was unknown), he became an assistant botanist on the Ames Experiment Station staff and took an M.S. in agriculture two years later. In February 1897 the state of Alabama enacted legislation to support an agricultural school and experiment station for blacks at Tuskegee Institute. The previous April Booker T. Washington had asked Carver to head the expected new program. "Of course it has always been the one great ideal of my life to be of the greatest good to the greatest number of 'my people' possible," Carver wrote Washington before accepting his offer, "and to this end I have been preparing my life for these many years; feeling as I do that this line of education is the key to unlock the golden door of freedom to our people."[2]

Carver began his duties at Washington's school with less than total dedication to the duties to which the principal had called him. "I do not expect to teach for many years," he wrote the Tuskegee Finance Committee upon his arrival in November 1896, "but will quit as soon as I can trust my work to others, and engage in my brush work, which will be of great honor to our people showing to what we may attain, along, science, History literature and art."[3] Painting would remain a hobby, but the peanut would pave his way to fame. Carver was raising a small quantity of Spanish peanuts at the Tuskegee Experiment Station in 1903, his earliest recorded involvement with the plant. [4] The soil-building qualities and nutritional values of the peanut made it a useful crop for Tuskegee's farm constituency, and he emphasized its cultivation and use in a 1916 bulletin, How to Grow the Peanut and 105 Ways of Preparing It for Human Consumption. His advice was not new: the Department of Agriculture had issued two far more comprehensive bulletins encouraging peanut cultivation and consumption, [5] and Carver freely acknowledged his debt to numerous recipe books and other sources. His publication doubtless made more rural blacks around Tuskegee aware of the values of the crop, but there was nothing in it to suggest his future prominence. During the next four years Carver became increasingly involved with the peanut and aroused the interest of several peanut-processing firms in his work. In 1919 he wrote the Peanut Product Corporation of Birmingham about a milk substitute he had just produced from the plant: "...it is without doubt the most wonderful product that I have yet been able to work out, and I see within it, unlimited possibilities." [6] Learning of his work, the United Peanut Associations of America asked him to appear at its convention in Montgomery in September 1920. Peanut growers, millers, and manufacturers had formed the organization that year in the face of declining postwar prices to lobby for a protective tariff on imported peanuts, and they sought publicity to promote their goal. Carver's presentation on "The Possibilities of the Peanut," in which he exhibited milk, coffee, stains, and others of more than 145 applications he claimed for the crop, was enthusiastically received despite reported "doubts lingering in the minds of the audience as to the advisability of having one of the negro race come before them...." "When the time comes when this question [the peanut tariff] must be threshed out before the American Congress," responded Representative Henry Bascom Steagall of Alabama, "I propose to see that Professor Carver is there in order that he may instruct them a little about peanuts, as he has done here on this occasion."[7]

Carver's subsequent appearance before the House Ways and Means Committee in January 1921 marked the beginning of his national identity as "the peanut man." Some of the congressmen received the stooped old black with jocular condescension, but his diverting presentation held the committee's interest well over the allotted time. As at Montgomery, Carver based his remarks upon a large assortment of products that he demonstrated or described, including breakfast food, candy, milk, ice-cream flavoring, livestock feed, and ink. Man could live by the peanut and sweet potato alone, he asserted, because together they constituted a balanced ration. [8] Carver did not explicitly claim that he had personally discovered the benefits of the peanut and invented all of the uses he cited; yet this implication was difficult to escape. In reality, he was again publicizing values and product possibilities known if not popularly appreciated. The Agriculture Department's first bulletin on the peanut, issued in 1896, had discussed the legume's value in restoring nitrogen to the soil, its nutritional excellence, and the uses of peanuts and peanut oil in candies, soapmaking, salad dressing, flour, soups, griddle cakes, muffins, cattle feed, and other products and processes. [9] The 1917 Yearbook of the Department of Agriculture had promoted the crop as a wartime substitute. Carver displayed many peanut products not manufactured commercially, but virtually all were ersatz commodities more feasibly derived from other materials. "I have just begun with the peanut," Carver told the House committee. [10] As the years passed he displayed an ever-growing quantity of peanut products at exhibits and personal appearances. By the mid-1930s he claimed over three hundred but refused to itemize them in response to a request from the Farm Security Administration: "I do not attempt to keep a list, as a list today would not be the same tomorrow, if I am allowed to work on that particular product." [11] In 1974 the Carver Museum at Tuskegee Institute, which Carver had helped develop, credited him with 287 peanut products. One hundred twenty-three were foods and beverages, sixty-eight were paints or dyes, the rest were cosmetics, stock foods, medicinal preparations, and miscellaneous uncategorized items. The catalog was inflated by much near duplication: listed as separate entries, for example, were bar candy, chocolate-coated peanuts, and peanut chocolate fudge; all-purpose cream, face cream, face lotion, and hand cream; thirty dyes for cloth, nineteen dyes for leather, and seventeen wood stains. Many and perhaps most of the products were not original with Carver even "salted peanuts" were on the list! Nor could the efficacy of every preparation, including a "face bleach and tan remover," be taken for granted. Since Carver left no formulas or other records of his processes beyond one patent for a cosmetic utilizing peanuts, it was impossible for later investigators to evaluate most of the peanut products attributed to him or to document his production of them. [12]

There could be no doubt, however, about the negligible extent to which peanuts became employed commercially in any new application Carver suggested. The crop continued to go almost entirely into confections and baked goods, peanut butter, and oils. [13] Because the great majority of products on Carver's list could be made more easily and cheaply from other substances, they were of little more than curiosity value. Together with the peanut, Carver championed the sweet potato, another crop well suited to Alabama soils that complemented the peanut nutritionally. Again he publicized the potential of the crop in quantitative terms. "The sweet potato products number 107 up to date," he told the Ways and Means Committee at his 1921 appearance. "I have not finished working with them yet." [14] As with the peanut the final number varied; the Carver Museum in 1974 attributed 159 uses of the sweet potato to its founder. Many were food recipes and nearly half were dyes. Even some of the less obvious applications were not original. Sweet-potato flour, proclaimed among Carver's discoveries, had been discussed in an Agriculture Department bulletin a decade before he prepared it during the First World War. [15] An absence of formulas has precluded scientific appraisal of other sweet-potato products attributed to Carver, but they found no wider adoption than those he claimed from the peanut. [16] Carver worked almost entirely alone and was singularly uncommunicative to those who asked about his laboratory procedures. George Lake Imes, on the Tuskegee faculty with him for many years, wrote of his "enigmatic replies" to information seekers. [17] C. A. Basole of Auburn University's Department of Chemical Engineering, visiting Tuskegee, found that Carver never gave a clear answer to any question about how his products were made. Robert Lee Vann of Pittsburgh asked Carver if he had recorded the formulas for his many discoveries. "To my amazement," Vann reported, "Dr. Carver looked at me and smiled and said, 'I have all of these formulas, but I have not written them down yet.'" [18] Although much of the publicity about Carver stressed the practical value of his work to agriculture and industry, he was equally reluctant to discuss this subject in concrete terms. In 1936 the Reader's Digest, preparing to reprint an American Magazine article on Carver, asked the author for additional material on the application of his experiments. When the author forwarded this request, Carver replied that he could not keep up with the results of his work. [19]

What public explanation of his scientific achievements Carver did offer was not calculated to satisfy the scientific community or most educated laymen. In a 1924 speech to a missions group at the Marble Collegiate Church in New York he declared that he never used books in his work and relied solely upon divine revelation for his product ideas and methods. [20] In later addresses he often repeated his laboratory conversations with "Mr. Creator," who told him what to do with the peanut. With such a modus operandi his failure to record his experiments and processes and to publish in scientific journals was perhaps understandable. Carver came to Tuskegee not to undertake original scientific research or invent new products but to teach the population served by the school, both on and off its campus. But his view of agricultural education as "the key to unlock the golden door of freedom to our people" was not widely shared by Tuskegee's students, many of whom saw education as a means of escaping the farm. Washington was continually unhappy about the small number of graduates turned out by the Agricultural Department, and in 1910 he removed Carver from charge. When Carver tendered his resignation in protest, the principal made him director of a new Department of Research and "consulting chemist," with teaching no longer required. [21] Carver did continue teaching for some time on a limited basis, but the quality of his instruction was not universally admired. "There is criticism among teachers and students to the effect that in your teaching you do not pursue a regular, logical and systematic course, that you jump about from one subject to another without regard to the course of study laid down in the catalogue," Washington advised him in 1912. "Some of your students are getting rather restless." [22] After Carver's death, in a largely glowing account of his life and work, Edwin Rogers Embree conceded his failure to attain greatness as a teacher. [23] Carver's training in botany had not prepared him to become a model farm administrator, but he took over the Experiment Station and other farm operations at Tuskegee with expectations of success. In his first Experiment Station bulletin in 1898 he announced: "Every effort will be put forth to carry out the two-fold object of the Station, viz: that of thoroughly equipping the student along the lines of practical and scientific agriculture; also the solving of many vexing problems that are too complex for the average farmer to work out for himself." [24] In overseeing the school farms, however, Carver encountered many vexing problems that he was unable to solve, particularly in satisfying Washington's desire to make the farms paying operations. His greatest difficulty was the unproductive poultry yard, plagued by bad-egg shipments and thefts. When Washington discovered fifty bushels of sweet potatoes rotting in the basement of the Agricultural Building he upbraided Carver for failing to practice the preservation techniques he preached. [25] Carver's aptitude as a practical farm administrator was questioned as early as 1902 by John Washington, Booker's brother, when he complained to the principal about maintenance shortcomings in Carver's department. [26] G. Lake Imes recalled Carver during his years of teaching and farm management as one who "did not fit very well into the college routine," being uninterested in schedules, credits, and making the school farm profitable." [27]

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Experimental work was more to Carver's liking and became his principal occupation after 1910. The Experiment Station had a field on which he tested crop varieties and fertilizers. In the laboratory he analyzed well water, soil, feed, and other materials submitted from the school, the surrounding community, and farther afield. He especially worked to demonstrate uses for locally available substances, exemplified by his experiments with swamp muck in lieu of commercial fertilizer. [28] The Tuskegee station differed fundamentally from others only in being staffed by blacks and being directed to a black constituency largely unaffected by progressive agricultural practices. It thus addressed an important need, even while its clientele kept it closer to a remedial level than to the forefront of scientific advance. Carver sought to extend the station's influence with the bulletins, leaflets, and circulars appearing under his name from 1898 to his death. "But few technical terms will be used," he promised in his first bulletin, and all but one of the forty he issued offered elementary information on farming and related rural concerns to the uneducated farmer. [29] The bulletins and other farming publications contained little of substance that had not already been printed in bulletins of the Agriculture Department or other experiment stations, and Carver's themes were not new even at Tuskegee. Much of what he would preach was summarized in a leaflet published by the institute before his arrival: "Do not plant too much cotton, but more corn, peas, sugar-cane, sweet-potatoes etc., raise hogs, cows, chickens, etc." [30] But while his advice was standard, the extent to which he amplified it to rural blacks unfamiliar with crop rotation, diversification, and other modern practices was unprecedented. The actual effectiveness of the bulletins, like that of Carver's other extension work, is not easily measured. As B. D. Mayberry of Tuskegee's Agricultural Department later noted, even the simplest publications had to be read and explained to the heavily illiterate farm population Tuskegee sought to help. [31] Carver and others provided such instruction at Tuskegee farmers' conferences and appearances elsewhere, but they inevitably reached and affected only a fraction of those in need. The local impact of Carver's preachments on the peanut is illustrative. In a 1905 bulletin, How to Build up Worn Out Soils, he advised all farmers to raise peanuts. How to Grow the Peanut and 105 Ways of Preparing It for Human Consumption appeared in 1916 and in numerous editions thereafter. By the 1930s Carver's association with peanuts was legendary, and his encouragement of their cultivation must have been known to all in the countryside around Tuskegee. Yet in 1933 he observed that few were grown in surrounding Macon County. [32] The extent of Carver's influence on local farming practices in other respects is also questionable. After his death the farms around Tuskegee could still be described as "poor and ill-kept." [33]

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Following Carver's presentation before the Ways and Means Committee, his by-line also appeared in journals aimed beyond the Tuskegee audience. His foremost publisher was the Peanut Journal, organ of the Southwestern and Southeastern Peanut Associations. "What Is a Peanut?" in the issue of November 7, 1923, was typical of his articles. Citing the values of the peanut in nourishing the soil and man, he named the products he had created. Descriptions of particular products were vague; of "peanut nitroglycerine" he said only, "This industry is practically new but shows great promise of expansion." There would always be more: "There is no assurance that this list will be correct tomorrow, certainly not if I get a chance to work with them as the Great Creator has put within the peanut a veritable storehouse of possibilities." [34] Carver's occupation as a publicist took him beyond the printed page and onto the exhibit and lecture circuit. He brought his message and his multitude of product samples to such events as the Four County Fair of 1922 in Suffolk, Virginia, and the Great Southern Exhibition in New York in 1925. Among his tours were those to colleges in Virginia and Tennessee in 1928, Mississippi and Louisiana in 1932, and the Northeast in 1933. [35] At Tuskegee he and his laboratory were regularly on display for visitors. [36] Notwithstanding Carver's efforts in promoting peanut production and consumption by such means, the greatest increase in the crop predated his identification with it. In 1909 Beverly Thomas Galloway, chief of the Agriculture Department's Bureau of Plant Industry, observed that the peanut was rapidly becoming an important farm crop throughout the South. [37] Annual American peanut production had climbed from 3,588,143 bushels to 19,415,816 bushels in the twenty years after 1889. When output rose to over 40,000,000 bushels in 1916 H. C. Thompson of the Agriculture Department called the phenomenon "one of the striking developments that have taken place in the agriculture of the South." [38] Carver did not issue his first bulletin emphasizing the peanut until 1916 and was not prominently associated with the crop until the early 1920s. By then peanut production was actually declining. It did not regain its 1917 peak level until 1927. In Alabama the 1917 output was not surpassed until the mid-1930swith little help from Carver's own county, it has been seen. [39] Far from leading a revolution in southern agriculture away from cotton and toward the initial recognition and large-scale adoption of the peanut, Carver was boosting an established but beleaguered industry. His publicity and that by others about him and his work were possible factors in the peanut's eventual recovery, but there is no evidence that his role was decisive. Given the modest nature of Carver's achievements, whence came his reputed transformation of southern agriculture and scientific wizardry? The development and perpetuation of the Carver myth may be traced in the writings of journalists, publicists, popular biographers, and even professional historians from the early 1920s into the third decade after Carver's death.

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Carver's reputation began to exceed his attainments when he was still generally unknown. In 1918 the principal of the Voorhees Normal and Industrial School (a Tuskegee offshoot in South Carolina) was calling him "the most eminent scientist in the Negro race and one of the most distinguished citizens of America." [40] After he "milked the peanut" the following year his name soared in wider circles. "What a wonderful thing it is to be a discoverer!" a Birmingham peanut processor wrote him. "I look upon such men as divinely inspired, and through such as you, Professor, God is indeed 'working in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform.'" [41] Through such contacts word of Carver's intriguing peanut milk spread to journalists and editors of trade publications. Then came the House Ways and Means Committee appearance, and Carver was celebrated to the public at large. The Peanut Promoter received clippings from newspapers across one country mentioning the appearance. Typical was the response of the Amsterdam (New York) Recorder: "...everybody listened eagerly, and with astonishment, to his revelations.... He has shown that so long as we can raise plenty of peanuts, the future of America is secure." The novelty of one of Carver's race testifying before Congress influenced much of the publicity, for most of the articles played as much on the man as on his "revelations." [42] In 1923 the Atlanta Journal published a full-page feature stressing Carver's background and personal attributes: "He combines all the picturesque quaintness of the ante-bellum type of darkey, the mind of an amazing scientific genius, and the soul of a dreamer. And his career... is no less picturesque." Attempting to reconcile his genius with his apparent absence of white blood, the journal found that "Professor Carver's nose, distinctly Arabic in type, hints of far-off ancestors who were possibly Egyptian, rather than African...." [43] Success Magazine that year dubbed him "Columbus of the Soil" and approvingly noted how, in Washington, he had "deferentially remained in the background until all of the white men had been heard." [44]

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Newspaper and magazine articles continued with some regularity. In 1929, in a prominent feature entitled "Negro Genius Shows 'Way Out' for Southern Farmers," Osburn Zuber of the Montgomery Advertiser found Carver "certainly the greatest genius the negro race has yet produced." [45] But the Carver myth received its greatest impetus in 1932 with the publication of anAmerican Magazine article by James Saxon Childers. Childers held Carver personally responsible for increasing peanut production in response to the boll weevil attack on cotton, then for increasing demand by developing peanut products and markets. He devoted much space to his subject's humility, unconcern for money, and other eccentricities and had him "shuffling" and "shambling" wherever he went. [46] The article prompted a massive inpouring of letters to Carver from across the nationmany seeking help or advice with personal problemsand fixed his reputation more firmly than ever before in the public mind. In 1936 Wade Moss of the Tom Huston Peanut Company put forth a piece in the Chemist, predictably titled "The Wizard of Tuskegee." Moss had Alabama farmers facing bankruptcy from the weevil in 1898 (the pest did not strike Alabama until the second decade of the twentieth century), then appealing to Carver for advice. When they obeyed his command to grow peanuts, he discovered ways to use the crop, making possible the spectacular growth of the peanut industry. [47] Although the circulation of articles like Moss's did not approach that of Childers's, journalists and popular biographers later magnified their impact by accepting them uncritically as source material. On occasion uncritical acceptance extended even to academic historians. In A History of the South William Best Hesseltine perpetuated Carver's catalog of discoveries by citing his "leading rank as an industrial scientist" in developing "165 different products from the lowly peanut and 107 food products from the yellow yam...." [48] As Carver advanced into old age his appeal, as measured by the publicity about him and his work, became even more irresistible. When the February 1937 Reader's Digest printed a condensation of the Childers article Carver's mail hit another peak. The next month Life did a photo feature lauding him as "one of the great scientists of the U.S." [49] That year the New York Times also praised his "300 useful products" from the peanut and "more than 100 products of varying human values" from the sweet potato. [50]

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Carver's last year and his death on January 5, 1943, afforded opportunity for more eulogies by newspapers, journals, and public figures and gave new momentum to the myth. In June 1942 the New York Times again acclaimed him editorially, citing his "long series of discoveries that have memorably improved the agriculture of the South." [51] Senator Bennett Champ Clark of Missouri inserted the last Times editorial in the Congressional Record and announced that Carver had "achieved a place as one of the foremost scientists of all the world for all time...." [52] President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's statement typified those issued by public figures on Carver's death: "The world of science has lost one of its most eminent figures.... The versatility of his genius and his achievements in diverse branches of the arts and sciences were truly amazing. All mankind is the beneficiary of his discoveries in the field of agricultural chemistry." [53] Representative Dewey Short and Senator Harry S Truman quickly introduced bills to make Carver's Missouri birthplace a national monument. At the joint legislative hearings on February 5 Truman testified that "the scientific discoveries and experiments of Dr. Carver have done more to alleviate the one-crop agricultural system in the South than any other thing that has been done in the history of the United States." On July 14, 1943, President Roosevelt signed the national-monument legislation. [54] Only two other persons had their birthplaces so designated: George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. The only major Carver biography with a claim to objectivity, Rackham Holt's George Washington Carver, appeared the year of its subject's death. Holt recognized Carver's products as "not revolutionary in themselves" and saw his major contribution as that of a publicist. Yet the romantic tone of her book did little to counter his established image. [55] In 1946 popular biographer Hermann Hagedorn held Carver single-handedly responsible for the tariff on peanuts as a result of his showmanship before the congressional committee and largely responsible for freeing the South from dependence on cotton. His overall assessment of Carver was a breathtaking combination of scientist and saint. [56] Two other serious works treating Carver appeared during the postwar period. In Titans of the Soil, issued in 1949 by the University of North Carolina Press, Edward Jerome Dies attributed to Carver's discoveries the establishment of major business enterprises. [57] Unaware that he kept no laboratory records, Langston Hughes wrote with unintentional irony in Famous American Negroes, "From Carver's small laboratory at Tuskegee came formulas in agricultural chemistry that enriched the entire Southland, indeed the whole of America and the world." [58] The last and perhaps most extensive mass circulation of the Carver myth came with the condensation of Lawrence Elliott's George Washington Carver: The Man Who Overcame in the May 1965 Reader's Digest. Elliott's book had Carver, in conjunction with the boll weevil, responsible for making peanuts the principal crop in much of Alabama prior to the First World War, then for developing "well over 300" peanut products manufactured in "scores of factories." The South's economic salvation was due to Carver alone. [59]

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Edgar Allan Toppin apparently made use of sources like Elliott for his portrait of Carver in A Biographical History of Blacks in America Since 1528, published in 1971. Toppin credited him with originating the process of food dehydration on the basis of his sweet potato flour. But most important"Working in his humble laboratory at Tuskegee, George Washington Carver freed the South from dependence on cotton by developing hundreds of uses for peanuts and sweet potatoes." [60] A survey of the most important Carver literature quickly reveals that his fame involved much more than his revolutionary discoveries, his salvation of the southern economy, and other deeds attributed to him. His religiosity, humility, racial stance, and disregard for material wealth received equal if not greater attention. The Alabama volume of the W.P.A. American Guide Series aptly phrased Carver's combination of religiosity and humility: "Never seeking honor for himself, Dr. Carver simply says, 'God told me how.'" [61] His frequent attribution of all his success to God enhanced his humble image and simultaneously elevated his stature as one in whom God confided. But while he was doubtless genuinely devout, his humility appears to have been legendary in the fullest sense of the word. He affected it to avoid discussing specifics about his work, as in a typical response to a written inquiry: "I do dislike to talk about what little I have been able, through Divine guidance, to accomplish." [62] Reacting to inflated journalistic pieces about his achievements, he customarily protested in a manner readily interpreted as modesty. "How I wish I could measure up to half of the fine things this article would have me be," he wrote one author. [63] Writers found Carver's humility only slightly less noteworthy than his discoveries. "His most notable characteristic aside from the great mental capacity which marks him as a genius, is his deep humility," declared Osborn Zuber. [64] His devotion to well-worn old clothes was part of the image. Hermann Hagedorn's depiction of "a stooped old colored man in a saggy alpaca coat shuffling through the dust of an Alabama road" exemplifies his biographers' delight in setting his scientific brilliance against his outward conformity to the black "uncle" stereotype. [65] In herPortraits in Color Mary White Ovington wrote of the enthusiasm southern whites felt for Carver's modest demeanor. [66] Carver was indeed popular with southern whites, for his deferential manner extended to a thoroughly accomodationist stance in race relations. Consistent with his support of Booker T. Washington's racial philosophy, he advocated in correspondence with George Foster Peabody a gradualist, self-help approach to black advancement: "Rising or falling, I believe is practically inherent within the individual, and since races and nations are made up of individuals, they progress or are held back by the percentage of individuals who will, or will not to do the right thing.... I believe in the providence of God working in the hearts of men, and that the so-called, Negro problem will be satisfactorily solved in His own good time, and in His own way." [67]

16

Carver's adherence to southern interracial etiquette was even stricter than Washington's. When he had dinner prepared for two white visitors to Tuskegee he took no chance on reviving the uproar engendered by Washington's famous White House dinner with Theodore Roosevelt. As he described the occasion to a friend, "I was astonished to have them send for me and insist on my dining with them, which of course I begged to he excused, and after finishing my dinner I explained to them why I did so." [68] At least once he privately mentioned the discomfort of Jim Crow accommodations in his travels, but he left no record of public expression on the subject. [69] While Carver avoided public discussion of racial questions, he appeared frequently before southern white audiences in tours sponsored by the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, the Y.M.C.A., and other organizations in the interracial movement. These groups, which sought to improve relations between the "better classes" of both races within the framework of segregation, found him an asset to their cause as he impressed college and conference assemblies with his work and personality. After his death Clare Boothe Luce asserted that "Carver did more than any man ever born to improve racial relations in America." [70] In a materialistic era Carver's disregard for financial gain was among the remarkable qualities exciting the public imagination. He sought or arranged for commercial exploitation of his products on at least four occasions, acquired three patents and a possible interest in others, and granted over $60,000 to the George Washington Carver Foundation at the end of his life despite reported losses in bank failures. [71] But since his patents and business ventures were not highly remunerative, since he lived almost penuriously, and since his estatewhile comfortabledid not befit a scientific genius responsible for hundreds of commercially valuable discoveries, his commercial activity was generally ignored or denied outright. "He would permit no patents to be taken out on his discoveries, allow no commercialization of his name," declared Clare Boothe Luce, oblivious of his Carver Products, Carver Penol, and Carvoline companies. [72] "Henry Ford and Thomas Edison tried to lure him to their laboratories," Edgar A. Toppin wrote. "But Carver donated his discoveries to humanity, never seeking to patent, or profit from them."[73] Carver's reported refusal of an immense salary to go to work for Edison was dramatic evidence of his disregard for riches; and the advertised admiration of two such prominent whites, who epitomized the scientific and materialistic spirit of their age, gave him a status matched by few others of his race. Edison never met Carver, but Ford visited him at Tuskegee and in 1942 announced plans to employ him in an experimental food laboratory. [74] "In my opinion," Ford was quoted, "Professor Carver has taken Thomas Edison's place as the world's greatest living scientist." [75]

17

The principal disseminators of the Carver myth were popular writers who found in Carver's life, work, and personality the potential for human-interest material that publishers and the public would buy. Three parties in particular had a deeper interest in promoting him, however: manufacturers of peanut products, Tuskegee Institute, and Carver himself. The role of the United Peanut Associations in bringing him to national attention has been cited, as has the space given him in the peanut trade journals. As a living "Mr. Peanut" his symbolic value to the peanut manufacturers compensated for the failure of his new peanut products to prove commercially attractive. Tuskegee Institute, having enjoyed a living symbol in Booker T. Washington, found Carver a fitting successor in that capacity. Carver was a featured topic in the Rural Messenger: "Professor Carver ranks among the greatest scientists of this age," a writer for the Tuskegee farm journal declared in 1920. [76] The 1921-1922 edition of the Negro Year Book issued by the school, reporting his presentation before the congressional committee, had him personally discovering the many uses he described for the peanut. [77] Writing for a Hampton Institute journal in 1934, a Tuskegee publicist praised Carver's great discoveries and personal qualities and called him "the greatest single force for racial understanding and goodwill in the South from an economic standpoint today." [78] Carver recognized the publicity value of his work to the school and noted its desire to have him on tour as much as possible. [79] Although Carver had a penchant for self-promotion, it is unlikely that he sought fame through conscious deceptionat least at first. Perhaps he was swayed by the excited reaction of nonscientists like the Birmingham peanut processor, unaware that a peanut milk substitute had already been made and patented, [80] to his production of peanut milk in 1919. For while he did not explicitly claim an innovative role in the products and uses he created and found, he said nothing to prevent laymen from assuming one on his behalf. If he ever considered setting the record straight, it became more difficult to do so as the public adulation grew. In his speeches and articles Carver blurred the distinction between creative discovery of new chemical syntheses and the production of items known to science or requiring no real scientific originality. By stressing the great quantity of his products rather than their quality or value, his presentations were more spectacular than informative or practical. His misleading representations of the nature of his scientific work and output contributed directly to the myth.

18

Carver contributed even more to the myth indirectly by his failure to correct the misleading and erroneous statements of others. Certainly he was aware of the claims made on his behalf, for he kept copies of virtually everything published about him. In many cases writers corresponded with him and requested his review of their work before publication. Rather than contradicting untruths, he let them pass or issued modest protestations unlikely to be received as sincere criticism. [81] His customary response to spoken claims was similar. "I always look forward to introductions about me as good opportunities to learn a lot about myself that I never knew before," he would begin on the platform, dissociating himself from inaccuracies without actually seeming to do so under a cover of humor and apparent modesty. [82] By playing along with misrepresentations and by his own infidelity to the facts Carver was both principal and accessory in the making of the myth. The Wizard of Tuskegee bore a certain similarity to the Wizard of Oz. Most of the acclaim and honors granted Carver were ostensibly for his accomplishments in agricultural science. But his real accomplishments were unspectacular, and even in their inflated state they would not have attracted such widespread public attention for their own sake. As Richard Bardolph has observed, "...no white scientist with precisely the same achievements would have been called a 'wizard' or 'the greatest industrial chemist in the world.'" [83] The Carver myth was accepted, therefore, for reasons transcending the alleged accomplishments of its subject. Its reception hinged on Carver's person and his function in the context of contemporary racial attitudes. Both blacks and whites acclaimed him because it served their respective needs to do so. Blacks had an obvious stake in the myth. In a society that worshiped individual achievement a submerged race with few prominent achievers was much in need of success symbols. Because few of even the most important members of the black community gained recognition in the white world the publicity about Carver in the white media and his links with men like Edison and Ford made him especially valuable in illustrating that blacks could stand on an equal footing with whites. Liberal whites sympathetic to black advancement as well as blacks themselves could find hope in the optimistic theory that the respect attained by one like Carver would extend to the race as a whole. [84] Carver's suspected partiality to whites was cause for grumbling among the Tuskegee faculty, some of whom viewed him as interested more in currying favor with the other race than in helping his own. [85] Others actively combating segregation and discrimination had reason to regret his accommodations in race relations. Because he did not seek a position of race leadership and avoided public statements of his racial philosophy, however, he attracted little overt black opposition. The Carver myth was proclaimed and accepted most widely in white society, including the majority of white society indifferent or hostile to black advancement.

19

The stake of most whites in the myth was of course quite different from that of the blacks. By lavishing praise on a token black they could deny or atone for prejudice against blacks as a class. The presence of a black achiever in the South could serve as testimony that the southern social order was not oppressive to blacks per se and, by extension, that those who failed to achieve had themselves to blame. Finally, a black achiever of the right sort could be valuable as a model to hold before the race. Booker T. Washington had served southern whites admirably as a black achiever of the right sort. They greeted with acclaim his advocacy of industrial education for blacks, his overt acceptance of their social order, and his kind words for the South and its leaders. With Washington's death in 1915 they needed a replacement. They found him in Carver. Like Washington, Carver had been born in slavery, a circumstance adding dramatic interest to his early life. He had risen through his own effortsalthough not without help from white patrons to whom he was duly grateful. He came to Washington's school, followed its founder's precepts, and came to personify the institution almost as Washington had. "Dr. Carver is regarded generally as the most outstanding figure of his race in the South since Booker T. Washington," one journal declared with probable accuracy in 1933. [86] In some ways Carver was even more appealing than Washington to whites. Unlike Washington, who affected unconcern for politics but whose covert political activity and influence occasionally came to public notice, Carver was completely apolitical. While privately regretting the discomforts of segregated accommodations, he never attempted to influence southern policy in this regard. The chief factors in his appeal, however, were his very different personal attributes. Washingtonaggressive, driving, viriledid not fit the white stereotype of the acceptable black; his popularity among whites was thus achieved in spite of his personal qualities as a result of the positions he advocated on race and education. Carver's popularity, in contrast, depended heavily on his ideal personality. He epitomized submission and piety. Old (he was in his late fifties when he became famous), gray, stooped, celibate, and squeaky-voiced, he was totally nonthreatening. Of him it could be truly saidand it usually wasthat he "shuffled" and "shambled." To southern whites he was a perfect model for his race. Carver's field of work also fitted conservative white concepts of proper black roles. Agriculture was a suitably humble occupation for blacks. In choosing to work with the "lowly" peanut Carver demonstrated that he knew his place vocationally as well as in social relationships. As a scientist who attributed his work to God, moreover, he was welcomed by traditional religionists whom the contemporary incursions of science had put on the defensive.

20

On balance, Carver's work was less significant to whites than his person. But the legitimacy of his fame required major accomplishments. Since his personal attributes alone were insufficient to support claims of greatness, his laboratory work was revised and extended to a level of wizardry, to be joined by his exploits in saving the southern economy. The miraculous nature of these achievements had the added benefit of making Carver so clearly atypical of his race that whites could express admiration for him without having to reassess their attitudes about blacks generally; as one reporter put it, he was "in a class by himself." [87] Had many been seriously concerned with the intrinsic value of his "discoveries" and other lauded accomplishments his work would have been subject to far closer scrutiny. Because the Carver myth was of such broad utility and because of the racial sensitivities involved, those who doubted Carver's advertised achievements generally kept quiet. In 1937 following publication of the Childers article in the Reader's Digest the Agriculture Department received a request for verification of the dramatic claims made in Carver's behalf. The reply indicated a reluctance to rock the boat: "Dr. Carver has without doubt done some very interesting thingsthings that were new to some of the people with whom he was associated, but a great many of them, if I am correctly informed, were not new to other people.... I am unable to determine just what profitable application has been made of any of his so-called discoveries. I am writing this to you confidentially and without an opportunity to make further investigation and would not wish to be quoted on the subject." [88] Twenty-five years later another federal agency exhibited similar reluctance to deal candidly with Carver's career. To obtain data for interpreting his life and work at the George Washington Carver National Monument the National Park Service commissioned a study and evaluation of his scientific contributions by the University of Missouri's Department of Agricultural Chemistry. The assessment was less than flattering. Concerned about unpleasant repercussions, the Park Service official transmitting the study to Washington urged that it be kept under wraps: "While Professors Carroll and Muhrer are very careful to emphasize Carver's excellent qualities, their realistic appraisal of his 'scientific contributions,' which loom so large in the Carver legend, is information which must be handled very carefully as far as outsiders are concerned.... Our present thinking is that the report should not be published, at least in its present form, simply to avoid any possible misunderstandings." [89] Informed assessments of Carver's place in science did appear in print during and after the 1950s. They contrasted him unfavorably with black scientists of high professional qualifications like Just and Turner while ascribing his much greater public reputation to his adherence to black behavior stereotypes and his folk appeal. [90] But the Carver myth has stayed current in popular literature, school textbooks and other juvenile works, and the Americana and Britannica encyclopedias. [91] With such widespread advocacy, its prospects for survival remain strong.

21

[1] Holograph autobiography, c. 1898, Box 138, Booker T. Washington Papers (Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D. C.). [2] Alabama, General Assembly, An Act to Establish Two Branch Agricultural Experiment Stations for the Colored Race and to Make Appropriations Therefor, approved February 15, 1897,Acts of the General Assembly of Alabama, Passed at the Session of 1896-7 (Montgomery, 1897), 945-47; Carver to Washington, April 12, 1896, Washington Papers. [3] Carver to Tuskeegee Washington Papers. Institute Finance Committee, November 27, 1896,

[4] Carver to Washington, October 17, 1904, ibid. [5] R. B. Handy, Peanuts: Culture and Uses (U.S. Department of Agriculture, Farmers' Bulletin, No. 25; Washington, 1896); W.R. Beattie, Peanuts (U.S. Department of Agriculture, Farmers' Bulletin, No. 356; Washington, 1909). [6] Carver to Walter M. Grubbs, October 1, 1919, George Washington Carver Papers (Tuskegee Institute, Alabama). [7] Peanut Promoter (editorial), III (October 1920), 20 (first quotation); "Montgomery Meeting of the United Peanut Associations of America, September 13-14," ibid., 2534 (second quotation on p. 34). [8] U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Ways and Means, 66 Cong., 3Sess., Tariff Information, 1921: Hearings... on Schedule G. Agricultural Products and Provisions, January 21, 1921 (Washington, 1921), 2070, 2075; cited hereinafter as Hearings on Agricultural Products. [9] Handy, Peanuts: Culture and Uses, 23. [10] Hearings on Agricultural Products, 2075. [11] Carver to R.W. Gray, September 14, 1937, Carver Papers. [12] George Washington Carver Museum (brochure, Tuskeegee Institute); Patent No. 1,522,176, January 6, 1925; William R. Carroll and Merle E. Muhrer, "The Scientific Contributions of George Washington Carver" (unpublished report for National Park Service, 1962), 19, 38. The patent was the first of three in Carver's name and the only one involving peanuts.

22

[13] C. Lewis Wrenshall, "The American Peanut Industry," Economic Botany, III (April-June 1949), 168; Robin Bird to William R. Carroll, July 6, 1961, Carroll and Muhrer, "Scientific Contributions of Carver," 45; C. H. Fisher to Carroll, October 20, 1961, ibid., 54. [14] Hearings on Agricultural Products, 2075. [15] W. R. Beattie, Sweet Potatoes (U.S. Department of Agriculture, Farmers' Bulletin, No. 324; Washington, 1908); Carroll and Muhrer, "Scientific Contributions of Carver," 10; Carver Museum brochure. [16] Carroll and Muhrer, "Scientific Contributions of Carver," 24, 29. [17] Imes, I knew Carver ([Harrisburg, Pa., 1943]), 7. [18] Basole interview, Carroll and Muhrer, "Scientific Contributions of Carver," 16-17; Vann to Raleigh H. Merritt, August 30, 1928, Merritt, From Captivity to Fame; or, The Life of George Washington Carver (Boston, 1929), 69. [19] James Saxon Childers to Carver, October 30, 1936; Carver to Childers, November 2, 1936, Carver Papers. [20] "Men of Science Never Talk That Way" (editorial), New York Times, November 20, 1924, p. 22. [21] Washington to Carver, May 25, 1910, Washington Papers; Carver to Washington, November 19, 1910, Carver Papers; Washington to Carver, November 28, 1910, Washington Papers. [22] Washington to Carver, May 3, 1912, Washington Papers. [23] Embree, 13 Against the Odds (New York, 1944), 116. [24] Carver, Feeding Acorns (Tuskegee Experiment Station, Bulletin, No. 1; Tuskegee, Ala., 1898), 5. [25] Washington to Carver, April 3, 1909, February 16, June 11, 14, December 9, 1910; March 26, October 15, 1912, Washington Papers. [26] John H. Washington to Washington, April 5, 1902, ibid. [27] Imes, I Knew Carver, 12-13.

23

[28] Carver address at convention of Association of American Agricultural Colleges and Experiment Stations (U.S. Department of Agriculture, Office of Experiment Stations, Bulletin, No. 123; Washington, 1902), 57; Carver to Washington, May 5, 1910; August 1, 1912, Washington Papers. [29] Carver, Feeding Acorns, 4. [30] Things to Remember and Practice During 1895 (copy in Box 110, Washington Papers). [31] Mayberry interview, Carroll and Muhrer, "Scientific Contributions of Carver," 5. [32] Carver to Paul R. Miller, July 10, 1933, letter in possession of Miller, Beltsville, Maryland. [33] Embree, 13 Against the Odds, 115-16. [34] Carver, "What is a Peanut?" Peanut Journal, III (November 7, 1923), 35, 55; see also Carver, "The Peanut's Place in Everyday Life," ibid., IV (December 1924), 9-10; Carver, "The Peanut Possesses Unbelievable Possibilities in Sickness and Health," ibid., VII (January 1928), 9, 11; Carver, "The Peanut and Its Essential Place on the Daily Menu," ibid., VIII (February 1929), 13, 15; Carver, "Drawing of a New Day for the Peanut," ibid., IX (January 1930), 25, 32; Carver, "Some Additional Facts on the Food Value of Peanuts," ibid., (September 1930), 13, 15. [35] "Carver's Exhibit at the New York Exhibition," ibid., IV (July 1925), 9-10; "PeanutsMost Unique Exhibit in World at Four County Fair, Suffolk," Peanut Promoter, V (October 1922), 11-12; Tuskegee Messenger, IV (June 30, 1928), 2; Carver, "Why Not Change Our Method of Advertising?" Peanut Journal and Nut World, XI (August 1932), 11; "Dr. Carver Visions Peanut Oil as Paralysis Cure," ibid., XIII (January 1934), 16. [36] Osburn Zuber, "Negro Genius Shows 'Way Out' for Southern Montgomery Advertiser, December 22, 1929, Feature Section, 7. [37] Beattie, Peanuts, 3. [38] Thompson, "Present Status of the Peanut Industry," United States Department of Agriculture, Yearbook, 1917 (Washington, 1918), 113. Farmers,"

24

[39] U.S. Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Agricultural Economics, Peanuts:

Acreage, Yield per Acre, Production, Farm Disposition, and Value, 190945 (Washington, 1948). The decline of peanut prices after the war boom and the
broader application of boll-weevil control measures caused many areas that had raised peanuts to return to cotton and other crops. Wrenshall, "The American Peanut Industry," 159. [40] Jesse O. Thomas to Carver, April 11, 1918, Carver Papers. [41] Walter M. Grubbs to Carver, November 30, 1919, ibid. [42] Quoted in Peanut Promoter, IV (April 1921), 54; clippings in Carver Papers. [43] Atlanta Journal, March 18, 1923, p. 13, clipping in Carver Papers. [44] Walter H. Seeley, "Carver of Tuskegee," Success Magazine, reprint in Carver Papers. [45] Zuber, "Negro Genius Shows 'Way Out' for Southern Farmers," 1. [46] Childers, "A Boy Who Was Traded for a Horse," American Magazine, CXIV (October 1932), 24-25, 112-16. [47] Moss, "The Wizard of Tuskegee," Chemist, XIII (October 1936), 688, 691-92. [48] Hesseltine, A History of the South, 1607-1936 (New York, 1936), 706. [49] Reader's Digest, XXX (February 1937), 5-9; "Slave-born Negro Scientist Is Honored in Alabama," Life, II (March 22, 1937), 37. [50] "Ten Talents" (editorial), New York Times, June 5, 1937, p. 16. [51] "Dr. Carver of Tuskegee" (editorial), ibid., June 16, 1942, p. 22. [52] Congressional Record, 77 Cong., 2 Sess., Appendix, 2345 (June 18, 1942). [53] "Carver Rites Tomorrow," New York Times, January 7, 1943, p. 19.

Washington Carver National Monument, Mo.: Joint Hearing Before Committee on Public Lands and Surveys, Senate, and the Committee on Public Lands, House of Representatives,... on S. 37, S. 312, and H.R. 647,... Feb. 5, 1943 (Washington, 1943), 4; An Act to Provide for the Establishment of the George Washington Carver National Monument, The Statues at Large... of the United States of America, LVII (1943), 563.
[54] U.S. Congress, 78 Cong., 1

Sess., George

25

[55] Holt, George Washington Carver: An American Biography (New York, 1943), 269. [56] Hagedorn, Americans: A Book of Lives (New York, 1946), 228, 241. [57] Dies, Titans of the Soil: Great Builders of Agriculture (Chapel Hill, 1949), 181. [58] Hughes, Famous American Negroes (New York, 1954), 71. [59] Elliott, George Washington Carver: The Man Who Overcame (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1966), 154-60, 207; quotation on p. 159; "Beyond Fame or Fortune," Reader's Digest, LXXXVI (May 1965), 259-310. [60] Toppin, A Biographical History of Blacks in America Since 1528 (New York, 1971), 139, 266 (quotation). This volume was copyrighted in 1969 and 1971 but not published until 1971. [61] Writers' Program, Alabama, Alabama: A Guide to the Deep South (New York, 1941), 284. [62] Carver to Franklin D. Cogswell, June 11, 1923, Carver Papers. [63] Carver to T. A. M'Neal, September 30, 1935, ibid. [64] Zuber, "Negro Genius Shows 'Way Out' for Southern Farmers," 1. [65] Hagedorn, Americans: A Book of Lives, 228. [66] Ovington, Portraits in Color, (New York, 1927), 177. [67] Carver to Peabody, September 20, 1923, Carver Papers. [68] Carver to James T. Hardwick, November 1, 1923, ibid. [69] Carver to George W. Owens, July 10, 1924, ibid. [70] Cong. Record, 80 Cong., 1 Sess., Appendix, 131 (January 8, 1947). [71] E. Maddin Ainsworth, "Form Company to Market Products of Plant Wizard," Atlanta Constitution, August 26, 1923, p. 8F; "Carver Penol Company," Peanut Journal, V (October 1926), 28; Annual Report of the George Washington Carver Foundation and a Resume of the Period 1940-1947 (Tuskegee Institute, Ala., n.d.), 9, 14.

26

[72] Cong. Record, 80 Cong., 1 Sess., Appendix, 131 (January 8, 1947). [73] Toppin, Biographical History of Blacks in America, 266. [74] "Carver to Work for Ford," New York Times, June 12, 1942, p. 38; "Dr. Carver Helps Ford Open Food Laboratory Where He Will Work on 'Wild Vegetables,'" ibid., July 22, 1942, p. 27. [75] Holt, George Washington Carver, 314; Elliott, George Washington Carver, 227 (quotation). [76] S. L. Bacon, "The Tenth Annual Voorhees Farmers' Conference," Rural

Messenger, I (March 26, 1920), 12.

[77] "Negro Discovers Amazing Food Uses for Lowly Peanut," Monroe N. Work, ed., Negro Year Book, 1921-1922 (Tuskegee Institute, Ala., 1922), 27-28. [78] Ollie Stewart, "Dr. Carver and the South's New Deal," Southern Workman, LXIII (September 1934), 261-63. [79] Carver to Walter A. Richards, July 1, 1929, Carver Papers. [80] U.S. Patent No. 1,243,855, October 23, 1917, cited in Carroll and Muhrer, "Scientific Contributions of Carver," 52. [81] Carver to Rackham Holt, July 23, 1940; Holt to Carver, October 10, 1941; Carver to Holt, October 13, 1941; Carver to Lucy Cherry Crisp, April 23, 1941, Carver Papers. [82] Glenn Clark, The Man Who Talks with the Flowers: The Intimate Life of Dr. George Washington Carver (St. Paul, 1939), 38; see also Carver, "What Chemurgy Means to My People," Farm Chemurgic Journal, I (September 17, 1937), 38. [83] Bardolph, The Negro Vanguard (New York, 1959), 186. [84] For an expression of this theory see Stewart, "Dr. Carver and the South's New Deal," 263. [85] Transcribed interviews with Pearl Wilson Jefferson, June 2, 1948, and Emily Neely, June 3, 1948, Carver Papers. [86] "Dr. Carver, Scientist, Shows the Value of Peanuts," Peanut Journal and Nut World, XII (September 1933), 23.

27

[87] Julia C. Harris, "Lions Honor Guest Tonight; Is Chemist of World Wide Fame," Columbus (Ga.) Enquirer Sun, June 12, 1929, reprint in Carver Papers. [88] Letter reproduced in Caroll and Muhrer, "Scientific Contributions of Carver," 39. [89] Regional Director, Region Two, to Director, February 21, 1962, George Washington Carver National Monument file, Division of History, National Park Service, Washington, D. C. [90] Herman R. Branson, "The Negro Scientist: His Sociological Background, His Record of Achievement, and His Potential," in Julius H. Taylor, ed., The Negro in Science ([Baltimore, 1955]), 1-9; E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro in the United States (rev. ed., New York, 1957), 560-61; Bardolph, The Negro Vanguard, 10, 18486; Michael R. Winston, "Through the Back Door: Academic Racism and the Negro Scholar in Historical Perspective," Daedalus, C (Summer 1971), 704. [91] L. H. Foster, "George Washington Carver," Encyclopedia Americana (international ed., 30 vols., New York, 1971), V, 746-47; [John L. King, Jr.], "George Washington Carver," New Encyclopaedia Britannica: Macropaedia (15th ed., 30 vols., Chicago and other cities, 1974), III, 972-73. The Britannica article recognized that Carver's popular reputation as an intellectual giant was overblown but spoke positively of his three hundred peanut products and the impact of his work on the southern way of life.

28

Automatic Lubricator, "Real McCoy"

Elijah McCoy revolutionized industry in 1872 by inventing the first device to automatically oil machinery? No! The phrase "Real McCoy" arose to distinguish Elijah's inventions from cheap imitations? No! The oil cup, which automatically delivers a steady trickle of lubricant to machine parts while the machine is running, predates McCoy's career; a description of one appears in the May 6, 1848 issue of Scientific American. The automatic "displacement lubricator" for steam engines was developed in 1860 by John Ramsbottom of England, and notably improved in 1862 by James Roscoe of the same country. The "hydrostatic" lubricator originated no later than 1871. Variants of the phrase Real McCoy appear in Scottish literature dating back to at least 1856 well before Elijah McCoy could have been involved.

The African-American inventor Elijah McCoy (1843-1929) is frequently presented in websites, childrens books, and newspaper articles as having revolutionized the industrial world with an invention that, supposedly for the first time, allowed steam locomotives and factory machinery to be automatically and continuously lubricated while in operation. Many publications go so far as to say his superior creations gave rise to the popular phrase "Real McCoy." The uncritical and widespread acceptance of these myths led to McCoy's induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Akron, Ohio, in 2001.

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Blood Bank
Dr. Charles Drew in 1940? No! During World War I, Dr. Oswald H. Robertson of the US army preserved blood in a citrate-glucose solution and stored it in cooled containers for later transfusion. This was the first use of "banked" blood. By the mid-1930s the Russians had set up a national network of facilities for the collection, typing, and storage of blood. Bernard Fantus, influenced by the Russian program, established the first hospital blood bank in the United States at Chicago's Cook County Hospital in 1937. It was Fantus who coined the term "blood bank."

Blood Plasma
Did Charles Drew "discover" (in about 1940) that plasma could be separated and stored apart from the rest of the blood, thereby revolutionizing transfusion medicine? No! The possibility of using blood plasma for transfusion purposes was known at least since 1918, when English physician Gordon R. Ward suggested it in a medical journal. In the mid-1930s, John Elliott advanced the idea, emphasizing plasma's advantages in shelf life and donor-recipient compatibility, and in 1939 he and two colleagues reported having used stored plasma in 191 transfusions. (See historical notes on plasma use.) Charles Drew was not responsible for any breakthrough scientific or medical discovery; his main career achievement lay in supervising or cosupervising major programs for the collection and shipment of blood and plasma.

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Washington DC City Plan

Benjamin Banneker? No! Pierre-Charles L'Enfant created the layout of Washington DC. Banneker assisted Andrew Ellicott in the survey of the federal territory, but played no direct role in the actual planning of the city. The story of Banneker reconstructing the city design from memory after L'Enfant ran away with the plans (with the implication that the project would have failed if not for Banneker) has been debunked by historians. Legend has it that Benjamin Banneker reconstructed Pierre-Charles L'Enfant's Washington DC design from memory after L'Enfant ran off with the plans. Banneker biographer Silvio Bedini argues that the story cannot be true, since Banneker left the project long before L'Enfant did: Banneker's departure from the District of Columbia] occurred at sometime late in the month of April 1791.... It was not until some ten months after Banneker's departure from the scene that L'Enfant was dismissed, by means of a letter from Jefferson dated February 27, 1792. This conclusively dispels any basis for the legend that after L'Enfant's dismissal and his refusal to make available his plan of the city, Banneker recollected the plan in detail from which Ellicott was able to reconstruct it. Silvio Bedini, Life of Benjamin Banneker, (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 1999) p. 136 Historian Bob Arnebeck, author of Through A Fiery Trial and other Washington DC historical literature, cites more evidence against the story: While Benjamin Banneker helped Ellicott survey the district line in 1791, the story about Banneker recalling L'Enfant's plan from memory, so that the plan could be engraved after L'Enfant quit, is not true. Andrew Ellicott's letter to the commissioners [shows] that it was his brother Benjamin Ellicott, not Benjamin Banneker, who helped him prepare a map of the city for engravers after L'Enfant refused his use of the original plan. Source: Bob Arnebeck's homepage (accessed 9/07/2003).

According to Arnebeck: "There is no evidence that Banneker contributed anything to the design of the city."

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Filament for Light Bulb

Lewis Latimer invented the carbon filament in 1881 or 1882? No! English chemist/physicist Joseph Swan experimented with a carbon-filament incandescent light all the way back in 1860, and by 1878 had developed a better design which he patented in Britain. On the other side of the Atlantic, Thomas Edison developed a successful carbon-filament bulb, receiving a patent for it (#223898) in January 1880, before Lewis Latimer did any work in electric lighting. From 1880 onward, countless patents were issued for innovations in filament design and manufacture (Edison had over 50 of them). Neither of Latimer's two filament-related patents in 1881 and 1882 were among the most important innovations, nor did they make the light bulb last longer, nor is there reason to believe they were adopted outside Hiram Maxim's company where Latimer worked at the time. (He was not hired by Edison's company until 1884, primarily as a draftsman and an expert witness in patent litigations). Latimer also did not come up with the first screw socket for the light bulb or the first book on electric lighting.

Heart Surgery (first successful)

Dr. Daniel Hale Williams in 1893? No! Dr. Williams repaired a wound not in the heart muscle itself, but in the sac surrounding it, the pericardium. This operation was not the first of its type: Henry Dalton of St. Louis performed a nearly identical operation two years earlier, with the patient fully recovering. Decades before that, the Spaniard Francisco Romero carried out the first successful pericardial surgery of any type, incising the pericardium to drain fluid compressing the heart. Surgery on the actual human heart muscle, and not just the pericardium, was first successfully accomplished by Ludwig Rehn of Germany when he repaired a wounded right ventricle in 1896. More than 50 years later came surgery on the open heart, pioneered by John Lewis, C. Walton Lillehei (often called the "father of open heart surgery") and John Gibbon (who invented the heart-lung machine).

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What medical historians say...?

Did Daniel Hale Williams really perform the first successful heart surgery?
On July 9, 1893, operating on a patient who was stabbed in the heart, Dr. Daniel Hale Williams sewed up a tear in the pericardium (the sac surrounding the heart muscle) but left the heart muscle itself alone, allowing a small nick there about one tenth of an inch in length to heal on its own (Williams, 1897). Published histories of cardiac surgery attach little importance to this event, when they mention it at all. The lay media, however, often refer to it as the first successful heart surgery a claim that is now as popularly accepted as it is false. There is some question of whether operations on the pericardium, involving no incisions or stitches in the heart proper, even qualify as heart surgery. If not, then the first successful operation on the human heart did not truly take place until 1896 when Ludwig Rehn of Germany repaired a stab wound to the right ventricle. Stephen Johnson, in his book History of Cardiac Surgery (1970), expresses a common opinion when he writes that Rehn's accomplishment "marked the beginning of cardiac surgery; for the first time a surgeon had successfully operated on a living human heart." But even if we count the pericardium as part of the heart, Dr. Williams' claim to distinction is spoiled by other surgeons who operated on the pericardium before he did. One of these was the now-forgotten Henry C. Dalton of St. Louis, who performed a procedure which according to Lillehei (1987) was "almost identical" to that done by Williams. Dalton reported his feat in Annals of Surgery about two years before Williams published a similar report in Medical Record. Likewise, the date of operation recorded in Dalton's article precedes by almost two years the date recorded by Williams. Johnson (1970) affirms the priority of Dalton: On September 6, 1891, H.C. Dalton, a professor of surgery in St. Louis, performed the first suture of the pericardium during an operation on a twenty-two-year-old man who had been stabbed in the chest. Two years later, Daniel H. Williams, a skilled Negro surgeon from Chicago, also sutured the pericardium during an operation on a twentyfour-year-old victim of a stab wound in the heart. Both patients recovered. Harris Shumacker in Evolution of Cardiac Surgery (1992) agrees: As far as is known, the first repair of a pericardial wound was performed at the City Hospital in St. Louis on September 6, 1891, by Henry Dalton, professor of abdominal and clinical surgery at the Marion Sims College of Medicine. ... A second procedure was performed at the Provident Hospital in Chicago on July 10, 1893 by Daniel Hale Williams, although it was not reported until March 1897.

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Another type of pericardial surgery goes even further back. In the early 19th century, Francisco Romero of Spain incised the pericardium to drain fluid compressing the heart, with the patients recovering in two of three cases. Baron Dominique-Jean Larrey, Napoleon's chief surgeon, is credited with a similar operation in 1810 on a patient whose pericardial cavity filled with blood following a stab wound to the heart. That patient survived for less than a month, but another drainage carried out by Larrey in 1824 led to a better outcome (Westaby, 1997). Shumacker (1989) comments: Heart surgery is generally regarded as having begun on September 10, 1896 when Ludwig Rehn sutured a myocardial laceration successfully. There are valid reasons, however, to believe that cardiac surgery had its origin nearly a century earlier with the operative drainage of the pericardium by the little known Spanish surgeon, Francisco Romero, and highly regarded Baron Dominique Jean Larrey. This procedure entailed making a thoracic incision and opening and draining the pericardium. ... When Romero first operated is unknown, but it antedated 1814 when his work was presented in Paris; Larrey's operation was performed in 1810. Aris (1997) claims to have settled the question of who was first, on the basis of memoirs presented by Romero in 1815 to the Society of Medicine in Paris: Francisco Romero, a Catalonian physician, became the first heart surgeon when he performed an open pericardiostomy to treat a pericardial effusion in 1801. [...] The first patient, a 35-year-old farmer named Antonio de Mira, was operated on in the spring of the first year of the century (meaning 1801). Five pounds of brick-colored fluid were drained. He made a good recovery, going back to work in 4 months. Three years after the operation his only complaint was pain in the incision. As should be obvious by now, who gets credit as the first successful heart surgeon depends on a number of subjective criteria for what constitutes "true" heart surgery. There is, however, no reasonable combination of technicalities that would award primacy to Daniel Hale Williams, who operated only on the pericardium and was not even the first to do so. These rare and relatively simple cardiac procedures of the 19th century should not be confused with modern open heart surgery using cardiopulmonary bypass. The modern procedure, which allows cutting the heart open to operate on its interior, required a method of diverting the blood flow away from the heart and lungs and was not achieved until the 1950s. Among its most important pioneers were C. Walton Lillehei, whose extensive contributions to the field earned him the nickname "father of open heart surgery"; and John Gibbon, principal inventor of the heart-lung machine.

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References/Bibliography Absolon KB, Naficy MA (2002). First successful cardiac operation in a human, 1896: a documentation: the life, the times, and the work of Ludwig Rehn (18491930). Rockville, MD: Kabel, 2002 Aris A (1997). Francisco Romero, the first heart surgeon. Annals of Thoracic Surgery. 64(3):870-1 Dalton HC (1895). Report of a case of stab wound of the pericardium, terminating in recovery after resection of a rib and suture of the pericardium. Annals of Surgery 21:147 Hessel EA (2001). Cardiac anesthesia timeline. ASA Newsletter 65(10). Johnson SL (1970). History of Cardiac Surgery, 1896-1955. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. Lillehei CW (1987). Commentary on Daniel Hale Williams. In: Organs CH, Kosiba MM, eds. A Century of Black Surgeons : the U.S.A. experience. Norman Oklahoma:Transcripts Press. 332-334. Meade RH (1961). A History of Thoracic Surgery. C.C. Thomas, Springfield, IL Richardson RG (1969). Surgeon's Heart: a History of Cardiac Surgery. London: Heinemann Medical Shumacker HB Jr. (1989). When did cardiac surgery begin? Journal of Cardiovascular Surgery (Torino). 30(2):246-9. Shumacker HB Jr. (1992). Evolution of Cardiac Surgery. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press Wertenbaker LT (1980). To Mend the Heart. New York: Viking Press Westaby S, Bosher C (1997). Landmarks in Cardiac Surgery. Oxford: Isis Medical Media Williams DH (1897). Stab wound of the heart and pericardium - suture of the pericardium - recovery - patient alive three years afterward. Medical Record 51:439.

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The Third Rail

Granville Woods in 1901? No! Werner von Siemens pioneered the use of an electrified third rail as a means for powering railway vehicles when he demonstrated an experimental electric train at the 1879 Berlin Industrial Exhibition. In the US, English-born Leo Daft used a thirdrail system to electrify the Baltimore & Hampden lines in 1885. The first electrically powered subway trains, which debuted in London in the autumn of 1890, likewise drew power from a third rail.

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Details
It is claimed on dozens of websites that Granville Woods invented the "third rail" that conveys electric power to subways and other rail vehicles. You can see in the following examples that third-rail technology was already a couple of decades old before Woods supposedly "invented" it in 1901. Siemens, 1879 Werner Siemens demonstrated a small electric railway at the Berlin Industrial Exhibition (Berliner Gewerbeausstellung) in 1879. The motor of the locomotive received power from a live third rail laid between the two track rails.

Siemens described the railway in a patent: ...the electric railway which was publicly used by me, E.W. Siemens, in the city of Berlin, in the year 1879.... Between the two rails upon which the vehicle traveled a middle rail, insulated upon wood or in any other proper manner, was made use of for transmitting the current, and both of the track-rails were made use of for the return-current. The electrical connection between the rail running in the middle between the two track-rails and the electrodynamic motor of the locomotive was effected by means of metallic brushes attached to the car-frame in an insulated manner, and the gap in the circuit thus formed between the brushes and the frame was closed by the copper wire of the electro-dynamic motor and by a switch provided with artificial resistances, by leading an insulated wire from the brushes upon the rail to one of the poles of the electro-dynamic motors of the locomotive, and another insulated wire from the car-frame through the switch to the other pole of the motor. E. Werner Siemens, in US patent #324176

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Leo Daft, 1883 English-born Leo Daft also used a third rail in what was perhaps the first standard-gauge electric railway in the United States. A public demonstration of the system was reported in the New York Times, Nov. 25, 1883: During the past two years Mr. Leo Daft, an electrician of repute, has been experimenting with a motor at his laboratory in Greenville, near Jersey City. His purpose has been to perfect a machine, which, propelled by electricity, should be capable of operating on railways and take the place of the steam locomotive. This afternoon Mr. Daft gave the first practical exhibition of the motor on the Saratoga, Mount McGregor and Lake George Railroad, a line about 12 miles long, with sharp curves and steep grades. The Daft Electric Light Company, of New-York, which controls the motor, brought a party to Saratoga to-day to witness the motor's workings. There were between 60 and 70 gentlemen from New-York, Brooklyn, Newark, Boston and other cities. [...] Along the centre of the track a third rail was laid, and from this rail the electric power was taken up by the motor. The electric current in this instance was generated by dynamos at a factory one-eighth of a mile from the railway station and 500 feet from the track, to which it was led through wires. The generating engine was 25-horse power. The current is fed to the central track and is taken therefrom by a contact wheel, which in turn transmits it to a receiving dynamo and causes the revolution. MR. Daft And His Motor, New York Times, Nov. 25 1883, p. 2 The experiment ended when the driver sped around one of the curves too fast, causing the vehicle to jump the track. In 1885, Daft built his first commercial third-rail system on the Baltimore & Hampden lines. It was discussed in the Manufacturer and Builder: ...since September 1st, 1885, electricity has been practically employed as the motive power for one of the suburban lines of surface railroad in Baltimore. The system used is that of Mr. Leo Daft.... An insulated steel rail, laid between the track rails, and roughly guarded by joists and planks laid on each side of it, serves as a conductor. The sections of this conducting rail, as also of the track rails, are electrically connected by wires. "The Electric Motor in Baltimore," Manufacturer and Builder, February 1886, p. 37

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City of London and Southwark Subway, 1890 A third rail transmitted power to the world's first electric subway trains, which debuted in London in late 1890. The road runs from the Monument, in King William Street, near the north end of the London Bridge, southward under the Thames River to Southwark, and is three and a half miles long. The road is laid with seventy-pound steel rails and the motive power is electricity. The electric current is transmitted along a third rail which is laid for the purpose between the two other rails, and is transmitted to the armature on the axle of the engine by brushes. AN UNDERGROUND ROAD, New York Times, Dec 27 1890, p. 5

Metropolitan Elevated Railway in Chicago, 1895 Instead of a dangerous overhead trolley wire, a third rail is run along the outside of the track. This rail is raised several inches above the track, and the electric current is conducted from the station to this rail by heavy feeder cables. TO RUN BY ELECTRICITY, New York Times, Jun 1 1895, p .1

Elevated Railway in NYC, 1896 The elevated structure will be equipped with a third rail to carry current to the trains. The storage battery on the locomotive and the motor will be connected in parallel with this third rail. Electric current will be conveyed by this third rail to the locomotive from a power station near the lines. ELECTRICITY TO BE TRIED, New York Times, Feb 5 1896, p .16

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Thomas Edison Edison patented his first third-rail power pickup system in 1882.

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

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Patent Interference Case

It is erroneously said or implied on several websites that Granville Woods was proven the inventor of the first train telegraph in a court case against either Lucius Phelps or his business partner Thomas Edison. Woods never went head-to-head with Edison himself, but there is indeed a known case where one of Phelps's patent applications, relating to specific improvements of railway telegraphs, was invalidated in a patent office hearing because Woods also had a pending patent on a closely similar idea which he had begun to develop earlier (Phelps subsequently appealed the decision, to no avail). What is not generally known is that Phelps had several other railway telegraph patents awarded both before and after Woods filed his application on May 21, 1885 which were not affected, and there had been previous inventors (going back to at least 1873) who patented train telegraph systems years before either Phelps or Edison or Woods applied for patents in this area. The Woods vs Phelps case is usually made out to be more of a big deal than it actually was. Cases involving interference between patent applications are nothing out of the ordinary, and are initiated by the patent office whenever two or more parties independently submit patent applications covering the same or overlapping ideas. Examiners then sort out who came up with the idea first. Edison and Phelps opposed each other in at least one of these disputes, which they resolved by forming the Consolidated Railway Telegraph Company to pool their interests in train telegraphy. Interference does not mean anyone "stole" or dishonestly claimed another's invention, even though one side may accuse the other of doing so, as when Phelps accused Woods of getting his ideas from a Scientific American article which described the Phelps railway telegraph and which was published exactly three months before Woods applied for his first railway telegraph patent. Woods was able to prove that he came up with his own plan independently.

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Refrigerated Truck
Frederick Jones (with Joseph Numero) in 1938? No! Did Jones change America's eating habits by making possible the longdistance shipment of perishable foods? No! Refrigerated ships and railcars had been moving perishables across oceans and continents even before Jones was born (see refrigerated transport timeline). Trucks with mechanically refrigerated cargo spaces appeared on the roads at least as early as the late 1920s. Further development of truck refrigeration was more a process of gradual evolution than radical change.

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Early Mechanically Refrigerated Trucks

This page shows examples of mechanically refrigerated trucks prior to their supposed "invention" by Frederick McKinley Jones in 1938. (A few dubious websites mention 1935 as the year Jones assembled his first unit; however, none of them offer any explanation or evidence in support of this earlier date.) In any case, the refrigerated trucking industry had already been born before Jones's contributions, as can be seen by browsing the mechanical engineering and food industry journals of the 1920s and 1930s. 1929 An early mechanically refrigerated (as opposed to ice-cooled) truck body.

Source: "New Self-Contained Refrigerator Truck." Compressed Air Magazine, vol. 34, no. 3, Mar 1929, p.2706.

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1930 Example of refrigerated trucks being used on commercial long-haul routes. ...[I]n 1930, the Borden Co. put ten more mechanical jobs on its ice cream routes. To date [August 1932], its eleven trucks equipped with this type of cooling are all giving satisfactory performance. All Borden's mechanical units receive power from the drive shaft, and they are operated on outlying, long-haul routes. Food Industries, vol. 4 no. 8, Aug 1932, p 270-1 1932 Refrigerated trucks used in the delivery of ice cream and meat products. (source: SAE Journal, vol. 31 no. 6, Dec 1932, p.459)

Gasoline-driven refrigeration unit in rear compartment of 2nd truck

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1937 A mechanically refrigerated semi-trailer (Food Industries, vol 9 no 8, August 1937, p. 450). The cooling system is located mostly inside the trailer body. In later years, it became more common to mount the units externally.

Attributes: Trailer: Fruehauf Refrigerating unit: York Ice Machinery Corp. Refrigerator motor: 4-hp Briggs & Stratton Cooling capacity: 1 tons (18,000 Btu/hr) Refrigerant: Freon Insulation: 2 in. of "Dry Zero"

46

Air Brakes / Automatic Brakes

Granville Woods in 1904? No! In 1869, a 22-year-old George Westinghouse received US a brake device operated by compressed air, and in the same Westinghouse Air Brake Company. Many of the 361 patents he his career were for air brake variations and improvements, "automatic" version in 1872 (US #124404). patent #88929 for year organized the accumulated during including his first

Air Conditioner
Frederick Jones in 1949? No! Dr. Willis Carrier built the first machine to control both the temperature and humidity of indoor air. He received the first of many patents in 1906 (US patent #808897, for the "Apparatus for Treating Air"). In 1911 he published the formulae that became the scientific basis for air conditioning design, and four years later formed the Carrier Engineering Corporation to develop and manufacture AC systems.

Airship
J.F. Pickering in 1900? No! French engineer Henri Giffard successfully flew a powered navigable airship in 1852. The La France airship built by Charles Renard and Arthur Krebs in 1884 featured an electric motor and improved steering capabilities. In 1900 Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin's first rigid-framed dirigible took to the air. Of the hundreds of inventors granted patents for early airship designs and modifications, few succeeded in building or flying their craft. There doesn't appear to be any record of a "Pickering Airship" ever getting off the ground

Automatic Railroad Car Coupler

Andrew Beard invented the "Jenny [sic] coupler" in 1897? No! The Janney coupler is named for US Civil War veteran Eli H. Janney, who in 1873 invented a device (US patent #138405) which automatically linked together two railroad cars upon their being brought into contact. Also known as the "knuckle coupler," Janney's invention superseded the dangerous link-and-pin coupler and became the basis for standard coupler design through the remainder of the millennium. Andrew Beard's modified knuckle coupler was just one of approximately eight thousand coupler variations patented by 1900.

47

Automatic Transmission / Gearshift

Richard Spikes in 1932? No! The first automatic-transmission automobile to enter the market was designed by the Sturtevant brothers of Massachusetts in 1904. US Patent #766551 was the first of several patents on their gearshift mechanism. Automatic transmission technology continued to develop, spawning hundreds of patents and numerous experimental units; but because of cost, reliability issues and an initial lack of demand, several decades passed before vehicles with automatic transmission became common on the roads.

Bicycle Frame
Isaac R. Johnson in 1899? No! Comte Mede de Sivrac and Karl von Sauerbronn built primitive versions of the bicycle in 1791 and 1816 respectively. The frame of John Starley's 1885 "safety bicycle" resembled that of a modern bicycle.

Cellular Phone
Henry T. Sampson in 1971? No! On July 6, 1971, Sampson and co-inventor George Miley received a patent on a "gamma electric cell" that converted a gamma ray input into an electrical output (Among the first to do that was Bernhard Gross, US patent #3122640, 1964). What, you ask, does gamma radiation have to do with cellular communications technology? The answer: nothing. Some multiculturalist pseudo-historian must have seen the words "electric" and "cell" and thought "cell phone." The father of the cell phone is Martin Cooper who first demonstrated the technology in 1973.

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Cock or Watch (First in America)

Benjamin Banneker built the first American timepiece in 1753? No! Abel Cottey, a Quaker clockmaker from Philadelphia, built a clock that is dated 1709 (source: Six Quaker Clockmakers, by Edward C. Chandlee; Philadelphia, The Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1943). Banneker biographer Silvio Bedini further refutes the myth: Several watch and clockmakers were already established in the colony [Maryland] prior to the time that Banneker made the clock. In Annapolis alone there were at least four such craftsmen prior to 1750. Among these may be mentioned John Batterson, a watchmaker who moved to Annapolis in 1723; James Newberry, a watch and clockmaker who advertised in the Maryland Gazette on July 20, 1748; John Powell, a watch and clockmaker believed to have been indentured and to have been working in 1745; and Powell's master, William Roberts. Silvio Bedini, The Life of Benjamin Banneker (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 1999).

Clothes Dryer
George T. Sampson in 1892? No! The "clothes-drier" described in Sampson's patent was actually a rack for holding clothes near a stove, and was intended as an "improvement" on similar contraptions: My invention relates to improvements in clothes-driers.... The object of my invention is to suspend clothing in close relation to a stove by means of frames so constructed that they can be readily placed in proper position and put aside when not required for use. US patent #476416, 1892 Nineteen years earlier, there were already over 300 US patents for such "clothes-driers" (Subject-Matter Index of Patents...1790 to 1873). A Frenchman named Pochon in 1799 built the first known tumble dryer a crank-driven, rotating metal drum pierced with ventilation holes and held over heat. Electric tumble dryers appeared in the first half of the 20th century.

49

Dustpan
Lloyd P. Ray in 1897? No! While the ultimate origin of the dustpan is lost in the mists (dusts?) of time, at least we know that US patent #20811 for "Dust-pan" was granted to T.E. McNeill in 1858. That was the first of about 164 US dustpan patents predating Lloyd Ray's.

Egg Beater
Willie Johnson in 1884? No! The hand-cranked egg beater with two intermeshed, counter-rotating whisks was invented by Turner Williams of Providence, Rhode Island in 1870 (US Patent #103811). It was an improvement on earlier rotary egg beaters that had only one whisk.

Electric Trolley
Did Granville Woods invent the electric trolley car, the overhead wire that powers it, or the "troller" wheel that makes contact with the trolley wire, in 1888? No! Dr. Werner von Siemens demonstrated his electric trolleybus, the Elektromote, near Berlin on April 29, 1882. The vehicle's two electric motors collected power through contact wheels rolling atop a pair of overhead wires. The earliest patentee of an electric trolley in the United States appears to be Eugene Cowles (#252193 in 1881), followed by Dr. Joseph R. Finney (#268476 in 1882) who operated an experimental trolley car near Pittsburgh, PA in the summer of 1882. In early 1885, John C. Henry established in Kansas City, MO, the first overhead-wire electric transit system to enter regular service in the United States. Belgian-born Charles van Depoele, who earned 240+ patents in electric railway technology and other fields, set up trolley lines in several North American cities by 1887. In February 1888, a trolley system designed by Frank Sprague began operating in Richmond, Virginia. Sprague's system became the lasting prototype for electric street railways in the US.

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Elevator
Alexander Miles in 1887? No! Was Miles the first to patent a self-closing shaft door? No! Steam-powered hoisting devices were used in England by 1800. Elisha Graves Otis' 1853 "safety elevator" prevented the car from falling if the cable broke, and thus paved the way for the first commercial passenger elevator, installed in New York City's Haughwout Department Store in 1857. The first electric elevator appeared in Mannheim, Germany in 1880, built by the German firm of Siemens and Halske. A self-closing shaft door was invented by J.W. Meaker in 1874 ("Improvement in Self-closing Hatchways," US Patent No. 147,853).

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Fastest Computer / Computation

Was Philip Emeagwali responsible for the world's fastest computer or computation in 1989? Did he win the "Nobel Prize of computing"? Is he a "father of the Internet"?No! The fastest performance of a computer application in 1989 was 6 billion floating point operations per second (6 Gflops), achieved by a team from Mobil and Thinking Machines Corp. on a 64,000-processor "Connection Machine" invented by Danny Hillis. That was almost double the 3.1 Gflops of Emeagwali's computation. Computing's Nobel Prize equivalent is the Turing Award, which Emeagwali has never won.

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Philip Emeagwali Myths MYTH #1:

Emeagwali made the "world's fastest computation" in 1989
Each year since 1987, the judges for the annual Gordon Bell competition have given out multiple prizes for supercomputing applications, usually including one forperformance (fastest speed), and one for price/performance (best speed/cost ratio; specifically, "price-performance ratio as measured in megaflop/s per dollar on a genuine application"). Despite what you may have read on the Internet, the 1989 prize for the fastest performance was awarded not to Emeagwali, but to another entrant: In the performance category, we awarded the prize to a team from Mobil Research and Development and Thinking Machines Corp. [...] Their solution of a seismic dataprocessing problem ran at almost 6 Gflops on a CM-2 Connection Machine. "Special Report: 1989 Gordon Bell Prize," IEEE Software, May 1990, p. 101 The winning speed of 6 Gflops was almost double that of Emeagwali's entry (3.1 Gflops, a speed that Emeagwali has repeatedly misrepresented as the "world's fastest"). The Mobil/TMC team achieved the best price-performance ratio too, but since no entry was allowed more than one prize, the price/performance award passed to Emeagwali (who also used a CM-2 Connection Machine) even though his score in that category was about 20% worse than the leading score: We awarded the price/performance prize to Philip Emeagwali [...] His model ran at a price/performance of slightly less than 400 Mflops per $1 million.While the Mobil/TMC team achieved almost 500 Mflops per $1 million, we decided to award only one prize per entry. "Special Report: 1989 Gordon Bell Prize," IEEE Software, May 1990, p. 101

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MYTH #2:
Emeagwali won computing's equivalent of the Nobel Prize
In spite of efforts by Emeagwali and his admirers to hype up his $1000 Gordon Bell award as a "Nobel Prize" of computing, the rest of the computing world continues to associate that lofty label with the Turing Award, which Emeagwali has never won. The Gordon Bell prize is just one of many other annual computing awards, respectable but not at all comparable to either the Nobel Prize or the Turing Award in prestige or prize money. Nor are the selection criteria analogous: Emeagwali was awarded for his performance in an annual competition, not in recognition of lasting contributions to his field.

MYTH #3:
Emeagwali is a "Father of the Internet"
1. Emeagwali's paternity claims to the Internet are judged and found baseless. Emeagwali has not shown any evidence that he was involved with ARPA or any other research organization or company connected with the genesis of the Internet, nor did he express his ideas in technical journals or any other channel through which he could have influenced the development of the Internet during its formative stages. 2. Is there a father of the Internet? A discussion of the main contenders: JCR Licklider, Bob Taylor, Paul Baran, Donald Davies, and Lawrence Roberts.

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MYTH #4:
The "Connection Machine" was invented by Emeagwali
A few Web sources expand the fallacy that Emeagwali created the fastest computer program, insisting that he was also responsible for the massively parallel supercomputer on which the program ran. However, the 65,000-processor "Connection Machine" that allowed such speedy computations was actually the brainchild of Danny Hillis and was built by Thinking Machines Corporation, the company Hillis co-founded. The fact is extensively documented on the web and is so well established that I won't devote more attention to it.

MYTH #5:
Emeagwali has lots of patents or patent applications
The number of Emeagwali's patents or patent applications is sometimes claimed to be as high as 30. However, a search of the USPTO and esp@cenet patent databases (as of September 2003) reveals the true number to be zero. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, which has a fully searchable online database for all U.S. patents since 1976 as well as all current applications, simply has nothing on file for Emeagwali.

MYTH #6:
"Dr." Emeagwali?
Emeagwali is frequently referred to on his own and other websites as "Dr. Philip Emeagwali" or simply "Dr. Emeagwali." Though he did in fact enroll in a PhD program at the University of Michigan, he did not get the degree after failing his qualification examinations twice and having his thesis rejected by a committee of faculty members. Emeagwali subsequently sued the university, alleging civil rights violations and racial discrimination. His case was dismissed without trial. When Emeagwali appealed to a higher court, a three-judge panel rejected his discrimination claims unanimously.

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Fire Escape
Joseph Winters in 1878? No! Winters' "fire escape" was a wagon-mounted ladder. The first such contraption patented in the US was the work of William P. Withey, 1840 (US patent #1599). The fire escape with a "lazy-tongs" type ladder, more similar to Winters' patent, was pioneered by Httman and Kornelio in 1849 (US patent #6155). One of the first fire escapes of any type was invented in 18th-century England: In 1784, Daniel Maseres, of England, invented a machine called a fire escape, which, being fastened to the window, would enable anyone to descend to the street without injury. Benjamin Butterworth, Growth of Industrial Art, 1888 By 1888 the US had granted 1,099 patents on fire escapes of "many forms, and of every possible material" (Butterworth).

Fire Extinguisher
Thomas J. Martin in 1872? No! In 1813, British army captain George Manby created the first known portable fire extinguisher: a two-foot-tall copper cylinder that held 3 gallons of water and used compressed air as a propellant. One of the earliest extinguishers to use a chemical extinguishing agent, and not just water, was invented in 1849 by the Englishman William Henry Phillips, who patented his "fire annihilator" in England and the United States (US patent #7,269).

Food Additives, Meat Curing

Lloyd Hall "is responsible for the meat curing products, seasonings, emulsions, bakery products, antioxidants, protein hydrolysates, and many other products that keep our food fresh and flavorable"? No! Hall "revolutionized the meatpacking industry"? No! Hall introduced no major class of additive, certainly not meat curing salts (which are ancient), protein hydrolysates (popularized by Julius Maggi as flavor enhancers in 1886), emulsifiers and antioxidants (lecithin, for example, was used in both roles before Lloyd Hall had any patents in food processing). The so-called revolutionary meat curing product marketed by Hall's employer was invented primarily by Karl Max Seifert; the number of Seifert's patent was printed right on the containers. Hall's main contribution to this product was to reduce its tendency to cake during storage.

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Lloyd Augustus Hall myths

A prominent figure in the pantheon of black inventor-heroes is industrial chemist Lloyd Hall, who worked for some time as the chief chemist for Griffith Laboratories, a company specializing in food processing products and food additives. A few writers, evidently unsatisfied with Hall's real contributions, have reshaped them into world-changing triumphs absurd exaggerations that plainly conflict with the history of food science. Hattie Carwell hyperbolizes in her book Blacks in Science:
1

[Lloyd Hall] is responsible for the meat curing products, seasonings, emulsions, bakery products, antioxidants, protein hydrolysates, and many other products that keep our food fresh and flavorable. The above is somewhat like saying "Joe Schmo is responsible for the cars, trucks, buses, trains, planes, boats, and many other vehicles that keep us moving and on schedule." Astonishingly, verbatim chunks of Carwell's tall tale found their way onto websites hosted by Princeton University, About.com, and other organizations whose website editors really should know better. A bit of fact-checking would have revealed that seasonings and meat curing salts are ancient, that Julius Maggi popularized protein hydrolysates as flavor enhancers in 1886, and that lecithin, first isolated in 1846, was used both as an emulsifier and an antioxidant before Lloyd Hall had any patents in food chemistry. No one scientist could have introduced more than a minuscule fraction of the myriad food additives in use today.
2

57

Revolutionized the meatpacking industry"?

The most hyped invention attributed to Hall is a meat-curing salt (for preserving meat and reddening its color) that "revolutionized the meatpacking industry," as About.com and several other sites would have us believe. Louis Haber in Black Pioneers of Science and Invention brags that it was "far superior to any meat-curing salts ever produced." None of the various biographical blurbs which apparently derive from the same few sources divulge the name of this mystery miracle product, which can only be "Prague Powder," the curing composition marketed by Hall's employer, Griffith Laboratories, from 1934 onward. Prague Powder was Griffith's signature product: it was heavily advertised in the meatpacking journal National Provisioner, and a water tower painted like a giant can of the stuff stood prominently atop the company's main factory in Chicago. Composed of microscopic nitrate/nitrite salts encased inside tiny grains of sodium chloride, the powder perfectly fits descriptions of the anonymous curing salt that Hall supposedly "invented" while at Griffith. But looking at the patent number shown on the earliest advertisements and checkered containers, we see that the product was originated not by Lloyd Hall, but by a German, Karl Max Seifert!
from National Provisioner,4 May 1935

Top: label of Prague Powder drum (cover of National Provisioner,26 Jan 1935). Bottom: part of Seifert's patent.

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Indeed, the powdery salt mixture described in characteristics that have erroneously been credited to Hall:

Seifert's

patent

matches

It was manufactured by rapidly drying a salt solution on heated metal rollers ("flash drying" process). Each grain or particle contained one or more secondary salts within a main salt, sodium chloride.

After Seifert's patent was assigned to Griffith Laboratories, the company's head honcho Enoch L. Griffith adapted the invention specifically for meat curing, using alkali metal nitrates and nitrites, well-known curing agents, as the secondary salts to be fused with the common salt. He admitted that the process for creating the powder was a "development under the Seifert patent No. 1,950,459." The presence of all curing ingredients in each particle ensured that the ingredients were uniformly distributed throughout the mix, and that the nitrate/nitrite would always be accompanied by sodium chloride when penetrating the meat. The powder replaced "Prague Salt," an earlier nitrite cure that Griffith Labs had been importing from Germany since 1925. While the essential ingredients and structure of Prague Powder remained the same, Lloyd Hall obtained at least seven patents concerned with either reducing the powder's tendency to cake, or preventing unwanted side effects of the anti-caking agents. In the patent documents, Hall never claimed to have originated the curing powder or the "flash-drying" process for making it, and multiple times referred to the earlier Enoch Griffith patents #2,054,624 and #2,054,626 themselves extensions of the Seifert patent. Although Hall helped delay the onset of caking from under two weeks in the 1930s to a few months by the mid-1950s, patent applications by Louis Sair and other Griffith workers in the 1960s reported that the caking problem was still not satisfactorily solved. Sair and others tackled the problem for good by physically altering the salt particles in such a way that they could not clump together. To the extent that Lloyd Hall's refinement of Griffith Labs' curing composition represented an advance, it was incremental far from a true breakthrough that could have "revolutionized the meatpacking industry." Even after the refinements, the active ingredients of Prague Powder were still the same old nitrite and/or nitrate salts flash-fused with sodium chloride. How did all the credit get shifted to Lloyd Hall? Perhaps those who wanted to advertise Hall's achievements overzealously assumed that the chemist, in his high-level position at Griffith, singlehandedly "invented" whatever the company made. In any case, there's little chance the myths will go away anytime soon, as they are carelessly repeated even on reputable websites.
8 7 6

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References/Notes
1. H. Carwell, Blacks in Science: Astrophysicist to Zoologist (Hicksville, N.Y.: Exposition Press, 1977), 27. 2. In 1926 Hermann Bollmann pointed out that adding lecithin to refined oils prevents oxidation and thus retards rancidity (US Patent 1,575,529). Soy lecithin was used as an emulsifier in margarine as early as 1925 by manufacturers in Hamburg, Germany (Shurtleff and Aoyagi, "History of Soy Lecithin," http://www.thesoydailyclub.com/SFC/MSPproducts531.asp [accessed 22 Oct 2004]). Lloyd Hall received no food-related patents until 1933 ("Protective Coating," US Patent 1,914,351). 3. Louis Haber, Black Pioneers of Science and Invention (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987, c1970), p.151. 4. "The Significant Sixty": A Historical Report on the Progress and Development of the Meat Packing Industry, 1890-1951. Section Two, National Provisioner, January 24, 1952, p. 231 5. Haber, describing the anonymous curing salt, refers to "the ingenious method of enclosing the nitrate and nitrite inside the sodium chloride crystal." (p. 151) 6. E.L. Griffith, US patents 2,054,623 through 2,054,626. 7. L. Hall and C. Griffith, US patent 2,770,550 8. L. Sair, US patent 3,508,931. Sair says that the caking problem was "resolved by inventions of U.S. Patent 3,164,480 [Sair, Reschke], U.S. Reissue Patent 25,996 [Sair, C. Griffith], and U.S. application Ser. No. 576,862, filed Sept. 2, 1966, issued as U.S. Patent 3,335,016 [Sair, C. Griffith]."

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Fountain Pen
W.B. Purvis in 1890? No! The first reference to what seems to be a fountain pen appears in an Arabic text from 969 AD; details of the instrument are not known. A French "Bion" pen, dated 1702, represents the oldest fountain pen that still survives. Later models included John Scheffer's 1819 pen, possibly the first to be mass-produced; John Jacob Parker's "self-filling" pen of 1832; and the famous Lewis Waterman pen of 1884 (US Patents #293545, #307735).

Golf Tee
Dr. George Grant in 1899? No! A small rubber platform invented by Scotsmen William Bloxsom and Arthur Douglas was the world's first patented golf tee (British patent #12941 of 1889). The first known tee to penetrate the ground, in contrast to earlier tees that sat on the surface, was the peg-like "Perfectum" patented in 1892 by Percy Ellis of England. American dentist William Lowell introduced the most common form of tee used today, the simple wooden peg with a flared top.

61

Who invented the golf tee?

World's first golf tee patent
In the early days of golf, golf tees as we know them today were not part of the game. To elevate the ball for a drive, one had to build a tiny mound of dirt or sand and balance the ball on top. Fed up with this messy nuisance, a few golfers broke with tradition and tried using portable manufactured tees. Among the experimenters were two Scots, William Bloxsom and Arthur Douglas, inventors of the first patented tee in the world. Their patent document is dated 1889 and describes a small rubber plate with a raised ball support in the form of upright prongs or a hollow cylinder. Most early tees were similar to this one in that they lay flat on, but did not penetrate, the ground.

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Peg tees
Tees that sat on top of the ground had an annoying tendency to fly away upon getting smacked with the club. A solution, advertised in British golf journals of the 1890s, was the use of peg-shaped tees that could be pushed into the ground. The first of these gadgets to hit the market was the "Perfectum," a rubber-and-iron peg with a crown of rubber pins upon which the ball rested. Its inventor was Percy Ellis of Surrey, England, who took out a British patent for his creation in 1892. The related "Victor" tee, with a cup-shaped rubber head and metal spike base, was patented in 1897 by PM Matthews of Scotland.

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The modern tee

While the turn of the 19th-20th century saw many tee inventions of various forms and materials, none of these novelties grew popular enough to threaten the centuries-old tradition of the sand tee. That situation began to change in the early 1920s, when New Jersey dentist William Lowell patented and sold a tee that would eventually become standard: the familiar one-piece wooden peg with a funnel-shaped head. The "Reddy Tee," as Lowell called it, was easy and cheap to mass produce, but most important to its success was Lowell's aggressive marketing campaign, which included hiring golf great Walter Hagen to show off the tees while touring. Because of the Reddy Tee's unprecedented acceptance at both the professional and amateur levels, Lowell was for some time assumed to have been the inventor of the golf tee. More recently it has become fashionable, especially during Black History Month, to give George Grant the credit. Few people are aware of the tees preceding both Grant's and Lowell's, and as of this writing, scant reference to them can be found elsewhere on the Web. For a reasonably complete history, find the book Singular History of the Golf Tee by Irwin R. Valenta (Greensboro, N.C.: I.R. Valenta, c1995).

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Appendix: Patent details

The list of patents below covers only the tees discussed on this page. More extensive patent lists can be found in Valenta's book. One should keep in mind that patents are not necessarily "firsts": surely there were golfers who fashioned makeshift tees out of paper or cork, or whittled pegs out of sticks, without seeking patent protection.

Application Date

Issuer & Patent No.

Inventor

Location

Type

16-Aug1889

GB 12941 of 1889

Bloxsom & Douglas

Scotland

Rubber plate with raised ball seat. World's first tee patent.

29-Feb1892

GB 3916 of P. Ellis 1892

Wallington, Surrey, England

Rubber head, metal spike

10-Sep1895

US 567455 D. Dalziel

Glasgow, Scotland

Rubber tee combined with artificialturf mat. First US tee-related patent.

16-Dec1895

US 570821

P.L. Senat

Phila., PA

Truncated cone made of paper or cardboard. First tee patented by US citizen.

12-Jun1897

GB 14292 of 1897

P.M. Matthews

Scotland

Cup-shaped rubber head, metal spike

1-Jul-1899

US 638920 G. Grant

Boston, MA

Tubular rubber head, wood spike

5-May-1922

US 1493687

W. Lowell

S. Orange, NJ

Wooden peg with concave, funnelshaped head

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The first United States patent relating to a golf tee belonged to David Dalziel of Glasgow, Scotland. The patent was for a cylindrical, concave-tipped rubber tee in combination with an artificial ground surface (similar to the setup one might find at a driving range). The first American to secure a golf tee patent was Prosper Senat, an artist from Philadelphia. His tee was a C-shaped card joined at its ends to form a truncated cone. Along its edges were notches and markings to help the golfer keep score.

Senat's tee (1895)

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Hairbrush
Lyda Newman in 1898? No! An early US patent for a recognizably modern hairbrush went to Hugh Rock in 1854 (US Design Patent no. D645), though surely there were hairbrushes long before there was a US Patent Office. The claim that Lyda Newman's brush was the first with "synthetic bristles" is false: her patent mentions nothing about synthetic bristles and is concerned only with a new way of making the handle detachable from the head. Besides, a hairbrush that included "elastic wire teeth" in combination with natural bristles had already been patented by Samuel Firey in 1870 (US, #106680). Nylon bristles weren't possible until the invention of nylon in 1935.

Halogen Lamp
Frederick Mosby? No! The original patent for the tungsten halogen lamp (US #2,883,571; April 21, 1959) is recorded to Elmer G. Fridrich and Emmett H. Wiley of General Electric. The two had built a working prototype as early as 1953. Fred Mosby was part of the GE team charged with developing the prototype lamp into a marketable product, but was not responsible for the original halogen lamp or the concept behind it.

Hand Stamp
William Purvis in 1883? No! The earliest known postal handstamp was brought into use by Henry Bishop, Postmaster General of Great Britain, in the year 1661. The stamp imprinted the mail with a bisected circle containing the month and the date.

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Heating Furnace
Alice Parker in 1919? No! In the hypocaust heating systems built by the ancient Romans, hot air from a furnace circulated under the floor and up through channels inside the walls, thereby distributing heat evenly around the building. One of the most famous heating systems in recent centuries was the iron furnace stove known as the "Franklin stove," named after its purported originator Benjamin Franklin around 1745 AD. The US had issued over 4000 patents for heating stoves and furnaces by 1888 (Benjamin Butterworth, Growth of Industrial Art, 1888).

Horseshoe
Oscar E. Brown in 1892? No! Some sources on the web, if not ignorant enough to say Brown invented the first horseshoe ever, will at least try to credit him for the first double or compound horseshoe made of two layers: one permanently secured to the hoof, and one auxiliary layer that can be removed and replaced when it wears out. However, in the US there were already 39 earlier patents for horseshoes using that same concept. The first of these was issued to J.B. Kendall of Boston in 1861, patent #33709.

Ice Cream
Augustus Jackson in 1832? No! Flavored ices resembling sherbet were known in China in ancient times. In Europe, sherbet-like concoctions evolved into ice cream by the 16th century, and around 1670 or so, the Caf Procope in Paris offered creamy frozen dairy desserts to the public. The first written record of ice cream in the New World comes from a letter dated 1700, attesting that Maryland Governor William Bladen served the treat to his guests. In 1777, the New York Gazette advertised the sale of ice cream by confectioner Philip Lenzi.

68

Ironing Board
Sarah Boone in 1892? No! Of the several hundred US patents on ironing boards granted prior to Sarah Boone's, the first three went to William Vandenburg in 1858 (patents #19390, #19883, #20231). The first American female patentee of an ironing board is probably Sarah Mort of Dayton, Ohio, who received patent #57170 in 1866. In 1869, Henry Soggs of Columbus, Pennsylvania earned US patent #90966 for an ironing board resembling the modern type, with folding legs, adjustable height, and a cover. Another nice example of a modern-looking board was designed by J.H. Mallory in 1871, patent #120296.

Laser Cataract Surgery

Patricia Bath "transformed eye surgery" by inventing the first laser device to treat cataracts in 1986? No! Use of lasers to treat cataracts in the eye began to develop in the mid1970s. M.M. Krasnov of Russia reported the first such procedure in 1975. One of the earliest US patents for laser cataract removal (#3,982,541) was issued to Francis L'Esperance in 1976. In later years, a number of experimenters worked independently on laser devices for removing cataracts, including Daniel Eichenbaum, whose work became the basis of the Paradigm Photon device; and Jack Dodick, whose Dodick Laser PhotoLysis System eventually became the first laser unit to win FDA approval for cataract removal in the United States. Still, the majority of cataract surgeries continue to be performed using ultrasound devices, not lasers.

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Laser cataract removal

Earliest patents: 1976
Krasnov patent Method of non-surgical treatment of cataracts Abstract: A method of non-surgical treatment of soft and membraneous cataracts, including congenital cataracts, said method comprising the step of cutting the anterior capsule of the lens and/or pupillary membrane without perforating injury to the eye wall with a laser beam, caused to pass through the cornea, the anterior chamber of the eye and pupil, and then be focused onto the anterior capsule of the lens and/or pupillary membrane to thus form at least one hole through which the cataract substance is thus let out of the lens capsule/soft cataract/into the anterior chamber of the eye where the substance is gradually dissolved. United States Patent 3,971,382 (July 27, 1976) Mikhail Mikhailovich Krasnov Filed: November 22, 1974

L'Esperance patent Eye surgical instrument Abstract: Method and apparatus are disclosed for surgically removing surface portions of an eye such as cataract tissue. The eye surface portions to be removed are vaporized by a carbon dioxide laser beam. Smoke and vaporized portions are withdrawn by a vacuum pump. United States Patent 3,982,541 (September 28, 1976) Francis L'Esperance, Jr. Filed: July 29, 1974

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Pioneers
In 1975 Krasnov reported the technique of laser phacopuncture, the first laser procedure for cataract removal. In: Coombes A, Gartry D, eds. Cataract surgery (London : BMJ Books, 2003), p.200 Four top ophthalmologists have been working independently on the system of developing a laser to help in cataract removal. The first has been Dr. Daniel Eichenbaum from the USA. It has been basically due to Dr. Daniel Eichenbaum and Paradigm that the laser cataract removal could be started. [...] The second ophthalmologist Dr. Jack Dodick introduced the use of the YAG laser for surgical cataract removal. [...] The third ophthalmologist is Dr. Michael Colvard. The Erbium laser is being used by Michael Colvard to ablate ocular tissue [...] The fourth ophthalmologist is Dr. Sunita Agarwal who has designed a new probe.... Agarwal S, et al. Laser phaco cataract surgery. In: Agarwal S, et al, eds.Phacoemulsification, Laser Cataract Surgery and Foldable IOLs. New Delhi: Jaypee Brothers Medical Publishers; Thorofare, N.J.: Slack [distributor], 2000. p.237

Eichenbaum patent Summary of the invention Accordingly, it is an object of this invention to provide a laser surgical device which is capable of operating through a small incision. A second object of this invention is to provide a laser surgical device able to direct the fragmenting laser energy directly and accurately to a very small area. Another object of this invention is to provide a laser surgical device capable of preventing random laser or heat energy from damaging adjacent areas of the eye during surgery. Another object of this invention is to provide a laser surgical device configured to provide a sufficiently large opening to accommodate large, hard pieces of lens, while at the same time preventing unacceptably high levels of aspiration. Yet another object of this invention is to provide a laser surgical system which can facilitate not only cataract surgery, but other types of laser surgery as well. United States Patent 4,694,828 Issued: September 22, 1987 Inventor: Eichenbaum; Daniel M. Application Filed: April 21, 1986 (Patricia Bath's U.S. Patent 4,744,360 was filed December 18, 1986 and issued May 17, 1988.)

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1st FDA approval for a laser cataract removal device

Salt Lake City -(BW HealthWire)-July 3, 2000 Laser Corp. (OTC BB:LSER) Monday announced that it has received FDA 510 (K) clearance to market the Dodick Laser PhotoLysis System in the United States. This clearance brings to the market and the medical profession the first laser device to be approved in the United States for the removal of cataracts. "Laser Corp. Announces FDA Clearance of Its Dodick Laser PhotoLysis System." Business Wire, July 3, 2000

Ultrasonic phacoemulsification
Most cataract surgeries are performed using ultrasound, not laser. Many people believe that cataract surgery is typically performed with a laser. In fact, this is one of the most common misperceptions in medicine. The phaco probe that is most commonly used in modern cataract surgery vibrates rapidly at ultrasonic frequency to break up the cataract and allow it to be removed through a small opening in the phaco probe. A recently developed instrument now uses a laser to break up the cataract, but the laser is not as powerful as ultrasound, and it cannot be used to remove advanced cataracts. Other methods of breaking up the lens are under investigation, like the use of tiny, powerful jets of water. Currently, there is no evidence that laser phaco machines produce better outcomes than ultrasound phaco machines. http://www.lasikinstitute.org/Phacoemulsification.html (accessed Mar. 1, 2004)

72

Bibliography
Agarwal S, Agarwal J, Agarwal T. Laser phaco cataract surgery. In: Agarwal S, Sachdev MS, Agarwal A, et al, eds. Phacoemulsification, Laser Cataract Surgery and Foldable IOLs. New Delhi: Jaypee Brothers Medical Publishers; Thorofare, N.J.: Slack [distributor], 2000:237-246. Coombes A, Gartry D, eds. Cataract surgery. London: BMJ Books, 2003 Dodick JM, Katz JD. Lasers in Cataract Surgery. In: Steinert, ed. Cataract Surgery: Technique, Complications, and Management. Philadelphia Pa.: Saunders, 2004:605610. Gardiner MF, Pineda R, Dana MR. Laser cataract surgery: past, present, and evolving technologies. International Ophthalmology Clinics. 2004 Winter;44(1):113-21.

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Lawn Mower
John Burr in 1899? No! English engineer Edwin Budding invented the first reel-type lawn mower (with blades arranged in a cylindrical pattern) and had it patented in England in 1830. In 1868 the United States issued patent #73807 to Amariah M. Hills of Connecticut, who went on to establish the Archimedean Lawn Mower Co. in 1871. By 1888, the US Patent Office had granted 138 patents for lawn mowers (Butterworth, Growth of Industrial Art). Doubtlessly there were even more by the time Burr got his patent in 1899. Some website authors want Burr to have invented the first "rotary blade" mower, with a centrally mounted spinning blade. But his patent #624749 shows yet another twist on the old reel mower, differing in only a few details with Budding's original.

Lawn Sprinkler
J. H. Smith in 1897? Elijah McCoy? No! The first US patent with the title "lawn sprinkler" was issued to J. Lessler of Buffalo, New York in 1871 (#121949). Early examples of water-propelled, rotating lawn sprinklers were patented by J. Oswald in 1890 (#425340) and J. S. Woolsey in 1891 (#457099) among a gazillion others. Smith's patent shows just another rotating sprinkler, and McCoy's 1899 patent was for a turtle-shaped sprinkler.

74

Mailbox (letter drop box)

P. Downing invented the street letter drop box in 1891? No! George Becket invented the private mailbox in 1892? No! The US Postal Service says that "Street boxes for mail collection began to appear in large [US] cities by 1858." They appeared in Europe even earlier, according to historian Laurin Zilliacus: Mail boxes as we understand them first appeared on the streets of Belgian towns in 1848. In Paris they came two years later, while the English received their 'pillar boxes' in 1855. Laurin Zilliacus, Mail for the World, p. 178 (New York, J. Day Co., 1953) From the same book (p.178), "Private mail boxes were invented in the United States in about 1860." Eventually, letter drop boxes came equipped with inner lids to prevent miscreants from rummaging through the mail pile. The first of many US patents for such a purpose was granted in 1860 to John North of Middletown, Connecticut (US Pat. #27466).

75

Mop
Thomas W. Stewart in 1893? No! Mops go back a long, long way before 1893. Just how long, is hard to determine. Restricting our view to the modern era, we find that the United States issued its first mop patent (#241) in 1837 to Jacob Howe, called "Construction of Mop-Heads and the Mode of Securing them upon Handles." One of the first patented mops with a built-in wringer was the one H. & J. Morton invented in 1859 (US #24049). The mop specified in Stewart's patent #499402 has a lever-operated clamp for "holding the mop rags"; the lever is not a wringing mechanism as erroneously reported on certain websites. Other inventors had already patented mops with leveroperated clamps, one of the first being Greenleaf Stackpole in 1869 (US Pat. #89803).

Paper Punch (hand-held)

Charles Brooks in 1893? No! Was it the first with a hinged receptacle to catch the clippings? No! The first numbered US patent for a hand-held hole punch was #636, issued to Solyman Merrick in 1838. Robert James Kellett earned the first two US patents for a chad-catching hole punch, in 1867 (patent #65090) and 1868 (#79232).

Pencil Sharpener
John Lee Love in 1897? No! Bernard Lassimone of Limoges, France invented one of the earliest sharpeners, receiving French patent number 2444 in 1828. An apparent ancestor of the 20th-century hand-cranked sharpener was patented by G. F. Ballou in 1896 (US #556709) and marketed by the A.B. Dick Company as the "Planetary Pencil Pointer." As the user held the pencil stationary and turned the crank, twin milling cutters revolved around the tip of the pencil and shaved it into a point. Love's patent #594114 shows a variation on a different kind of sharpener, in which one would crank the pencil itself around in a stirring motion. An earlier device of a similar type was devised in 1888 by G.H. Courson (patent #388533), and sold under the name "President Pencil Sharpener."

76

Permanent Wave Machine (for perming hair)

Marjorie Joyner in 1928? No! That would be German hairdresser Karl Ludwig Nessler (aka Charles Nestl) no later than 1906.

Postmarking and Canceling Machine

William Barry in 1897? No! Try Pearson Hill of England, in 1857. Hill's machine marked the postage stamp with vertical lines and postmark date. By 1892, US post offices were using several brands of machines, including one that could cancel, postmark, count and stack more than 20,000 pieces of mail per hour (Marshall Cushing, Story of Our Post Office, Boston: A. M. Thayer & co., 1892, pp.189-191).

Printing Press
W.A. Lavalette invented "the advanced printing press" in 1878? No! Movable-type printing first appeared in East Asia. In Europe, around 1455, Johann Gutenberg adapted the screw press used in other trades such as winemaking and combined it with type-metal alloy characters and oil-based printing ink. Major advances after Gutenberg include the cylinder printing press (c. 1811) by Frederick Koenig and Andreas Bauer, the rotary press (1846) by Richard M. Hoe, and the web press (1865) by William Bullock. Major advances do not include Lavalette's patent, which was only one of 3,268 printing patents granted in the US by the year 1888 (Butterworth, Growth of Industrial Art).

Propeller for Ship

George Tolivar or Benjamin Montgomery? No! John Stevens constructed a boat with twin steam-powered propellers in 1804 in the first known application of a screw propeller for marine propulsion. Other important pioneers in the early 1800s included Sir Francis Pettit Smith of England, and Swedish-born ship designer John Ericsson (US patent #588) who later designed the USS Monitor.

77

Refrigerator
Thomas Elkins in 1879? John Stanard in 1891? No! Oliver Evans proposed a mechanical refrigerator based on a vapor-compression cycle in 1805 and Jacob Perkins had a working machine built in 1834. Dr. John Gorrie created an air-cycle refrigeration system in about 1844, which he installed in a Florida hospital. In the 1850s Alexander Twining in the USA and James Harrison in Australia used mechanical refrigeration to produce ice on a commercial scale. Around the same time, the Carr brothers of France led the development of absorption refrigeration systems. Stanard's patent describes not a refrigeration machine, but an old-fashioned icebox an insulated cabinet into which ice is placed to cool the interior. As such, it was a "refrigerator" only in the old sense of the term, which included nonmechanical coolers. Elkins created a similarly low-tech cooler, acknowledging in his patent #221222 that "I am aware that chilling substances inclosed within a porous box or jar by wetting its outer surface is an old and well-known process."

Rotary Engine
Andrew Beard in 1892? No! The Subject Matter Index of Patents Issued from the United States Patent Office from 1790 to 1873 Inclusive lists 394 "Rotary Engine" patents from 18101873. The Wankel engine, a rotary combustion engine with a four-stroke cycle, dates from 1954.

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Screw Socket for Light Bulb

Lewis Latimer? No! The earliest evidence for a light bulb screw base design is a drawing in a Thomas Edison notebook dated Sept. 11, 1880. It is not the work of Latimer, though: Edison's long-time associates, Edward H. Johnson and John Ott, were principally responsible for designing fixtures in the fall of 1880. Their work resulted in the screw socket and base very much like those widely used today. R. Friedel and P. Israel, Edison's Electric Light: Biography of an Invention, (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1986). The 1880 sketch of the screw socket is reproduced in the book cited above.

Smallpox Vaccine
Onesimus the slave in 1721? No! Onesimus knew of variolation, an early inoculation technique practiced in several areas of the world before the discovery of vaccination. English physician Edward Jenner developed the smallpox vaccine in 1796 after finding that the relatively innocuous cowpox virus built immunity against the deadly smallpox. This discovery led to the eventual eradication of endemic smallpox throughout the world. Vaccination differs from the primitive inoculation method known as variolation, which involved the deliberate planting of live smallpox into a healthy person in hopes of inducing a mild form of the disease that would provide immunity from further infection. Variolation not only was risky to the patient but, more importantly, failed to prevent smallpox from spreading. Known in Asia by 1000 AD, the practice reached the West via more than one channel.

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Smokestack for Locomotives

L. Bell in 1871? No! Even the first steam locomotives, such as the one built by Richard Trevithick in 1804, were equipped with smokestacks. Later smokestacks featured wire netting to prevent hazardous sparks from escaping. Page 115 of John H. White Jr.'s American Locomotives: An Engineering History, 1830-1880 (1997 edition) displays a composite picture showing 57 different types of spark-arresting smokestacks devised before 1860.

Steam Boiler Furnace

Granville Woods in 1884? No! The steam engine boiler is of course as old as the steam engine itself. The Subject Matter Index of Patents Issued from the United States Patent Office from 1790 to 1873 Inclusive lists several hundred variations and improvements to the steam boiler, including the revolutionary water-tube boiler patented in 1867 by American inventors George Herman Babcock and Stephen Wilcox.

Street Sweeper
Charles Brooks in 1896? No! Brooks' patent was for a modified version of a common type of street sweeper cart that had long been known, with a rotary brush that swept refuse onto an elevator belt and into a trash bin. In the United States, street sweepers started being patented in the 1840s, and by 1900 the Patent Office had issued about 300 patents for such machines.

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Elevator-belt street sweepers

A few examples of elevator-belt street sweepers (US Patent number, Year)

At the bottom of the above diagram is Charles Brooks' street sweeper cart patented in 1896; above it are a few examples of earlier street sweepers of a similar type (having a revolving brush, elevating belt and refuse receptacle). Brooks' design, far from being the "first street sweeper," was just a variation of what already existed, and the patent for it was among the more than 300 street sweeper patents issued in the United States before 1900. Most 19th-century sweepers, including the one in Brooks' patent, were horsecarts with no engine on board. The wheels on the cart turned gears or chains which drove the brush and belt.

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A few other types

First self-propelled sweeper vehicle patented in the USA, driven by steam engine and intended for cleaning railroad tracks.

Another steam-propelled sweeper, this one for roads.

The inventor of this machine, Eureka C. Bowne, was the first known woman to get a patent for a street sweeper. "Her success was great," wrote Matilda Joslyn Gage in The North American Review, Volume 136, Issue 318, May 1883.

US patents for street sweepers, prior to 1900

Street sweeper type Number of (primary classification) patents

. Hand directed . Belt brush . Reciprocating brush . Rotary-brush cylinder . . Collector . . . Elevator belt . . . Elevator pan . . . Elevator wheel . Rotary-brush disk . Other

29 26 8 55 43 102 7 15 9 21

All

315

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Supercharger for Automobiles

Joseph Gammel/Gamell in 1976? No! In 1885, Gottlieb Daimler received a German patent for supercharging an internal combustion engine. Louis Renault patented a centrifugal supercharger in France in 1902. An early supercharged racecar was built by Lee Chadwick of Pottstown, Pennsylvania in 1908 and reportedly reached a speed of 100 miles per hour.

Toilet
T. Elkins in 1897? No! The Minoans of Crete are said to have invented a flush toilet thousands of years ago; however, there is probably no direct ancestral relationship between it and the modern one that evolved primarily in England starting in the late 16th century, when Sir John Harrington devised a flushing device for his godmother Queen Elizabeth. In 1775 Alexander Cummings patented a toilet in which some water remained after each flush, thereby suppressing odors from below. The "water closet" continued to evolve, and in 1885, Thomas Twyford provided us with a single-piece ceramic toilet similar to the one we know today.

Toilet for Railroad Cars

Lewis Latimer in 1874? No! William E. Marsh Jr. of New Jersey took out US patent #95597 for "Improvement in Water-closets for Railroad Cars" five years prior to Latimer's 1874 patent with the same title. Marsh's patent specification suggests that railroad-car water closets, i.e., toilets, were already in use: In the closets or privies of railroad cars, the cold and wind, especially while the train is in motion, are very disagreeable... My invention is to remove these objectionable features.... W. Marsh, US patent #95597, 1869

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Tricycle
M.A. Cherry in 1886? No! In Germany in the year 1680 or thereabouts, paraplegic watchmaker Stephan Farffler built his own tricycle at 22 years of age. He designed it to be pedaled with the hands, for obvious reasons.

Turn Signals
Richard Spikes in 1913? No! Did the 1913 Pierce Arrow feature Spikes' turn signals? No! Electric turn signal lights were devised as early as 1907 (U.S. Patent 912,831), but were not widely offered by major automobile manufacturers until the late 1930s, when GM developed its own version and made it standard on Buicks. The Pierce Arrow Museum in Buffalo, NY denies that directional signals were offered on 1913 Pierce Arrows.

Typewriter
L.S. Burridge & N.R. Marshman in 1885? No! Henry Mill, an English engineer, was the first person to patent the basic idea of the typewriter in 1714. The first working typewriter known to have actually been built was the work of Pellegrino Turri of Italy in 1808. The familiar QWERTY keyboard, developed by C. L. Sholes and C. Glidden, reached the market in 1874. In 1878 change-case keys were added that enabled the typing of both capital and small letters.

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