An ongoing illustrative history study
This piece originally posted 6/8/2021
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You may not know his name, but you almost certainly made use of at least one of his inventions sometime in the past few days.
Meet Garrett Morgan, Sr., inventor and businessman. Born in 1877 Kentucky to liberated enslaved persons, Garrett Morgan worked as a handyman in his teens, but then moved to Cleveland in search of work, and took a job with a sewing machine repair service. Garrett's natural bent for tinkering and engineering soon came to the fore, and by 1907 he had essentially invented, on the fly, an improved belt fastener and an improved zigzag attachment. In 1908 Garrett and his wife Mary Ann opened their own sewing machine repair shop, and then a ladies clothing store (which, significantly for the time, at one point employed 32 people). The Morgans also co-founded the Cleveland Association of Colored Men.
Garrett's fascination for engineering did not wane and he began experimenting with inventions of his own, rather than merely improving upon the work of others. He received his first patent in 1912; a chemical solution that straightened the woolen fibers of textiles and human hair. A year later he formed the G.A. Morgan Hair Refining Cream Company. He also invented and patented a specialized hood to protect firefighters against smoke inhalation; this creation got a very public demonstration in 1916, when Garrett used it to help with the rescue of miners who had become trapped in a tunnel beneath Lake Erie. He also founded the Cleveland Call (later the Cleveland Call and Post), which is still in publication today.
But perhaps Garrett's most ubiquitous invention came in 1923. While working on solutions to modern-day road safety (after having witnessed a collision between a horse-drawn carriage and an automobile); he devised and patented the G.A. Morgan Safety System --an automated caution indicator that displayed alternating colored signals at perpendicular pathways. In other words, folks: the modern day traffic light.
There. That's a name you know, now.
(Grateful thanks to my son Samuel who ably assisted me with some of the coloring methods in both Garrett's, and Lesson #89's Frankie Muse Freeman's, respective illustrations.)
Next page - Lesson 91: Ernestine Eckstein