(uuworld.org) Rarely today does a single person get credit for a major technological advance the way Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell did in the nineteenth century. Yet even back then, inventions were almost always the product of many ingenious minds collaborating and competing with one another.
Brilliant, modest, and still little known, Lewis Latimer was a key figure behind two of the most revolutionary inventions of all timeâ€â€the light bulb and the telephone. The son of escaped slaves, Latimer became one of the first African American inventors and helped found the Unitarian church in Flushing, New York.
Latimer grew up in Boston. His family moved from house to house to elude slave catchers, and he attended only grammar school before going to work in his father’s barbershop. The capture of his father, George, in 1842 spurred Boston’s abolitionists to their first political actionâ€â€creating a human wall around the Leverett Street Jail to prevent his return to a Virginia slaveholder. They also bought his freedom.
At 16, Lewis Latimer enlisted in the Navy to fight for the Union in the Civil War, lying about his age. On his return, he landed a job as an office boy with a patent-law firm. Latimer eagerly studied the draftsmen who turned clients’ sketches into drawings for their patent claims. He bought his own tools and practiced at night. In eleven years at the firm, he rose to head draftsmanâ€â€but was paid less than white draftsmen.
In 1876 Alexander Graham Bell, a teacher of deaf students, asked Latimer to help him apply for a patent. Bell…more
