Inventions We Couldn’t Live Without
Black History Month Edition
As a network of agencies in service of creativity, Inventor’s Day is one of our favorite informally celebrated holidays. You can’t really have one without the other, after all. To be creative, one must think inventively. To be inventive, one must think creatively.
Last year, we spotlighted some inventions that our people thought were the most useful. They picked the battery, coffee, the lego brick, and the mirror. While many of us might be avoiding the last of those inventions as the months we’re stuck inside continue to stack up, it’s hard to imagine what our lives would look like without them.
Which leads us to this year’s theme: inventions our lives would be worse without. And since this list could go on forever without limitations, we’re focusing on inventions made by Black inventors in light of February being Black History Month. What follows is a list of five innovations that have made our lives easier, safer, and better.
3D Technology
Whether you love it or hate it, 3D is a major component of the way we consume media, and it has certainly been foundational to the work our agencies do. It was also made possible by Valerie Thomas, an Black inventor and scientist.
She started working for NASA as a data analyst in 1964 and quickly made her impact developing real-time computer data systems to support satellite operations control centers, among other feats. After becoming inspired at a seminar, Thomas started experimenting with flat and concave mirrors to see how they affected the reflections of different objects. Her discovery that concave mirrors create three-dimensional illusions led to her developing the 3D Illusion Transmitter in 1977, which made possible other inventions including 3D film, 3D TV and modern medical imaging.
Three-Light Traffic Signal
Are you someone who speeds up at a yellow light, or slows down?
Whatever your answer, we can thank Garrett Morgan for our ability to even ask the question. Morgan was born in Kentucky in 1877, the child of two formerly enslaved people. Taking up odd jobs from the age of 14, he eventually opened his own repair shop in 1907 and then started a garment shop two years later. His ventures were both so successful that in 1920, he had saved enough to start The Cleveland Call, which became one of the most important Black newspapers in the nation.
Not many people had cars back then, but because of his profits, Morgan was one of the few. He noticed that because the traffic signals only had two options — stop and go — that drivers had very little time to react when the signal changed, producing collisions. After seeing an especially terrible accident, he decided to design his own traffic signal with a “warning” signal, which would eventually become our yellow light and create a personality test of sorts: are you a speed up or slow down kind of person?
Long Lasting Light Bulb
Imagine having to change your lightbulb every 15 hours. You’d either be losing a lot of money, or a lot of light (or a lot of arguments). Thanks to Lewis Howard Latimer, we don’t have to worry about it.
While Thomas Edison technically invented the light bulb in 1879, Latimer — who worked with Edison, gathering his data as well as translating it into German and French — created a lightbulb with a more durable filament than Edison’s, made of Carbon. He sold the patent to the US Electric Co. in 1881, and a year later patented a process for efficiently manufacturing the carbon filament. The reason incandescent light bulbs became more efficient and affordable is all due to him.
Refrigerated Trucks
Most of what you eat isn’t actually grown or manufactured in your town — so how do your grocery stores get it? Refrigerated trucks, of course. And we can thank Frederick McKinley Jones for their existence.
Jones took out more than 60 patents throughout his life, including a patent for the roof-mounted cooling system that’s used to refrigerate goods on trucks during extended transportation in the mid-1930s. He received a patent for his invention in 1940, and co-founded what would become known as The Thermo King. Because of Jones, you can now buy any artisanal ice cream you want from your local grocery store even if it’s made four states over. Let’s not pretend like we would have survived our quarantine cravings without him.
Home Security System
Maybe your home security system is a Rottweiler, and if that’s the case, we’re not sure who you have to thank for that, though it was probably someone from the Roman legions in Rottweil, Germany. But if you have any of the modern security systems of today that rely on cameras, monitors, two-way microphones, and alarms, then the inventor you should know is Marie Van Brittan Brown.
A full-time nurse at the time of her invention, she wanted a system that would allow her to identify security threats and quickly alert the authorities because she was disappointed by the lack and slowness of response by police where she lived, in Jamaica, Queens. Her patent laid the foundation for the modern closed-circuit television system that is widely used for surveillance, home security systems, push-button alarm triggers, crime prevention, and traffic monitoring. Nurses really have always saved the day.
Take a look here for a more extensive list of inventions patented by Black inventors.
