The first known traffic signal appeared in London in 1868 near the Houses of Parliament. Designed by JP Knight, it featured two semaphore arms and two gas lamps. The earliest electric traffic lights include Lester Wire's two-color version set up in Salt Lake City circa 1912, James Hoge's system (US patent #1,251,666) installed in Cleveland by the American Traffic Signal Company in 1914, and William Potts' 4-way red-yellow-green lights introduced in Detroit beginning in 1920. New York City traffic towers began flashing three-color signals also in 1920.
Garrett Morgan's cross-shaped, crank-operated semaphore was not among the first half-hundred patented traffic signals, nor was it "automatic" as is sometimes claimed, nor did it play any part in the evolution of the modern traffic light.
I think there's a /pol/itical undertone to this thread
Cooper Price
Peanut butter
George Washington Carver (who began his peanut research in 1903)? Nope.
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."
Aaron Martinez
FACTS ARE RACIST!!!!!!
Luke Miller
Gas mask
Garrett Morgan in 1914? Nope.
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.
Eli Parker
George Washington Carver
"Discovered" hundreds of new and important uses for the peanut? Fathered the peanut industry? Revolutionized southern US agriculture? Nope.
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 were either unoriginal, impractical, or of uncertain effectiveness. No product born in his laboratory was widely adopted.
The boom years for Southern peanut production came prior to, and not as a result of, Carver's promotion of the crop.
Carver's work to improve regional farming practices was not of pioneering scientific importance and had little demonstrable impact.
Benjamin Wright
Automatic lubricator, "Real McCoy"
Elijah McCoy revolutionized industry in 1872 by inventing the first device to automatically oil machinery? Nope. The phrase "Real McCoy" arose to distinguish Elijah's inventions from cheap imitations? Nope.
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.
William Cox
Blood bank
Dr. Charles Drew in 1940? Nope.
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."
Jacob Torres
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? Nope.
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. Charles Drew was not responsible for any breakthrough scientific or medical discovery; his main career achievement lay in supervising or co-supervising major programs for the collection and shipment of blood and plasma.
Isaiah Turner
Washington DC city plan
Benjamin Banneker? Nope.
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.
Joshua Adams
Filament for light bulb
Lewis Latimer invented the carbon filament in 1881 or 1882? Nope.
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 them, 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.
Angel Allen
Heart surgery (first successful)
Dr. Daniel Hale Williams in 1893? Nope.
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).
Parker Bailey
"Third rail"
Granville Woods in 1901? Nope.
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 third-rail 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.
Jacob Peterson
Slow down there friend. Being an internet ideologue is mighty hard work. Pace yourself.
Levi Edwards
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? Nope.
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.
Daniel Nguyen
Lets say you're 100% correct about all of this.
What's your point? Does it even matter? Who cares?
I have a feeling this is a /pol/post about "LOL DAE STUPID NIGGERS?"
Samuel Hughes
Refrigerated truck
Frederick Jones (with Joseph Numero) in 1938? Nope. Did Jones change America's eating habits by making possible the long-distance shipment of perishable foods? Nope.
Refrigerated ships and railcars had been moving perishables across oceans and continents even before Jones was born. 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.
Sebastian Thompson
Air brake / automatic air brake
Granville Woods in 1904? Nope.
In 1869, a 22-year-old George Westinghouse received US patent #88929 for a brake device operated by compressed air, and in the same year organized the Westinghouse Air Brake Company. Many of the 361 patents he accumulated during his career were for air brake variations and improvements, including his first "automatic" version in 1872 (US #124404).
Mason Bailey
Air conditioner
Frederick Jones in 1949? Nope.
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.
Blake Ramirez
Airship
J.F. Pickering in 1900? Nope.
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.
The simple fact of the matter is that almost nothing is completely invented by one guy (black, white, or anything else). While it's true that black inventions are greatly exaggerated, most of these stories could plausibly described as "black improvements".
Jacob Sanders
>What's your point? Does it even matter? Who cares? Couldn't the same be said for any thread on this board. I for one find it interesting.
