Black Inventors in the Age of Segregation: Granville T. Woods, Lewis H. Latimer, & Shelby J. DavidsonAccording to the stereotype, late-19th and early-20th-century inventors, quintessential loners and supposed geniuses, worked in splendid isolation and then unveiled their discoveries to a marvelling world. Most successful inventors of this era, however, developed their ideas within the framework of industrial organizations that supported them and their experiments. For African-American inventors, negotiating these racially stratified professional environments meant not only working on innovative designs but also breaking barriers. Americans: Granville Woods, an independent inventor; Lewis Latimer, a corporate engineer with General Electric; and Shelby Davidson, who worked in the US Treasury Department. Detailing the difficulties and human frailties that make their achievements all the more impressive, Fouche explains how each man used invention for financial gain, as a claim on entering adversarial environments, and as a means to technical stature in a Jim Crow institutional setting. complicated racial identities - as both black and white communities perceived them - with their hopes of being judged solely on the content of their inventive work, Fouche provides a nuanced view of African American contributions to - and relationships with - technology during a period of rapid industrialization and mounting national attention to the inequities of a separate-but-equal social order. |
Contents
INTRODUCTION | |
INVENTING THE MYTH OF RACIAL EQUALITY | |
LIARS AND THIEVES GRANVILLE T WOODS AND THE PROCESS OF INVENTION | 17 |
LEWIS H LATIMER AND THE POLITICS OF TECHNOLOGICAL ASSIMILATIONISM | 72 |
ADDING MACHINES INSTITUTIONAL RACISM AND THE BLACK ELITE | 125 |
BACK TO THE FUTURE REASSESSING BLACK INVENTORS IN THE TWENTYFIRST CENTURY | 169 |
NOTES | 181 |
ESSAY ON SOURCES | 203 |
INDEX | 211 |
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adding machine African American African American inventors Amer American culture American dream American Engineering Company American society apparatus attorney auditing automatic fee began black elite black inventors Booker Burroughs Cincinnati civilization colored Davidson device draftsman Elec Electric Lighting Company electric railway Enholm February February 14 filed George Latimer Granville Woods Greener History Howard University ibid ideas incandescent lamp Induction Telegraph Interference cases 18,207 invention Kram L. H. LATIMER Latimer's Lewis H Lewis Howard Latimer Lewis Latimer LHLC-QBPL LHLC-SCSBC Logbook Maxim Merritt Roe Smith money order NARA National Archives patent application Patent Office Perkins position Post Office Division produce race racial racism received Record Group 241 Shelby SJDC social technical telephone Testimony in Surrebuttal tion Treasury Department twentieth century United States Electric United States Letters ventors W. E. B. Du Bois Washington William wire Woods Electric Woods Electric Company Woods's wrote York Zerbe
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