Garrett Morgan

Garrett Morgan was born in Kentucky, the seventh of eleven children of parents who had been enslaved. He left school after the sixth grade and at 14 went to Cincinnati to work as a handyman, paying a tutor from his wages to keep up his education. In Cleveland he got a job sweeping the floor of a sewing machine factory, learned to repair the machines and opened his own repair shop in 1907. A hair-straightening cream he stumbled on while trying to stop sewing needles scorching cloth gave him the money to keep inventing.

In 1914 he patented a safety hood, a canvas hood with two long tubes that reached down to the floor, where air was cooler and cleaner, and a sponge filter. It was sold to fire brigades. On 25 July 1916 a gas explosion in a tunnel being dug under Lake Erie for the Cleveland waterworks trapped a crew of workers, and the first rescuers were overcome too. Morgan was woken in the night, went to the lake with his brother, put on his hoods and went down. They brought out several men, some alive. When newspapers made clear that the hero was Black, orders from the south dried up.

In 1923, after seeing a crash at a Cleveland junction, he patented a three-position traffic signal with a warning phase between stop and go, and sold the rights to General Electric for 40,000 dollars. He founded a Black newspaper and lost most of his sight in later life.