Black History Month: Mary Ellen Pleasant
Black History Month: Mary Ellen Pleasant
Black History Month - Garrett Morgan
Black History Month - Garrett Morgan
Don Mayer
Feb 25, 2021
My Tesla will now "see" traffic lights and automatically stop for them and beeps at me when the light turns green. In the early days of cars there were no traffic lights until a bad "horseless carriage" accident motivated Garrett Morgan to invent the traffic signal!
After witnessing a collision between an automobile and a horse-drawn carriage, Morgan took his turn at inventing a traffic signal. Morgan was one of the first to apply for and acquire a U.S. patent for an inexpensive way to produce a traffic signal. The patent was granted on November 20, 1923. Morgan also had his invention patented in Great Britain and Canada.
The Morgan traffic signal was a T-shaped pole unit that featured three positions: Stop, Go, and an all-directional stop position. This "third position" halted traffic in all directions to allow pedestrians to cross streets more safely.
Morgan's hand-cranked semaphore traffic management device was in use throughout North America until all manual traffic signals were replaced by the automatic red-, yellow-, and green-light traffic signals currently used around the world. The inventor sold the rights to his traffic signal to the General Electric Corporation for $40,000.
The son of former slaves, Garrett Augustus Morgan was born in Claysville, Kentucky, on March 4, 1877. Garrett was the seventh of 11 children, and his early childhood was spent attending school and working on the family farm with his brothers and sisters. While still a teenager, he left Kentucky and moved north to Cincinnati, Ohio, in search of opportunities.
In 1895, Morgan moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where he went to work as a sewing machine repairman for a clothing manufacturer, teaching himself as much as he could about sewing machines and tinkering with the process. Word of his experiments and his skill at fixing things traveled fast and he was in demand by several Cleveland companies.
In 1907, Garrett opened his sewing equipment and repair shop. It was the first of several businesses he would establish. In 1909, he expanded the enterprise to include a tailoring shop that employed 32 people.
Still tinkering, in 1914, Morgan was awarded two patents for the invention of an early gas mask, the Safety Hood and Smoke Protector. He manufactured the mask and sold it nationally and internationally through the National Safety Device Company, or Nadsco, using a marketing strategy to avoid Jim Crow discrimination—what historian Lisa Cook calls "anonymity by dissociation." At the time, entrepreneurs sold their inventions by conducting live demonstrations. Morgan appeared in these events to the general public, with municipal fire departments, and city officials representing himself as his own assistant—a Native American man called "Big Chief Mason." In the South, Morgan hired whites, sometimes public safety professionals, to stage demonstrations for him. His newspaper advertisements featured smartly dressed white male models. The gas mask proved very popular: New York City quickly adopted the mask, and, eventually, 500 cities followed suit.
On July 25, 1916, Morgan made national news for using his gas mask to rescue men trapped during an explosion in an underground tunnel located 250 feet beneath Lake Erie. No one had been able to reach the men: Eleven of them had died as had ten others attempting to rescue them. Called in the middle of the night six hours after the incident, Morgan and a team of volunteers donned the new "gas masks" and brought two workers out alive and recovered the bodies of 17 others. He personally gave artificial respiration to one of the men he rescued.
In 1920, Morgan moved into the newspaper business when he established the "Cleveland Call." As the years went on, he became a prosperous and widely respected businessman and was able to purchase a home and an automobile, invented by Henry Ford in 1903. In fact, Morgan was the first African American to purchase an automobile in Cleveland, and it was Morgan's experience while driving along the streets of that city that inspired him to invent an improvement to traffic signals.
Along with many others, Morgan lost most of his wealth with the stock market crash, but it didn't stop his inventive nature. He developed glaucoma, but at the time of his death he was still working on a new invention: a self-extinguishing cigarette. Morgan died on August 27, 1963, at the age of 86.