Garrett Morgan

Garrett Augustus Morgan was born in Paris, Kentucky, on March 4, 1877. His father, Sydney Morgan, had been enslaved and was the son of Confederate general John Hunt Morgan and a woman Sydney's mother had been enslaved by. His mother, Elizabeth Reed, was the daughter of a Baptist minister and had been born into slavery herself. Both parents worked tenant farms after emancipation. Garrett was one of eleven siblings.

He left school in the sixth grade and went to work. At fourteen he moved north to Cincinnati, where he took jobs as a handyman and paid a tutor out of his wages to keep studying on his own time. Around 1895 he moved to Cleveland and took a position at a sewing machine factory. He was the kind of mechanic who disassembled machines to understand them, and within a few years he had his first patent: an improved friction drive clutch for manually operated sewing machines.

In 1907 he opened his own sewing machine repair shop. In 1909 he expanded into a tailoring business that employed thirty-two workers at its peak. A year later he discovered, while experimenting with a chemical solution meant to help sewing machine needles slide more smoothly through wool cloth, that the same solution straightened animal fur. He tested it on a dog's coat, then on his own hair. He founded the G. A. Morgan Hair Refining Company in 1913 to sell the preparation.

In 1914 he was granted U.S. Patent 1,090,936 for what he called the Safety Hood and Smoke Protector. It was a canvas hood with a long tube that hung to the floor, where the air was cooler and cleaner during a fire, connected to a small filter. A person wearing it could walk into smoke and breathe for fifteen or twenty minutes. Fire departments began buying the hoods. The U.S. Army adopted a variant as a gas mask during the First World War.

On July 25, 1916, a natural gas explosion in the Cleveland Waterworks tunnel beneath Lake Erie trapped several dozen workers two hundred and fifty feet underground. The city's rescue attempts failed. Someone remembered the inventor in Cleveland with the breathing hoods. Morgan and his brother Frank drove to the scene in the middle of the night, put on the hoods, and went down the tunnel. They carried two men out alive and recovered the bodies of others. White newspapers that covered the rescue either omitted his name or listed him as a white inventor's employee. He later said the omission cost his company orders; fire departments in the South canceled contracts when they learned who had built the hood.

In 1920 he founded the Cleveland Call, a Black-owned weekly newspaper, to give his community its own voice and to make sure his own story and others like it were told accurately. The Call merged with the Post in 1927 to become the Call and Post, which still publishes in Cleveland today.

On the morning of November 20, 1923, he received U.S. Patent 1,475,024 for a three-position traffic signal. Existing signals used only two positions, stop and go, and switched between them instantly. Morgan's signal added a third position: a warning phase, raised from the mast before the stop signal engaged, that gave drivers and pedestrians time to clear the intersection. It is the direct ancestor of the yellow light at every intersection in North America. General Electric bought the rights for forty thousand dollars, a sum equivalent to roughly seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars today.

He was a founder and the treasurer of the Cleveland Association of Colored Men, which in 1914 merged into the local branch of the NAACP. He donated consistently to Black colleges, including a standing scholarship fund at Wilberforce University, where he was an honorary graduate. He argued publicly for the integration of Cleveland's public schools.

He was diagnosed with glaucoma in 1943 and lost most of his eyesight over the following decade. He continued inventing. He filed his last patent application at eighty-three, for a self-extinguishing cigarette. He died in Cleveland on July 27, 1963, one month before the March on Washington. He was eighty-six.