67.
“We Thee Abused (American) “Negro Race”…
Appearance Respectfully
before his/her “World Honorable Presiding “Justices”,
“Affirm”, “State”, and “declare” legally, furtherance’s herein
The Patent Act of
1793 and 1836 barred enslaved Africans from obtaining patents because they were
not considered citizens.
In
1861, Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America, enacted
a patent law that allowed enslaved Africans to receive patent protection for
their inventions, according to Bloomberg.com.
In
1870, the U.S. government passed a patent law giving all American men,
including Blacks, the rights to their inventions.
68.
Benjamin Montgomery
Benjamin
Montgomery was born into slavery in 1819 in Loudon County, Virginia.
Montgomery
obtained employment at a general store owned by his master Joseph Davis.
He
would eventually take over the entire purchasing and shipping operations of the
store.
During
those days, merchandise was shipped by boat on the rivers connecting counties
and states.
However
a timely shipment was not guaranteed since the depths of water in different
spots throughout the river made navigation difficult.
In an
effort to expedite the shipment of merchandise, Montgomery invented a propeller
that could cut into the water at different angles, thus allowing the boat to
navigate more easily though shallow water.
Pursuant to “Dred Scott” Vs. Sandford,
60 U.S. 393 (1857)
Montgomery
attempted to patent his invention after regaining his freedom, but was rejected
again.
69.
Henry Boyd
Henry
Boyd, who was born into enslavement in Kentucky, was an inventor, carpenter,
and a master mechanic.
He
invented the corded bed with the wooden rail screwed into both the headboard
and the footboard. According to findagrave.com,
Boyd was unable to
patent his invention, but eventually earned enough money to buy freedom for
himself and his brother and sister in 1826.
Undeterred
by the laws barring him from obtaining a patent and now a freedman, Boyd
started H. Boyd Company in 1836, selling his invention the “Boyd Bedstead.”
He made
sure to stamp his name on every finished product to assure buyers it was his
work.
The
Notable Kentucky African American Database records that in 1843 Boyd was among
the most successful furniture makers in Cincinnati, Ohio, where his company was
based.
70.
Benjamin Bradley
Benjamin
Bradley, was born into enslavement around 1830 in Maryland. He “was put
to work in a printing office and at the age of 16 began working with scrap he
found, modeling it into a small ship.
Eventually, with an intuitiveness that seemed
far beyond him, he improved on his creation until he had built a working steam
engine, made from a piece of a gun-barrel, pewter, pieces of round steel and
some nearby junk,” according to blackinventor.com.
Bradley’s
ingenuity earned him a job at the Annapolis Naval Academy, where he was a
classroom assistant in the science department.
While
there, he developed a steam engine large enough to drive the first
steam-powered warship at 16 knots for warships in the 1840s. He later sold the
invention and bought his and his family’s freedom.
71.
Ned ?
Oscar
J. E. Stuart (or Stewart), a white Mississippi slave owner, wanted to receive a
patent for the invention of a Black man, Ned, whom Stuart held in bondage. Ned
had invented the cotton scraper.
Stuart’s request was denied after he could not
prove he was true inventor of the cotton scraper. Stuart persisted, penning a
letter to the Secretary of Interior Jacob Thompson,
On
August 5, 1858, asserting that “the master is the owner of the fruits of the
labor of the slave, both manual and intellectual.”
That
same year, both enslaved Blacks were barred from applying for patents and their
slave owners on their behalf.
Despite
numerous rejections, Stuart began manufacturing the creation and reportedly
used this testimonial from a fellow plantation owner:
“I am
glad to know that your implement is the invention of a Negro slave – thus
giving the lie to the abolition cry that slavery dwarfs the mind of the Negro.
When did a free Negro ever invent anything?”
In
The Emergence of the Cotton Kingdom in the Old Southwest: Mississippi 1770-1860,
the author states that
“Former
Mississippi governor Albert G. Brown wrote Stuart that his slave’s ‘double plow
and scraper’ went ‘a long way ahead of both the common scraper and Yost’s
then-famous plow and scraper.”
72.
Jo Anderson
Cyrus
McCormick, considered the “Father of Agriculture,” has been widely credited
along with his father Robert for revolutionizing the farming industry with the
invention of the mechanical reaper.
Little is reported about Jo Anderson, the
Black man who worked closely with slave-holder McCormick on the machine.
Lester
R. Godwin Jr., a retired curator of the McCormick Farm in Augusta and
Rockbridge, Va., said that Anderson “has as much to do with the later
development of the reaper as Cyrus McCormick.” Adding,
“Unfortunately, history
likes to put things in neat boxes … and often those who are involved in the
creation of something don’t get credit for it.”
McCormick’s
grandson also acknowledged the work of Anderson in his 1931 book, “The
Century of the Reaper.”
“Of
that day in July 1831, when the reaper was first tested before an audience of
friends, neighbors and skeptics in the Shenandoah Valley,
Jo Anderson was
there, the Negro slave who, through the crowded hours of recent weeks, had
helped build the reaper.”
73.
Date:
Fri, 1794-03-14
*On this date in 1794, Eli Whitney patented the Cotton
Gin which he invented; (or did he?).
African slaves, because they were not citizens,
could not register any invention with the patent office.
Their owners could not register a slave's invention
either, since the law required that the patent be issued to the actual
inventor. Consequently, any free person wanting to patent something could not
acknowledge any contribution from a slave.
Thus it was easy to steal a slave's ideas and
patent them.
The cotton gin was a machine designed to remove
seeds from picked cotton. Before the use of the cotton gin, it took a very long
time to separate the seeds from the fibers by hand.
Working hard, a person could only clean about a
pound of cotton a day. Whitney has been charged with borrowing the idea for the
cotton gin from a simple comb like device that slaves used to clean the cotton.
Whitney is said to have merely enlarged upon the idea of the comb to create the
cotton gin, which works very much like an oversized comb culling the seeds and
debris from the cotton.
Whitney may have borrowed the idea, which though
valuable was still incomplete. He may have used the principle behind the
slaves' device and applied it to the broader problem how to clean large
quantities of cotton.
Another historian writing about the problems facing
African American inventors has noted:
"Whether slave or free the Negro could not
proceed far in matters requiring the sanction of government except under the
tutelage of some white man.
Often what the Negro actually developed was
exploited by the white man by whom he was employed or through whom he
endeavored to find recognition."
So, while historians have accepted the theory that
Eli Whitney's cotton gin idea came from an African slave, this claim remains
impossible to prove. The Cotton Gin patent # is 72X.
Reference: According to Portia James, in The Real
McCoy: African-American Invention and Innovation, 1619-1930.
Dorothy Yancy: "Four Black Inventors with Patents," Negro History Bulletin 39 [1976]: 574
No comments:
Post a Comment