Today, some thoughts about traffic lights, gas
masks, and hair straighteners. The University of
Houston's College of Engineering presents this
series about the machines that make our
civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity
created them.
In 1914, a New Orleans paper
reported an advertising demonstration. First, an
inky thick smoke had been created. Then an Indian
assistant, Big Chief Mason, had donned the new
Morgan safety hood and spent 20 minutes in the
smoke without ill effect.
What the onlookers didn't know was that "Big Chief
Mason" was, in fact, Garrett Morgan -- the safety
hood's inventor. Morgan's mother was a freed slave;
and, since his birth in 1877, American racism had
steadily worsened. The only way he could sell the
hood was to keep his black identity quiet. So he
demonstrated it in a sort of cigar-store Indian
disguise.
But fortune found him out in 1916, when a violent
explosion ripped through a 250-foot-deep waterworks
tunnel in his home city of Cleveland. Workers were
trapped -- suffocating in smoke and dust. Somebody
knew about Morgan's safety hood, and he was called
in. He suited up and went into the tunnel -- again
and again -- carrying people out. He saved lives,
but being exposed as black hurt his sales. Still,
the gas masks used in WW-I were derived from
Morgan's safety hood.
Morgan was no one-machine inventor. In 1923, for
example, he came up with a device that led to our
three-way traffic lights. He saw that existing
mechanical stop-and-go signals were dangerous. They
had no caution signal to buffer traffic flow. So he
patented a three-armed signal that indicated stop
and go in two directions, a 4-way stop for
pedestrians, and move forward with caution -- the
forerunner of the yellow light. General Electric
bought his patent for what was then a huge sum --
$40,000.
In his late years, Morgan was highly honored for
his contributions. But his first invention troubles
me. When he was only 30, he set up a small
sewing-machine shop. Sewing-machine needles
functioned better when they were polished; and
Morgan found -- by chance -- that commercial liquid
polish would also straighten hair. Morgan figured
out how to make the stuff into a cream. He created
his own company, and he marketed it.
When I was a child, many blacks were still
straightening their hair. It helped them blend into
a white landscape. Morgan's other inventions saved
lives and accommodated human need. The sad fact is
that in 1910 hair-straighteners also met a human
need. Morgan, after all, did what he had to do in
the worst of times. But it's no wonder he dreamed
of celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the
Emancipation Proclamation -- New Year's day, 1963.
This remarkable and inventive man was still alive
in 1963; but America's Emancipation Centennial was
held that August, in Chicago. Morgan died a month
before it took place.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
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