Inventions
A native of Georgia, Clarence Elder founded Elder Systems Incorporated, a research and development company located in Baltimore, Maryland. Elder developed Occustat, a monitoring and energy conservation system. Designed to reduce energy usage in buildings,
Occustat works by using a light beam aimed across building and room entrances to monitor traffic and, thus, occupancy. When the building or room is empty, heating, cooling, and lighting controls are lowered, reducing energy consumption by as much as 30 percent. Occustat is in use in hotels and schools. Elder, a graduate of Morgan State College, has also received 12 additional patents in the United States and abroad.
Inventions
1791 – 1859
A tailor in New York City, Jennings is credited with being the first African American to hold a U.S. patent. The patent, which was issued in 1821, was for a dry-cleaning process.
Inventions
1898 – 1976
Born in Nashville, Tennessee, David Crosthwait held numerous patents relating to heat transfer, ventilation, and air conditoning, the areas in which he was considered an expert. Holding B. S. and M. S. degrees from Purdue University in engineering, Crosthwait began working as a research engineer and director of research laboratories for C. A. Dunham Company, in Marshalltown, Iowa. He served as technical advisor to Dunham from 1930 to 1970 and, in addition to designing the heating system for Radio City Music Hall in New York City, he authored texts and guides on heating and cooling with water. After his retirement in 1970, Crosthwait taught at Purdue University.
Inventions
Sam Mangwana is an innovator of the Congolese rumba, a hybrid of what most Americans know as the Cuban rumba which was introduced to Africa in the 1960s when Cuban musicians toured the Congo and performed the country-style blues of Cuba known as the son.
Mangwana blends a rare mix of accordion, vocals and drums and guitar in his fusion of traditional music from the Congo, the guaguanco and the columbia. Afro-Cuban rhythms that he fondly defines as “our music that went across the Atlantic Ocean and came back in a suit and tie
Inventions
Jan Ernst Matzeliger (1852-1889) was born in Paramaribo, Surinam (Dutch Guiana), South America. His father was a Dutch engineer who married a native Black Surinamese woman. At the age of ten, young Jan worked in the machine shops supervised by his father, where his talents and mechanical aptitude was nurtured. In 1871, at the age of 19, he sailed the world and settled in Philadelphia 2 years later.
Hearing about the rapid growth of the shoe industry in Massachusetts, Matzeliger went to Lynn in 1877 in search of a better job. Since he seas a Black foreigner who spoke very little English. he had trouble finding employment. A determined young man, he quickly learned the English language.
He eventually landed a job as an apprentice in a shoe factory operating various shoe making machinery during time when most white people would look down on him because of his Black ancestry, he did manage to make a few friends in town. He was a devout Christian, teaching Sunday School at The North Congregational Church, one of the few churches in the area that would accept Blacks.
In the early days of shoe making, shoes were made mainly by hand. For proper fit, the customer’s feet had to be duplicated in size and form by creating a stone or wooden mold called a “last” from which the shoes were sized and shaped. Since the greatest difficulty in shoe making was the actual assembly of the soles to the upper shoe, it required great skill to tack and sew the two components together. It was thought that such intricate work could only be done by skilled human hands. As a result, shoe lasters held great power over the shoe industry. They would hold work stop-pages without regard for their fellow workers’ desires, resulting in long periods of unemployment for them.
Matzelinger set out to try to solve the problem of this strangle-hold by developing an automatic method for lasting shoes. It took many years and much sacrifice before he came up with a prototype that was successful. Matzeliger’s machine was able to turn out from 150 to 700 pairs of shoes a day versus an expert hand lasters fifty.
By 1889 the demand of the shoe lasting machine was overwhelming. A company was formed, The Consolidated Lasting Machine Company, where Matzelinger was given huge blocks of stock for his invention. His machine had revolutionized the entire shoe industry in the U.S . and around the world.
Unfortunately, Jan Matzelinger didn’t live to see the fruits of his labor. Because he had sacrificed his health working exhausting hours on his invention and not eating over long periods of time, he caught a cold which quickly developed into tuberculosis. He died at age 37 on August 24, 1887.
Jan Ernst Matzeliger’s invention was perhaps “the most important invention for New England.” His invention was “the greatest forward step in the shoe industry,” according to the church bulletin of The First Church of Christ (the same church that took him as a member) as part of a commemoration held in 1967 in his honor. Yet, because of the color of his skin, he was not mentioned in the history books until recently.
