A theme runs through the annals of science history that, give or take, six people made goddamn everything. Same dude figured out that earth is 4.5 billion years old and that we should stop coating the planet in lead (great story for another day). An 18th century French tax collector figured out half the shit that gives first year chemistry majors nightmares. And we’re still jerking ourselves off to Isaac Newton in every calculus and physics class today.
One guy who you likely haven’t heard of despite his work being critical to the light bulb, the telephone, and air conditioning? A Black inventor born before the Civil War.
Today’s Moment of Science… the most unlikely story of Lewis Latimer.
But first, to hear the story of Lewis Latimer, you should hear about his parents.
George and Rebecca Latimer escaped from slavery in Virginia in 1842. George was lighter skinned on account of his father having been a white man, and the couple passed as a white plantation owner traveling with his servant. After making it through Philadelphia and Baltimore, Rebecca was able to make it safely to hiding in Boston, but George was caught. A bounty was out for his return from Latimer’s former owner.
Boston was not fucking having it.
Temporarily being deemed the most ‘violent city in America’ as a result of the civil unrest, crowds of Black and white abolitionists gathered together across the state for the ‘Latimer Meetings.’ They planned and tussled to end the practice of slave catching, sending legislation to the state and federal levels to sever any hold other states could have over formerly enslaved people who sought their freedom in Massachusetts.
The federal legislation failed. But Massachusetts’ 1843 Liberty Act, aka the Latimer Law, prevented the state from capturing people alleged to have escaped slavery.
In the legislative storm brewing around him, George Latimer’s freedom was purchased for $400. He and Rebecca had four children, the youngest of whom was Lewis.
Born in Boston in 1848, Lewis Latimer grew up helping his father run the family barbershop as a child. That came to an end in 1857 when Dredd Scott Decision split the family up again, as now even freed Black people in free states could not remain free without some watertight proof that they were free. Rebecca and George fled, and the children remained locally at a farm school.
After a two year stint in the Navy starting at age 15, Latimer began working for a patent law firm in 1865.
This guy did more as a teenager with a slide rule and a set square than I can do with a super computer and a 55 gallon drum of lube.
He was promoted from being an office boy making $3 per week to the head draftsman for $20 weekly. Alexander Graham Bell asked him personally to draft the plans for the telephone. It was a race to get the patent first, and between Latimer’s knowledge of the patent process and his late nights staying up to work on drafting blueprints, Bell’s plans made it to the patent office first by mere hours.
That was just the start. Latimer was awarded patents for the first design of a railroad car toilet and, probably more importantly to modern life, the precursor to an air conditioner. In 1880 he started working for US Electric Lighting Company, a huge rival to Thomas Edison. Starting as a draftsman, he picked up the burgeoning field of electric incandescent lighting on the fly. As you do. While there, he invented and eventually patented a new process for making carbon filaments for lightbulbs, making them less prone to breaking and eventually more affordable.
So if you’re working for all the fancy pants inventors of the nineteenth century, why not Thomas Edison next?
He elevated Edison’s work, and vice versa. His thorough knowledge of the patent process was part of Edison’s secret weapon both in getting his work patented and protecting it from patent infringement. He also took on the responsibility of translating Edison’s work into both German and French. With Edison’s encouragement, in 1890 Latimer published the hugely popular Incandescent Electric Lighting: A Practical Description of the Edison System.
Of the twenty-eight scientists and inventors in the charter group of the Edison Pioneers in 1918, Lewis Latimer was the only Black man.
He passed away a decade later, less than a century after his parents were born into bondage, his name in the history books as a celebrated scientist with a hand in crafting inventions that shape our lives to this very day.
This has been your daily Moment of Science, just a column, sitting in front of the internet, asking why there isn’t a goddamn movie about Lewis Latimer yet.
Love your emails! As for why there isn’t a movie is because Hollywood is to concern about living in fantasy. Also, why isn’t there movies for millions of other inventors (Black, white, brown, yellow, etc.). I could careless about Hollywood, would rather read a non fiction book. Have a wonderful day!