Give Latimer credit where credit is due, he did invent a better filament. However, he did NOT invent the light bulb. Man, anything for politics. Anything...
Yep. He was also employed by Edison for years after that.
BTW, Latimer, the son of a former slave, proves that one generation is enough for anyone who isn’t content to just keep doing what people have been doing.
People who kept on doing the same thing, if white or black, kept getting the same results year after year ... which is why the percentage of poorly educated dirt farmers to escape poverty remains low if white or black. But for those driven to step out and who wouldn’t be stopped even the real oppression of the past couldn’t keep them from getting ahead, or even getting rich.
This, I reason, is why Booker Washington apparently felt a particular distaste for blacks who made their living agitating over injustice ... for such people depend for their pay on folks doing exactly the same things that have failed them time and again so that they can call the consequences stuff like systemic racism.
Edison had a lot of patents but it’s not clear he was the inventor of all or even most of them. Edison provided the laboratory and materials for researchers that he hired. Plus he had a good instinct for figuring out what inventions were marketable and likely to succeed and had the resources to buy the patents of others.
Many people own patents for the work of others. If you work in someone else’s laboratory, it’s likely the head of that lab will be first author and get credit. A good example is the Fauci. He gets royalties for drugs that were developed with government money in government funded laboratories. He has the patents too.
Side story: GatorAde was invented by a nephrologist at the University of Florida. He wanted to market it but the university wasn’t interested so he went to Stokeley-Van Camp. It turned out to be a big success and the university sued Cade and Van Camp for a piece of the action. They settled and I think the university gets about half of the $$. At least Cade still gets the credit for developing it. He was a hands-on researcher and actually collected the data himself. He tried out his early versions of Gator Ade on the track team. The football team was too valuable to use them as subjects.