Black Inventors Are Often Overlooked In American History

Townhall.com ^ | February 25, 2021 | Ken Blackwell

[Chode]

said inventors were ALL well educated by whites in white society where as they came from a continent that iirc collectively never discovered the wheel

now tell us all the great african inventions built on african civilization and technology without the help of the evil white man...

[myerson]

Don’t forget Percy Julian. We wouldn’t be where we are today without him.
(I’m privileged to know his daughter in law and granddaughter).

[buwaya]

Truth is that inventors in general are mostly forgotten men (and a few women). Industrial history is a very neglected field. There are a very large number of critical developments from the mid-19th century on, escalating rapidly into the 1870s-90s, that transformed human life. But those responsible are mostly anonymous. There are tons of gadgets that begat other gadgets, in an escalating cascade.

That some black men are among the horde of the anonymous is no surprise.

These anonymous men are still with us, unmentioned in public to this day. What monuments are there to Kernighan&Ritchie, inventors of the C programming language (and partly of Unix)? What statue us there of Brendan Eich, who created Javascript, the language that maybe 3/4ths of the worlds programmers currently make their living on (add all the derivatives thereof to that)?

Zip.

[Georgia Girl 2]

I think I was thinking of Frederick McKinley Jones who was biracial and invented refrigeration units for the trucking industry.

[nesnah]

I think I was thinking of Frederick McKinley Jones who was biracial and invented refrigeration units for the trucking industry.

---

And he was likely a good student of Carnot’s principles, as every ChemE would have to be. ;-)

[CodeToad]

Booker? Ain’t he dat dood on CNN? I mean da ting yall needs to know r u east coast or da west coast!! Sla’sheeet!

[JimRed]

He doesn't look black but maybe he's black like Meghan Markle.

Or Commie-La Harris. The only way she's black is if you're following the racist old "one drop" rule.

[Ozark Tom]

Super-Soaker: the off hours musings of an Oak Ridge National Lab scientist, Lonnie Johnson. Johnson’s thermal energy converter (JTEC) concept was thwarted for a decade by lack of suitable materials. As of the financial round of November, once again moving forward toward commercial development with a suitable proton conductive membrane in hand.