Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,419
By This is the grave of Lewis Howard Latimer.
Born in 1848 in Chelsea, Massachusetts, Latimer grew up in the free Black community of that state. His parents had both escaped slavery in the early 1840s. In fact, his father was a famous case on the status of escaped slaves. Interesting story here–his father was very light skinned and his mother was not. So his father passed as a white slave owner taking his slave with him. It worked. Shortly after the family arrived in Boston, his owner found him up there and demanded he be returned. Frederick Douglass represented Latimer in court. Of course, being a fugitive slave was illegal, even though this was before the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, so while he was found guilty of escaping, he was able to buy his freedom with the help of friends. So that’s the kind of world young Lewis would grow up in. That hardly meant it was easy. After the Dred Scott case, Latimer’s parents figured it was time to get safe and so his father fled to Canada while the family stayed in Massachusetts. This was tough stuff. Latimer and his brothers were sent to an agricultural school at this time as a way to get them some kind of positive environment.
In 1864, Latimer made the choice to fight for the freedom of Black Americans and though he was only 16, he entered the Navy. He was in the military for about a year and then got a job as an errand boy at a law firm. He found a better set of skills and became an excellent draftsman. By the early 1870s, he was pretty successful at this and was making a firmly middle class salary based on his skills. Latimer also became a classic 19th century tinkerer and he got a lot of patents over the years based on his inventions and improvements. For one thing, Latimer was working for Alexander Graham Bell and so was part of the team creating the patent for the telephone. Even before this, he and another draftsmen filed a patent for an improved toilet system for rail cars. In 1879, he left Bell’s firm and worked for U.S. Electric Lighting Company. This was a rival to Thomas Edison and Latimer worked on light bulb improvements. He received patents on various improvements in the early 1880s. This led Edison to hiring him away (Edison was always jealous of competition) and among his other jobs there, since had had learned German and French along the way, was to translate the latest developments on relevant Edison interests in those languages. That was key for Edison, as he wanted to undermine any challenges to his patents from the Europeans. He worked on an early form of the air conditioner and improvements to early elevators so that people wouldn’t fall out of them and die. Seems like a good idea. Latimer also supervised the instillation of public electric lights in major cities, including New York, Philadelphia, and Montreal. He also wrote the first book on electric lighting, 1890’s Incandescent Electric Lighting.
Latimer remained involved in the community as well. While he wasn’t necessarily at the front lines of civil rights, he was part of the National Conference of Colored Men, which was an 1895 attempt to create an organization to push for equality and which we can see as a brief precursor to the NAACP. He also worked at the Henry Street Settlement in New York, teaching drafting skills to the new immigrants entering America by the millions in the early 20th century. That said, recent scholars on Latimer have pushed back on the idea that he was a “race man,” noting that this is more a myth of more recent people wanting to find heroes in Black inventors than in the way that Latimer saw himself. According to Rayvon Fouché, who is a scholar of Black inventors at Purdue University, “Latimer wanted to fade into this technical world to the point where he was no longer seen as a black man, but as a raceless member of this environment.” Makes sense.
Really, I don’t know of many Black Americans of the Gilded Age who rose this far working in the racist constrictions of Gilded Age society. Edison was no liberal, but he did like money and protecting his patents and that quite evidently meant a heck of a lot more to him than your normal Gilded Age race restrictions. I am sure that Latimer put up with some horrible things, but the overall story is quite inspiring, and that’s not a word I often use. I do think there’s no question that he is relatively little known today because of the idea of the white entrepreneur/inventor personified by Edison, Bell, the endless weirdo Tesla fanatics (eyeroll), Ford, etc. He certainly has received more attention in recent years. There’s a children’s book on him that was published in 2018, for example.
Latimer spent the last few decades of his life in Queens and he died there in 1928, at the age of 80.
Lewis Howard Latimer is buried in Oak Grove Cemetery, Fall River, Massachusetts. I am not quite sure why he is in Fall River. Maybe his wife’s family, but that’s conjecture.
If you would like this series to visit other Black inventors, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Garrett Morgan, who invented the three way traffic light, is in Cleveland and Granville Woods, the so-called “Black Edison,” is in Queens. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.