Solomon McWorter of downstate Barry received the first patent granted to a Black person in the state of Illinois on Nov. 5, 1867. According to the Illinois State Library, U.S. Patent No. 70,451 was for “Improvement in Evaporators for Reducing Sorghum and other like Sirups.”
McWorter explained its ingenuity in his patent application: “This invention relates to the combination of a steam-boiler and evaporating-pan in such a manner that the heat from the steam-boiler is imparted to the evaporating-pan without any danger of scorching the sirup.”
Black inventors have assembled an impressive list of pioneering designs and mechanisms — though they haven’t always received appreciation for them.
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Dawn Turner, former Tribune columnist and author of “Three Girls From Bronzeville,” wrote 20 years ago: “Lest we forget: According to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Black people invented or perfected the gas mask, golf tee, traffic light, pencil sharpener, telegraph, automatic gear shift, commode toilet, fire extinguisher, disposable syringe, lawn mower, air brake for the railroad. An African American, Otis Boykin, invented electronic control devices for guided missiles, IBM computers and the pacemaker. J. Standard invented the refrigerator and received the patent in 1889.
“Black folks perfected methods for dry cleaning clothes, refining sugar and storing blood.”
“I could fill this space with names and dates and patent numbers, but the lists are just lists without proper historical context,” Turner wrote.
Here’s a look back at the lives and inventions of just a few of the Black men and women from the Chicago area who have patented their creations or radically changed how things are done in order to make daily life better or more efficient.
Capt. David Kenyon and Engine Company 21: First sliding pole (fire pole)
The year after the Great Chicago Fire, city officials hired six Black firefighters to be assigned to Engine Company 21 on May Street — near the site of the fire.
Not only did Engine 21 consistently get excellent reviews, but it added a tool to a fireman’s kit that quickened the response time of all companies.
It was a pole used to hoist hay to the third floor, where feed for the horses was stored. One day an alarm was sounded, and George Reed slid down the pole and was waiting for the other firemen, who took the stairs.
That prompted Kenyon, the company’s white commander, to ask his superiors if a circular hole could be cut in the second floor and the pole installed permanently. Walcott notes that permission was granted on condition that if the experiment failed, he would pay for repairing the floor.
It worked, and the Fire Department’s annual report for 1878 noted that “sliding poles” were being installed in firehouses across the city. The later ones were made of brass, as sliding down a wooden one meant a fireman sometimes took a sliver with him.
For Kenyon, the invention kick-started his rise through the department’s ranks. As deputy fire marshal, however, he was thrown from his buggy, run over by an engine, and died of his injuries in 1887.
Though the sliding pole was adopted worldwide, it didn’t end the harassment of Engine 21’s crew or quicken the department’s integration.
S. E. Goode (July 14, 1885): Cabinet bed (U.S. Patent No. 322,177)
Sarah E. Goode was the first Black woman to receive a U.S. patent in Illinois. Born into slavery in 1850, Goode was freed at the end of the Civil War in 1865 and moved to Chicago. As the owner of a furniture store, she observed that many residents of the rapidly growing metropolis had a modicum of space in their cramped apartments. Goode designed what she called a folding cabinet bed. When folded, the assembly, which included compartments for stationary and writing paraphernalia, could be used as a writing desk.
“Its merits are, it weighs less, costs less, is more simple, and is easier to handle than any other bed,” the Tribune said when Goode’s design was exhibited at the Illinois State Fair in 1884. It led to what we today call a hideaway bed.
Chicago Public Schools’ Goode STEM Academy is named in her honor.
Daniel Hale Williams (July 9, 1893): First successful open-heart surgery
The patient was James Cornish, a young man with a knife wound to the chest from a barroom brawl. The surgeon, who had gone into medicine because he disliked earlier work as a shoemaker’s apprentice, was Williams.
The surgery took place in Provident Hospital, the city’s first interracial hospital, which Williams helped to found. Both patient and surgeon were Black.
Medical textbooks of the time said that operating on a human heart was too dangerous, and there was no precedent for opening the chest, longtime Tribune science and medical reporter Ronald Kotulak wrote more than a century later.
Despite lacking X-rays, antibiotics, adequate anesthesia or other tools of modern surgery, Williams stepped in. Cornish lived, and Williams went on to acclaim. In 1894, Williams was appointed chief surgeon at the Freedmen’s Hospital in Washington, D.C., which gave care to formerly enslaved Blacks.
Marjorie Stewart Joyner (Nov. 27, 1928): Permanent waving machine (U.S. Patent No. 1,693,515)
Joyner — who was among the first Black women in the U.S. to receive a patent — didn’t think there was anything spectacular about the permanent hair-waving machine she invented, when interviewed by the Tribune in 1989.
“It all came to me in the kitchen when I was making a pot roast one day, looking at these long, thin rods that held the pot roast together and heated it up from the inside,” Joyner said. “I figured you could use them like hair rollers, then heat them up to cook a permanent curl into the hair.”
The South Side beautician hooked 16 pencil-shaped pot roast rods to an old-fashioned hair dryer hood, then joined them together to draw electricity through a single electrical cord. When her device premiered that year at Marjorie’s Beauty Salon, located in the basement of her home at 5607 S. Wabash Ave., it was an instant hit.
“Black ladies loved it. I could pull the kinks out of their hair with a hot comb and oil, then put these pretty curls in with the machine,” she said. “I guess what I didn’t realize then, though, was that I had done something more than just invent a way to do Black women’s hair.”
What Joyner had done was mark an early milestone for Black women entrepreneurs by obtaining a U.S. patent, which she would follow up a year later with a second patent for a scalp protector. She had also brought fame to her business, the first Black beauty salon in Chicago.
“If I’ve set an example for other people — not just Black people, not just poor people, not just women — I want it to be that you shouldn’t be limited in what you try to do,” Joyner said. “If I can take pot roast rods and have a one-of-a-kind invention, believe me, people can do what they set their minds to do.”
Percy Julian: Chemist with more than 100 U.S. patents
As a child, Julian spent summers on his grandfather’s farm in Alabama. One day he and the other farmhands were singing an old spiritual as they worked a cotton field: “There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole.”
Julian said he asked his great-grandfather about that strange word “balm.” Grandpa Cabe, as he was known, explained that it was a salve to heal wounds and sores. Gilead was a land east of the Jordan River famed for its salves.
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The song came from a biblical story about the Prophet Jeremiah being in despair, and the Lord telling him there’s always a remedy, a way out — he just had to look for it. “I want you to know that, Sonny, because there is always a way out,” he said his Grandpa Cabe told him.
Julian was destined to create balms. He was only the third African American in the United States to hold a Ph.D. in chemistry. He helped develop medical steroids. He found a way to synthesize cortisone from soybeans, resulting in an affordable drug for the legions suffering from arthritis. He similarly transformed soybeans into progesterone, a component of the birth-control pill.
Frank A. Crossley (July 30, 1957): Titanium alloy (U.S. Patent No. 2,801,167)
Though he never worked directly for NASA, Crossley’s ingenuity — creating metals that were stronger than steel but much lighter — would be vital in the crafts used for space exploration, according to “We Could Not Fail: The First African Americans in the Space Program.”
But before his patents were in the planning stage, the Chicago-born DuSable High School graduate completed a rare trifecta of accomplishments: he was the first African American officer in the U.S. Navy; the first person to earn a Ph.D. in metallurgical engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology and the first person of African ancestry in the world to earn a doctorate in the field, according to Illinois Tech.
After World War II, S.I. Hayakawa, an Illinois Tech professor and future U.S. senator for California, wrote in the Chicago Defender: “So Frank Crossley has come home from his Navy service with no dramatic stories of injustice, of fights against prejudice, of indignities nobly borne, of triumphs over discrimination. Yet his uneventful, peaceful integration and joint work with other men is the kind of thing that we hope for all over America.”
Crossley’s experimentation with titanium-based alloys earned him a $100 award (about $1,000 in today’s dollars) from the Armour Research Foundation in 1957, but his work would revolutionize the aircraft and aerospace industries. He established the department of metallurgical engineering at Tennessee State University before becoming a research director and scientist for firms including Lockheed Martin and Aerojet. He eventually received seven U.S. patents and authored more than 60 papers.
The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society named its diversity award in Crossley’s honor.
Henrietta Bradberry (May 25, 1943): Bed rack (U.S. Patent No. 2,320,027)
and (Dec. 11, 1945): Torpedo discharge means (U.S. Patent No. 2,390,688)
While her husband William was at work, the Kentucky native brainstormed ideas for useful devices in their Chicago home on Champlain Avenue. Her two patents could not be more different in purpose and design.
Bradberry’s first patent was for a collapsible rack — meant to hold bed sheets and pajamas — that could attach to a bed’s frame.
“The object of my invention is primarily for airing these sheets and bed clothes after the bed has been slept in, so as to freshen the bed clothes and maintain them in as clean a condition as possible for sleeping the ensuing night,” Bradberry wrote in her patent application.
She followed it up during World War II with a detailed method to house and deploy a torpedo underwater while preventing the liquid from penetrating inside the mechanism.
Bradberry noted about the simple, practical design for submarines or other submerged vehicles, “Another object of my invention is to provide a torpedo discharge means which is adapted to automatically trip the propelling means of torpedoes discharged there thru concurrently with the initial travel or projection of the said torpedoes within the said discharge means.”
Leonidas H. Berry: Co-creator of the Eder-Berry Gastroscope
The North Carolina native and son of a minister was the first physician to perform gastroscopies at several Chicago hospitals in the 1930s and 1940s.
In 1946, the graduate of Wilberforce University, the University of Chicago and Rush Medical College became the first Black physician admitted to the staff of Michael Reese Hospital. That same year, he also became the first Black internist at Cook County Hospital, where with the help of a visiting Japanese physician he introduced the use of a fiber-optic gastro-camera at the hospital — the first time it was used in the United States.
Berry invented a biopsy attachment in 1955 — named the Eder-Berry Gastroscope — that became the first instrument used for taking tissue samples by suction during gastroscopic examination, according to the National Library of Medicine, where his papers are housed.
Berry was also a former president of the National Medical Association and the organizer and chairman of the gastroenterology division of Provident Hospital who later successfully crusaded to have the historic South Side hospital reopened.
After performing more than 5,000 procedures during his lifetime, the gastroscope owned and used by Berry is housed in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.
Rufus Stokes (April 16, 1968): Exhaust purifier (U.S. Patent No. 3,378,241)
Berry and Stokes, an inventor who once worked as a security guard to support himself, were honored together during the first awards dinner of the Council for Bio-Medical Careers in 1971.
Unlike Berry, however, Stokes didn’t get the recognition he deserved during his lifetime. Through his Air Purification Co. of America, Stokes spent 15 years developing a pollution-control device that he said independent testing firms found to be 100 percent efficient. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, however, would not endorse its use, and Stokes and EPA officials had a decade-long dispute over the device.
Stokes mounted the device on a truck and took it around for demonstrations to businessmen, politicians, government officials and colleges. In 1979, someone stole Stokes’ mobile smoke elimination system.
“Some people see their inventions go down the drain,” Stokes told the Tribune at the time. “Mine went down the street.”
Thankfully, the contraption was recovered a day later.
A 1980 Tribune article described the invention as, “an incineration antipollution system that he says was made to order for small commercial and industrial firms that must burn their trash and must still meet clean-air laws.”
There were people who believed in Stokes’ invention. Ronald Greer, vice president of urban business at Continental Illinois National Bank & Trust Co. of Chicago, said in 1980: “I’d be willing to bet that he will die before he is given credit for what he has done. It’s a very unfortunate case.”
Los Angeles invited him to become a consultant for the city’s new water-treatment plant. A Chicago suburb contacted Stokes about designing a waste-control system. Neither would be realized.
The even greater tragedy, said his son, is that the death of Stokes, who had worked in creating incinerator devices for more than 25 years, was apparently caused by his exposure to asbestos in his work.
Evelyn Carmon Nicol (Jan. 6, 1976): Urokinase production (U.S. Patent No. 3,930,944)
The Kentucky native was a highly respected immunologist for local companies Abbott and Baxter and one of the few Black women to be awarded a patent in the sciences.
The first time her name appeared in the Tribune, however, was after she died from complications of the coronavirus in 2020. Yet, thanks to her own meticulously kept records, Nicol’s life story and incredible accomplishments can continue to be told for generations.
After spending her early years working as a maid for white families, Nicol enrolled at Tuskegee University in Alabama to study home economics in 1949. Bored with the material, she soon switched her major to chemistry, which went against the advice of her academic adviser. Just four years later, Nicol graduated almost at the top of her class with a joint degree in chemistry and mathematics and earned Beta Kappa Chi and Alpha Kappa Mu honors.
As a molecular biologist, Nicol conducted research on the production of “HeLa” cells as part of the project to eliminate polio. Next, she became the first person to isolate the virus that causes chickenpox and shingles using amniotic cells in a tissue culture from a patient. While advancing her studies, Nicol worked on special projects that included time at Michael Reese Hospital.
It was when Nicol joined Abbott as a research assistant in 1962 that she produced her most groundbreaking work. Yet she also found the environment “male dominated and racially hostile,” according to her self-written biography. Undeterred, she received a patent in production methods that use an enzyme, Urokinase, to dissolve blood clots. It was a major medical advancement. For pregnant women, she also developed a screening test for a harmful parasite that’s still commonly used in Europe. After working at Abbott for decades, however, Nicol said she never earned more than $33,000 — less than half of her peers.
That’s why when she was approached by Pandex, which became a division of Baxter, in 1985, she left. Her salary doubled and she continued to gain leadership opportunities and developed the company’s early HIV testing kits. When Abbott purchased Pandex, however, Nicol opted instead to retire at 1990 and end her distinguished career.
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