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According to the stereotype, late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century inventors, quintessential loners and supposed geniuses, worked in splendid isolation and then unveiled their discoveries to a marveling world. Most successful inventors of this era, however, developed their ideas within the framework of industrial organizations that supported them and their experiments. For African American inventors, negotiating these racially stratified professional environments meant not only working on innovative designs but also breaking barriers. In this pathbreaking study, Rayvon Fouche examines the life and work of three African Americans: Granville Woods (1856-1910), an independent inventor; Lewis Latimer (1848-1928), a corporate engineer with General Electric; and Shelby Davidson (1868-1930), who worked in the U.S. Treasury Department. Detailing the difficulties and human frailties that make their achievements all the more impressive, Fouche explains how each man used invention for financial gain, as a claim on entering adversarial environments, and as a means to technical stature in a Jim Crow institutional setting. Describing how Woods, Latimer, and Davidson struggled to balance their complicated racial identities-as both black and white communities perceived them-with their hopes of being judged solely on the content of their inventive work, Fouche provides a nuanced view of African American contributions to-and relationships with-technology during a period of rapid industrialization and mounting national attention to the inequities of a separate-but-equal social order.

Product Identifiers

PublisherJohns Hopkins University Press

ISBN-139780801882708

eBay Product ID (ePID)95812850

Product Key Features

Number of Pages242 Pages

Publication NameBlack Inventors in the Age of Segregation: Granville T. Woods, Lewis H. Latimer, and Shelby J. Davidson

LanguageEnglish

SubjectScience, Evolution, History

Publication Year2005

TypeTextbook

AuthorRayvon Fouche

FormatPaperback

Dimensions

Item Height229 mm

Item Weight318 g

Item Width152 mm

Additional Product Features

Country/Region of ManufactureUnited States

Title_AuthorRayvon Fouche

Series TitleJohns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology

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Black Inventors in the Age of Segregation: Granville T. Woods, Lewis H. Latimer, and Shelby J. Davidson by Rayvon Fouche (Paperback, 2005)