Did You Know: Every Day Items Created by Black Inventors
February 25, 2022
| Home Security System
Marie Van Brittan Brown developed her own home defense system in 1966, complete with monitors, cameras, peepholes, and a button that could alert police. At the time she was a nurse, but this invention would pave the way for modern day closed-circuit surveillance/security systems. The SuperSoaker In 1982, Lonnie G. Johnson invented one of the most popular water gun toys, the Super Soaker. Johnson was actually an aerospace engineer for NASA, but this toy is what he’s mainly known for. Traffic Signal Garrett Morgan got the patent for a third traffic signal in 1923. At the time, U.S. stop lights only had two positions: “Stop” and “Go”. The addition of a third position greatly improved the regulation of traffic. Shockwave Lisa Gelobter was a main contributor in the development of Shockwave, technology that transformed web animation. This created the GIFs we know today. Gelobter also worked with Hulu and was the Chief Digital Service Officer for the U.S. Department of Education. Supercomputer Phillip Emeagwali created the world’s greatest parallel processing supercomputer at the time in 1989. After studying bees’ construction of honeycombs, he applied this knowledge to computer processing and created a computer that could make 3.1 billion calculations every second. Resources: https://thinkgrowth.org/14-black-inventors-you-probably-didnt-know-about-3c0702cc63d2?gif=true https://barretthonors.asu.edu/news-events/news/100-black-innovators-10-days-day-10-inventors |
