Garrett Morgan, an African American man with little formal education, became a well-known inventor whose innovations saved lives and became the forerunners of several things that we take for granted today.

Born in Paris, Kentucky on March 4, 1877, the seventh of eleven children of former slaves, Garrett Morgan is remembered for his contributions to safety. As a child, Morgan worked alongside his brothers and sisters on the family farm and attended elementary school. At the age of fourteen, he had completed sixth grade, and like most African American youths of his era, it was necessary for him to stop going to school and find employment. He moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, where he worked as a handyman for a wealthy landowner. While living and working in Cincinnati, the teenaged Morgan hired a tutor to help him study grammar in his spare time.

In 1895 Morgan left Cincinnati and found a job with a clothing manufacturer, repairing sewing machines. He developed a reputation for being good at fixing things, and was soon offered employment with competing firms. In 1907 he opened his own sewing machine equipment and repair shop, which in a few years, expanded to include a tailoring shop which employed thirty-two people. The tailoring shop used equipment designed and constructed by Morgan. During this time, Morgan invented a zig-zag attachment for sewing machines, and discovered the first chemical formula to straighten hair. He had been working on developing a lubricant to prevent friction-heated sewing machine needles from burning wool fabric when overheated, when he wiped a small amount of the chemical mixture from his hands onto a piece of horsehair fabric. Curiously, the curly hairs on the cloth straightened. Morgan tested the mixture on a neighbor's Airedale dog, and the dog's curly hair came out straight also. He then tested the preparation on his own hair, and it worked just fine. He ended up marketing the hair straightener as G.A. Morgan Hair Refining Cream.

In 1912, Morgan developed a device to protect firefighters from being overcome by smoke and fumes. It was a safety hood, (Morgan called it a "breathing device") forerunner to the gas mask. The hood consisted of a canvas hood with air tubes; the open end of the tubes had water-soaked sponges to filter and cool smoky air. Morgan received the patent for this device in 1914, and in 1916 had a dramatic opportunity to demonstrate its use. A tunnel was under construction beneath Lake Erie, and one night there was an explosion inside. Men were trapped in the tunnel (282 feet under the lake, and 5 miles out), many had been killed, and three separate rescue parties had gone in and not come back out, due to smoke, dust, and natural gas fumes. Officials who knew of Morgan's safety hood requested his help. He and his brother rushed to the site of the disaster in their pajamas. They brought four of the safety hoods, and the two of them, plus two volunteers, donned the hoods and went into the tunnel. They came back out with injured and suffocating men, and rushed back in to rescue more. Again and again Morgan and his team returned to the tunnel to bring out workers and would-be rescuers. Morgan saved the tunnel project superintendent by performing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on him.

Morgan and his brother's heroism and the success of the safety hoods brought Morgan awards, public accolades and national attention. Orders started coming in as fire departments, mining companies, and chemists heard of the safety hoods. Unfortunately, some orders were cancelled when buyers discovered that the inventor was an African American man. Morgan ended up hiring a white man to impersonate him for marketing purposes. Gas masks developed using some features of Morgan's safety hoods were used extensively to protect soldiers during World War I.

By 1920 Morgan was a successful businessman with an automobile. In those early days of the automobile, the roadways were chaotic, with horse-drawn carriages, pedestrians, and bicycles all sharing space with cars. One day Morgan, driving in his automobile, witnessed a particularly bloody accident involving an automobile and a horse-drawn carriage. He decided to design a device to improve traffic safety. By 1923 he had received a patent on a traffic signal that was adopted all over the country, and was also patented in Canada and England. The signal consisted of a T-shaped pole with three positions: Stop, Go, and all-directional stop (required traffic from all directions to stop or slow down at the intersection before proceeding). Bells sounded when the signal was changing direction. Batteries and electricity from overhead wires powered the lights. Morgan sold the rights to the traffic signal to the General Electric Company. Morgan eventually formed two companies to manufacture safety devices.

In 1920, he also founded a newspaper called the Cleveland Call, which served the African American community. The newspaper still exists, and is now known as the Call and Post. Morgan was active in his community, serving as treasurer of the Cleveland Association of Colored Men, an organization that later merged with the NAACP. In 1931 Morgan ran for City Council in Cleveland, in an attempt to obtain better representation for Cleveland's Black citizens.

Garrett Morgan lived to be eighty-six years old. In the last twenty years of his life, he developed glaucoma and lost much of his eyesight. He is remembered as a respected inventor who used his wealth of talent and creativity to improve the quality of life for others. []
Susan Robinson

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