Garrett Morgan

Morgan was born the seventh of eleven children in Paris, Kentucky, in 1877, to parents who had both been enslaved — his father by the Confederate cavalry general John Hunt Morgan. His schooling stopped at sixth grade. At fourteen he left for Cincinnati alone, worked as a handyman, and paid a private tutor out of his own wages to keep learning what the schoolroom hadn't finished. He settled in Cleveland in 1895 and found steady work repairing sewing machines for a clothing manufacturer, a trade that taught him how mechanisms failed and what fixed them. His first patents, a belt fastener and a zigzag attachment, came directly out of that repair bench.

In 1905 Morgan found, almost by accident, that a chemical he'd mixed to polish sewing-machine needles straightened hair, and he built a hair-care products company on it. His safety hood, patented in 1914, filtered smoke through a moist sponge and drew breathable air from ground level, where it still lingered beneath the rising smoke of a fire; it won the top prize at a national safety exposition the same year. In 1923 he patented a three-position traffic signal, adding a caution position between stop and go, and sold the rights to General Electric for $40,000. He also founded the Cleveland Call, a Black-owned newspaper, in 1920, and ran a clothing store and a country club open to the Black members most Cleveland clubs turned away.

The contradiction sat at the center of his business: to sell the safety hood to white buyers, Morgan sometimes hired white actors to demonstrate it and, dressed as 'Big Chief Mason,' a supposed Indigenous chief from Canada, wore the mask himself inside smoke-filled tents rather than let customers see a Black inventor's face on his own product. It worked until it didn't. When news photographs eventually showed his race, orders from Southern customers were canceled outright. The disguise paid off in one way it never should have needed to: on July 24, 1916, an explosion trapped workers in a Lake Erie water tunnel, and Morgan and his brother went in wearing his hoods and pulled out survivors and bodies on four separate trips. Cleveland's mayor left him off the list of recommended heroes anyway.

Cleveland's Black community raised the honor the city withheld, presenting Morgan a diamond-studded gold medal in 1917. Glaucoma took his sight almost entirely by 1943, and he kept inventing anyway, patenting a self-extinguishing cigarette near the end of his life. He died on July 27, 1963, a month before the March on Washington, and was honored that August at the Emancipation Centennial Celebration in Chicago. The recognition Cleveland delayed in 1916 has since been built into the city's infrastructure: a water treatment plant, a fire department boat commissioned in 2023, a school, and a light-rail station all carry his name.

Garrett Morgan's life against the full span of the corpus.

• G. A. Morgan Hair Refining Company company
  Built on an accidental discovery about a needle-polishing chemical 1913
• Safety hood patent
  Won first prize at the Second International Exposition of Safety and Sanitation 1914
• Cleveland Call company
  Weekly newspaper serving Cleveland's Black community; later merged into the Call and Post 1920
• Three-position traffic signal patent
  Sold to General Electric for $40,000 1923

• March 4, 1877 aged 0 Born in Paris, Kentucky
• 1895 aged ~18 Moves to Cleveland and begins repairing sewing machines
• 1907 aged ~30 Opens his own sewing machine repair shop
• 1913 aged ~36 Launches the G. A. Morgan Hair Refining Company
• 1914 aged ~37 Patents the safety hood and wins first prize at a national safety exposition
• July 24, 1916 aged 39 Leads the rescue of survivors from the Cleveland Waterworks tunnel disaster
• 1920 aged ~43 Founds the Cleveland Call newspaper
• 1923 aged ~46 Patents the three-position traffic signal and sells the rights to General Electric
• July 27, 1963 aged 86 Dies in Cleveland

• Madam C. J. Walker 1867–1919
  Entrepreneur who built a major Black hair-care company and used her wealth for philanthropy and civil-rights causes. fellow Black entrepreneur in hair care
• George Washington Carver 1864–1943
  Agricultural scientist whose research on crop rotation and alternative crops transformed Southern farming. contemporary Black inventor
• Booker T. Washington 1856–1915
  Educator and founder of Tuskegee Institute who advocated for vocational training for African Americans. model of racial uplift he followed
• Thomas Edison 1847–1931
  Inventor and scientist whose research laboratory model and electrical innovations transformed modern life. white contemporary who got the credit he didn't