Lewis Latimer: Drafting the Telephone Patent and Fixing the Light Bulb

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Lewis Howard Latimer was born in Boston in September 1848 to George and Rebecca Latimer, who had escaped slavery in Virginia six years earlier. George was arrested as a fugitive in Boston, and after Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison rallied the public, a minister named Samuel Caldwell raised money to buy his freedom. After the 1857 Dred Scott decision George fled, the family split up, and Lewis was sent to a state farm school. At 16 he joined the Navy and served on the USS Massasoit. In 1865 he became an office boy at a Boston patent law firm for $3 a week, taught himself drafting with secondhand tools, and rose to head draftsman. In 1876 he drew the patent drawings for Alexander Graham Bell's telephone.

In 1879 he moved to Bridgeport, Connecticut, and went to work for Hiram Maxim's U.S. Electric Lighting Company, Thomas Edison's rival. His method of carbonizing filaments inside cardboard envelopes cut breakage and made bulbs practical to mass produce, patented in 1881 and 1882. Maxim sent him to England for nine months to build a factory. In 1884 Edison hired him as a draftsman, patent expert, translator, and courtroom witness, and he supervised lighting installations in New York, Philadelphia, Montreal, and London. In 1918 he became the first person of color in the Edison Pioneers. He died in Flushing, Queens, in 1928 at 80.

• His first patent, in 1874, was for an improved railroad car toilet.
• He patented an 1886 apparatus for cooling and disinfecting air by passing it over wet surfaces.
• He wrote Incandescent Electric Lighting in 1890 and patented a safety elevator in 1894.
• He published a poetry book, Poems of Love and Life, and played flute and violin.
• He taught English and mechanical drawing to immigrants at the Henry Street Settlement.