GARRETT MORGAN

Garrett Augustus Morgan was born in Claysville, Kentucky, in 1877, to parents who had been enslaved. He left school after the sixth grade, moved north as a teenager, and found work repairing sewing machines in Cleveland — a trade that taught him mechanisms from the inside out.

By 1907 he had his own repair shop, then a tailoring business employing dozens of workers. Every later invention came out of that same habit: watch a machine fail, understand why, build the fix.

In 1914 Morgan patented a "safety hood" — a breathing device that drew cooler, cleaner air from near the floor through a long tube while filtering smoke. It won a gold medal at a national safety exposition. Fire departments in the South would only buy it when a white actor was hired to pose as the inventor.

In 1916 an explosion trapped workers in a tunnel under Lake Erie. Morgan and his brother went down in the hoods and brought survivors and bodies out of the gas-filled shaft. The rescue made headlines; the credit, at first, went elsewhere. Later refinements of the design informed gas masks used in the First World War.

Existing traffic signals had two states: stop and go. After witnessing a serious collision at a Cleveland intersection, Morgan patented a T-shaped signal in 1923 with a third, all-stop warning position — the ancestor of the amber light that gives traffic time to clear.

He sold the rights to General Electric for $40,000. He also founded the Cleveland Call newspaper and funded Black institutions across the city until his death in 1963.