GREAT AMERICANS--GARRETT MORGAN IS MORE THAN THE INVENTOR OF THE TRAFFIC SIGNAL

He was born in Kentucky during the Reconstruction Era, in 1877. Though Morgan only had a sixth-grade education (like so may other American inventors) he had a mechanical genius and an entrepreneurial bent. Finding work in a textile factory, he learned how the machines worked, and became the only African American engineer, fixing and improving mechanical problems. In 1907 he opened his own repair shop, and soon launched a clothing business with his wife, an immigrant seamstress from Bavaria. It was an era of difficulty for most Negroes. However Morgan made money, becoming the first black man in Cleveland to own a car. He branched out into cosmetic products, joined a new organization called the NAACP, and soon was donating money to Negro colleges.

Morgan's biggest venture was his safety hood. As a young man, he had seen firefighters struggling to survive the suffocating smoke they encountered in the line of duty. In 1914 Morgan secured a patent for his device, a canvas hood with two tubes. Part of the device held on the wearer’s back filtered smoke outward, while cooling the air inside.

Garrett's safety hood won accolades and wide adoption in the Northern States, where over 500 cities bought it, over time. He sold the hoods to the U.S. Navy, and the Army used them in World War I. But sales in the segregated South proved challenging. Morgan's hood got great press in 1916, when he used it to save workers in a collapsed tunnel under Lake Erie. But Cleveland's newspapers and city officials left Morgan (who had ventured into the tunnel first) out of the story, lauding other men and ignoring Morgan's heroism. It would take years for the city to recognize his contributions. In 1920, he started a newspaper for African Americans, The Cleveland Call (which today is known as the Call and Post) and opened an all-black country club. In 1923 he patented a mechanical traffic signal which was first used in Cleveland. He later sold it to General Electric. It was widely used, yet Morgan earned only $40,000 for the invention. Morgan died in 1963, vindicated as a hero of the Lake Erie rescue and restored to his place in history.