Black invention myths

[O.R.I.O.N]

Pencil Sharpener
John Lee Love in 1897? Nope.
Bernard Lassimone of Limoges, France invented one of the earliest sharpeners, receiving French patent number 2444 in 1828. An apparent ancestor of the 20th-century hand-cranked sharpener was patented by G. F. Ballou in 1896 (US #556709) and marketed by the A.B. Dick Company as the "Planetary Pencil Pointer." As the user held the pencil stationary and turned the crank, twin milling cutters revolved around the tip of the pencil and shaved it into a point.

Love's patent #594114 shows a variation on a different kind of sharpener, in which one would crank the pencil itself around in a stirring motion. An earlier device of a similar type was devised in 1888 by G.H. Courson (patent #388533), and sold under the name "President Pencil Sharpener."

 

[O.R.I.O.N]

Permanent Wave Machine (for perming hair)
Marjorie Joyner in 1928? Nope.
That would be German hairdresser Karl Ludwig Nessler (aka Charles Nestlé) no later than 1906.

 

[O.R.I.O.N]

Postmarking and Canceling Machine
William Barry in 1897? Nope.
Try Pearson Hill of England, in 1857. Hill's machine marked the postage stamp with vertical lines and postmark date. By 1892, US post offices were using several brands of machines, including one that could cancel, postmark, count and stack more than 20,000 pieces of mail per hour (Marshall Cushing, Story of Our Post Office, Boston: A. M. Thayer & co., 1892, pp.189-191).

 

[Montrovant]

Blacks invented Jazz

Yes, but I don't think we should be shaming them by reminding everyone of that. Jazz is fucking awful.

I don't mind jazz, but this was very funny!

 

[O.R.I.O.N]

Printing Press
W.A. Lavalette invented "the advanced printing press" in 1878? Nope.
Movable-type printing first appeared in East Asia. In Europe, around 1455, Johann Gutenberg adapted the screw press used in other trades such as winemaking and combined it with type-metal alloy characters and oil-based printing ink. Major advances after Gutenberg include the cylinder printing press (c. 1811) by Frederick Koenig and Andreas Bauer, the rotary press (1846) by Richard M. Hoe, and the web press (1865) by William Bullock. Major advances do not include Lavalette's patent, which was only one of 3,268 printing patents granted in the US by the year 1888 (Butterworth, Growth of Industrial Art).

 

[O.R.I.O.N]

Propeller for Ship
George Tolivar or Benjamin Montgomery? Nope.
John Stevens constructed a boat with twin steam-powered propellers in 1804 in the first known application of a screw propeller for marine propulsion. Other important pioneers in the early 1800s included Sir Francis Pettit Smith of England, and Swedish-born ship designer John Ericsson (US patent #588) who later designed the USS Monitor.

 

[O.R.I.O.N]

Refrigerator
Thomas Elkins in 1879? John Stanard in 1891? Nope.
Oliver Evans proposed a mechanical refrigerator based on a vapor-compression cycle in 1805 and Jacob Perkins had a working machine built in 1834. Dr. John Gorrie created an air-cycle refrigeration system in about 1844, which he installed in a Florida hospital. In the 1850s Alexander Twining in the USA and James Harrison in Australia used mechanical refrigeration to produce ice on a commercial scale. Around the same time, the Carré brothers of France led the development of absorption refrigeration systems.

Stanard's patent describes not a refrigeration machine, but an old-fashioned icebox — an insulated cabinet into which ice is placed to cool the interior. As such, it was a "refrigerator" only in the old sense of the term, which included non-mechanical coolers. Elkins created a similarly low-tech cooler, acknowledging in his patent #221222 that "I am aware that chilling substances inclosed within a porous box or jar by wetting its outer surface is an old and well-known process."

 

[Steinlight]

David Duke is spazzing out and Farakhan is getting pissed quite a show lol

 

[O.R.I.O.N]

Rotary Engine
Andrew Beard in 1892? Nope.
The Subject Matter Index of Patents Issued from the United States Patent Office from 1790 to 1873 Inclusive lists 394 "Rotary Engine" patents from 1810-1873. The Wankel engine, a rotary combustion engine with a four-stroke cycle, dates from 1954.

 

[O.R.I.O.N]

Screw Socket for Light Bulb
Lewis Latimer? Nope.
The earliest evidence for a light bulb screw base design is a drawing in a Thomas Edison notebook dated Sept. 11, 1880. It is not the work of Latimer, though:

Edison's long-time associates, Edward H. Johnson and John Ott, were principally responsible for designing fixtures in the fall of 1880. Their work resulted in the screw socket and base very much like those widely used today.

R. Friedel and P. Israel, Edison's Electric Light: Biography of an Invention, (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1986).

The 1880 sketch of the screw socket is reproduced in the book cited above.

 

[O.R.I.O.N]

Prove its wrong dipstick...I can wait.

Why? You need to prove its right clown. No one believes that storm front crap.

David Duke is spazzing out and Farakhan is getting pissed quite a show lol

Lol.Funny thing is I admire both those men. I prefer Malcolm X in his hey day but ya know...

 

[O.R.I.O.N]

Smallpox Vaccine
Onesimus the slave in 1721? Nope. Onesimus knew of variolation, an early inoculation technique practiced in several areas of the world before the discovery of vaccination.
English physician Edward Jenner developed the smallpox vaccine in 1796 after finding that the relatively innocuous cowpox virus built immunity against the deadly smallpox. This discovery led to the eventual eradication of endemic smallpox throughout the world. Vaccination differs from the primitive inoculation method known as variolation, which involved the deliberate planting of live smallpox into a healthy person in hopes of inducing a mild form of the disease that would provide immunity from further infection. Variolation not only was risky to the patient but, more importantly, failed to prevent smallpox from spreading. Known in Asia by 1000 AD, the practice reached the West via more than one channel.

 

[O.R.I.O.N]

Smokestack for Locomotives
L. Bell in 1871? Nope.
Even the first steam locomotives, such as the one built by Richard Trevithick in 1804, were equipped with smokestacks. Later smokestacks featured wire netting to prevent hazardous sparks from escaping. Page 115 of John H. White Jr.'s American Locomotives: An Engineering History, 1830-1880 (1997 edition) displays a composite picture showing 57 different types of spark-arresting smokestacks devised before 1860.

 

[O.R.I.O.N]

Steam Boiler Furnace
Granville Woods in 1884? Nope.
The steam engine boiler is of course as old as the steam engine itself. The Subject Matter Index of Patents Issued from the United States Patent Office from 1790 to 1873 Inclusive lists several hundred variations and improvements to the steam boiler, including the revolutionary water-tube boiler patented in 1867 by American inventors George Herman Babcock and Stephen Wilcox.

 

[O.R.I.O.N]

Street Sweeper
Charles Brooks in 1896? Nope.
Brooks' patent was for a modified version of a common type of street sweeper cart that had long been known, with a rotary brush that swept refuse onto an elevator belt and into a trash bin. In the United States, street sweepers started being patented in the 1840s, and by 1900 the Patent Office had issued about 300 patents for such machines.

 

[O.R.I.O.N]

Supercharger for Automobiles
Joseph Gammel/Gamell in 1976? Nope.
In 1885, Gottlieb Daimler received a German patent for supercharging an internal combustion engine. Louis Renault patented a centrifugal supercharger in France in 1902. An early supercharged racecar was built by Lee Chadwick of Pottstown, Pennsylvania in 1908 and reportedly reached a speed of 100 miles per hour.

 

[O.R.I.O.N]

Toilet
T. Elkins in 1897? Nope.
The Minoans of Crete invented a flush toilet thousands of years ago; however, there is probably no direct ancestral relationship between it and the modern one that evolved primarily in England starting in the late 16th century, when Sir John Harrington devised a flushing device for his godmother Queen Elizabeth. In 1775 Alexander Cummings patented a toilet in which some water remained after each flush, thereby suppressing odors from below. The "water closet" continued to evolve, and in 1885, Thomas Twyford provided us with a single-piece ceramic toilet similar to the one we know today.

 

[O.R.I.O.N]

Toilet for Railroad Cars
Lewis Latimer in 1874? Nope.
William E. Marsh Jr. of New Jersey took out US patent #95597 for "Improvement in Water-closets for Railroad Cars" five years prior to Latimer's 1874 patent with the same title. Marsh's patent specification suggests that railroad-car water closets, i.e., toilets, were already in use:

In the closets or privies of railroad cars, the cold and wind, especially while the train is in motion, are very disagreeable... My invention is to remove these objectionable features....

W. Marsh, US patent #95597, 1869

 

[O.R.I.O.N]

Tricycle
M.A. Cherry in 1886? Nope.
In Germany in the year 1680 or thereabouts, paraplegic watchmaker Stephan Farffler built his own tricycle at 22 years of age. He designed it to be pedaled with the hands, for obvious reasons.

 

[O.R.I.O.N]

Turn Signals
Richard Spikes in 1913? Nope. Did the 1913 Pierce Arrow feature Spikes' turn signals? Nope.
Electric turn signal lights were devised as early as 1907 (U.S. Patent 912,831), but were not widely offered by major automobile manufacturers until the late 1930s, when GM developed its own version and made it standard on Buicks. The Pierce Arrow Museum in Buffalo, NY denies that directional signals were offered on 1913 Pierce Arrows.