Description:

Poster: Inventors and Scientists .

Top left picture
Benjamin Banneker of Maryland USA became interested in science as a teenager during the days when America was an English colony. For ten years, his popular Almanac (annual publication)informed Americans about the tides, moon and crops. He constructed the first clock built from American-made parts and later helped lay out the city of Washington D.C.

Top middle picture
Lynn Matzeliger, a Lynn, Massachusetts cobbler, was only 30 when he invented a machine that vastly simplified shoe manufacture. When he died several years later from tuberculosis, he left his money to a church.

Top right picture
Granville T Woods contributed to the development of the third rail and invented a system of telegraphic communication that made it possible to send messages between moving trains. In 1888, a newspaper called him the greatest electrician in the world .

Middle left picture
Lewis H Latimer worked with Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Alva Edison and became an expert draftsman. He was a member of the Edison Pioneers and wrote a book in 1890 explaining the use of the electric light to the public. After retiring, he published a volume of his poetry.

Middle middle picture
In 1893, Dr. Daniel Hale Williams performed the first successful heart operation. He campaigned successfully to open the nursing profession and its schools to black people.

Bottom left picture
Dr George Washington Carver developed hundreds of uses for the Southern crops of peanuts, pecans and sweet potatoes. A kind and gentle man, he taught hundreds of students, from the son of the King of Sweden to the sons of Alabama sharecroppers.

Bottom right picture
During World War II, Dr. Charles R Drew developed the blood plasma system for the Red Cross. In 1950, after an automobile accident in North Carolina, he was refused entry to a “white” hospital and bled to death.

Contributed by John Judkyn Memorial.

Date: 1800s - 1900s

Copyright: The American Museum in Britain, Bath

Object ID:74.179.6