[This coming
weekend will mark the 250th
birthday of Robert Fulton, about whose influential invention I’ll write in
Friday’s post. All week I’ll AmericanStudy some of our most complex and
significant inventors—and I’d love for you to share your thoughts on them and
other inventors (and inventions) for an innovative crowd-sourced weekend post!]
Two largely
forgotten, inspiring and influential inventors, and what links them.
Otis Boykin (1920-1982)
was a product of the segregated Jim Crow South in every sense: born in 1920
Dallas, attended the city’s African American Booker T. Washington High School
(graduating as valedictorian), and then attended and worked as a lab assistant
at Nashville’s historic black Fisk
University. After Fisk he moved to Chicago, attending the Illinois
Institute of Technology and joining the lab of engineer and inventor Hal Fruth.
And then he became one of the 20th century’s most prolific inventors
in his own right, inventing more than 25 electronic
devices (and patenting 11 of them), including an electrical resistor used
in numerous computers and televisions and, most influentially, a control unit
that became a vital
component in artificial heart pacemakers. Few 20th century
inventions have more directly improved and saved lives than the pacemaker, and
without Boykin’s contribution it’s entirely possible that the device would
never have reached that level of success. Just one of many ways that Boykin transcended,
and revealed the ridiculousness of, the imposed limitations of the world into which
he was born.
Bette Nesmith
Graham (nee McMurray; 1924-1980) seemed destined at an early age for the
role of a post-war housewife: dropping out of high school at the age of 17,
marrying a young man on his way to service in World War II and having their
child while he was overseas, and attending secretarial school in the meantime
to help support the young family. But shortly after her husband returned from
the war they divorced, and she moved with her son and other family members to
Dallas, where she worked as a bank secretary and moved up to the role of
executive secretary. And then, inspired both by the difficulty of correcting
mistakes with the era’s typewriters and by some extra work she did painting
holiday pictures on the bank’s windows, she invented a paint-based white
correction fluid—one that she began marketing as “Mistake Out” in 1956 and that
became “Liquid Paper”
when she started her own company out of her house a few years later. By 1979, when
she sold Liquid Paper to Gillette for nearly $50 million, the company had
200 employees and was producing 25 million bottles annually. A particularly
vivid illustration of just how far Nesmith Graham had come from the 17 year old
wartime bride and housewife-to-be. (Her son
Michael went even further, becoming a
member of The Monkees, but that’s another story for another post!)
There are lots
of interesting details that link these two 20th century inventors—their
connections to Dallas, for one example; their very similar birth and death
years, for another; and the tragically early timing of those deaths, for a
third. Boykin and Graham are also certainly linked, as the structure of my two
prior paragraphs illustrates, by the ways in which their life trajectories
represented striking breaks from social and cultural limitations and
expectations, making their successes all the more impressive to be sure. But I
would also highlight another exemplary side to these two figures and stories,
one that I would argue defines them as 20th century inventors in
contrast with the earlier figures on whom I’ve focused so far in this series:
the way in which their inventions were not necessarily as overtly new or
innovative as earlier ones like the electric light and the telephone, but
represented instead seemingly small advances in technology or business that
ended up revolutionizing our world through their contributions. While of course
the century witnessed its own amazing innovations, including the computer and
the cellular phone, even these were developed out of a series of smaller, gradual
and complementary such steps, not at all unlike Boykin’s and Graham’s (and with
Boykin’s a part of them). Just one more reason to better remember these two
inspiring and influential inventors.
Last inventive
post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other inventors or inventions you’d highlight?
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