Alexander Miles, Charles Richard Drew, Marie Van Brittan Brown, Shirley Ann Jackson, and Mark E. Dean. Our world would be very different if not for these 5 African-American inventors and their inventions. This introductory video from Business Insider can help kickstart more research about these five pioneering people in technology. A quick recap:
We have Alexander Miles to thank for automatic elevator doors, patented in 1887.
“Father of the Blood Bank” Dr. Charles Richard Drew advanced medical techniques and equipment for storing blood plasma. This revolutionized blood donation and transfusion in the 1940s.
Marie Van Britton Brown invented the home security system, a 1969 patent filed with husband Albert Brown.
Dr. Shirley Jackson is a theoretical physicist and the first African-American woman to earn a Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Via BlackPast.org, “she conducted research on the optical and electronic properties of layered materials, surface electrons of liquid helium films, strained-layer semiconductor superlattices, and most notably, the polaronic aspects of electrons in two-dimensional systems.”
And without Dr. Mark Dean, chief engineer and one of the designers on the original IBM personal computer team, modern computing wouldn’t be the same. Scholastic summarizes his pivotal role in “creating the technology that allows devices, such as keyboards, mice, and printers, to be plugged into a computer and communicate with each other.”
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