Black Inventors, Crafting Over 200 Years of Success Book

Black Inventors, Crafting Over 200 Years of Success, clearly outlines Black inventors from over seventy countries. The author Keith C. Holmes has spent some twenty years researching information on inventions by Black people from such places as Belize, Canada, France, Germany, Ghana, Haiti, Jamaica, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Trinidad and Tobago to name a few. One cannot build any civilization without innovations, inventions, plans, financial resources, labor saving devices, materials and muscle. This book points out a number of the inventions, patents and labor saving devices developed by Black inventors. Africans before the period of enslavement developed a number of inventions: agricultural tools, building materials, medicinal herbs, cloths, and weapons are just a few examples. Though many Black people were brought to Canada, Caribbean, Central and South America and the United States in chains under the yoke of slavery, it is relatively unknown that many of them developed labor saving devices and inventions that created companies, generated money and jobs. This is one of the first books to address diversity of the Black inventors and their inventions from a global perspective. The focus of this book is to introduce the readers to the facts that inventions by black people both in the past and currently were developed and patented on a global scale. This also means that there are inventors in every civilization whose ideas have been turned into inventions. In the past the focus has been on American and European inventors. The new giants in the patenting process are Brazil, China, India, Japan, Nigeria, South Africa and South Korea. Black inventors have from the very beginning of their involvement in the invention and patent process in Western Civilization have made important and earth shattering impact on the world. This book outlines the early Black inventors from the United States including almost all fifty states. It documents one of the first Black inventors to file for and be granted a patent in the Caribbean and the United States. In the United States, there are now sixteen African American men inducted in to the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Two of the inventors, Jan E. Matziliger, Suriname and Elijah McCoy, Colchester, Canada were born outside the United States. Recently, Dr. Patrica Bath was nominated to the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Yet, there are still no African American women who have been inducted into this prestigious organization. Mr. Holmes documents inventions by Black women inventors from Africa, Canada, Caribbean, United Kingdom and the United States. The material available in this book is an introduction into the world of inventions by Black inventors. It gives the reader, researcher, librarian, student and teachers the materials needed to effectively understand that the Black inventor is not one dimensional but global occurrence.Read More