A draftsman leans over a board in a Boston office, squaring a line with a straightedge. The ink dries in clean strokes. His fingers are steady.
It is 1879.
He does not just learn to draw. He teaches himself mechanical drawing at night after work as an office boy, watching the draftsmen, borrowing their tools, until a patent firm promotes him to their staff.
He does not just prepare one patent drawing. He drafts the drawings for a device that would carry sound across a wire, working alongside the inventor who filed that application in 1876.
He does not just improve a single lamp. He develops and patents a method for making carbon filaments more durable, then supervises the installation of electric lighting in cities in the United States and abroad.
He does not just serve one great inventor. He is widely recorded as the only Black member of the elite team of engineers and scientists who defended and extended the reach of a national electric company.
His Spark of Liberty was a pencil that answered to no man’s permission.
He was the son of people who had run from bondage, and he built a life out of lines drawn true. The drafting board asked nothing about his father’s escape or his own early poverty. It asked only whether the line was straight and the mechanism sound. In that demand he found a strange kind of freedom, a place where skill could not be denied on sight. He taught himself the trade rather than wait to be admitted to it.
Now, “Where History Comes to Life.”
He was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts, on September 4, 1848. His parents had escaped slavery in Virginia, and his father’s case became entangled in a widely reported fugitive slave dispute in Boston in 1842, in which the abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and others took public interest. At sixteen he enlisted in the United States Navy and served aboard the USS Massasoit during the Civil War. After the war he took a job as an office boy at the Boston patent law firm of Crosby and Gould, where, by accounts of his life, he taught himself mechanical drawing by studying the draftsmen at work.
His skill earned him promotion to head draftsman. In 1876 he was a draftsman at the patent firm Alexander Graham Bell had hired, and he is widely credited with preparing drawings that went into the telephone application, though how much of that work was his own hand is debated. He later worked for the United States Electric Lighting Company under Hiram Maxim, where in 1881 and 1882 he received patents connected to the manufacture of carbon filaments for incandescent lamps. He supervised the installation of electric street lighting in New York, Philadelphia, Montreal, and London, and while in Canada he is said to have taught workers French terms to communicate on the job, a detail reported in later biographies.
By 1884 he had joined the Edison Electric Light Company, and he became one of the engineers and draftsmen who supported the company’s patent work in court. He was later listed among the founding members of the group of associates gathered around Thomas Edison, and he is widely recorded as the only African American among them. In 1890 he wrote a technical book on incandescent electric lighting, one of the earliest of its kind. He also drafted the drawings used to defend Edison’s patents in litigation, work that required both engineering knowledge and precise draftsmanship.
He held patents of his own beyond lighting, including an early water closet for railway cars and a forerunner of air conditioning described as an apparatus for cooling and disinfecting. He taught mechanical drawing and English to immigrants at a community house in New York. He wrote poetry and painted. He remained active in civic life, joining efforts on behalf of Black soldiers and testifying in support of causes he believed in. He died in Flushing, New York, on December 11, 1928.
His name was Lewis Howard Latimer.
Now We Know Em
by Christopher B. Gordon
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