The month of February is set aside to remember the black people who have done remarkable things and have contributed to the well being of society. We often think that all the inventions that have been made, particularly in the world of technology, have been made by white people. That simply is not true.
Take the invention of the light bulb with a carbon filament, for example. True, Tomas Edison, a white inventor, invented the incandescent bulb but its filament was not long lasting. It took the son of runaway slaves, Lewis Latimer to figure out that a filament made from carbon would last a lot longer that those that were being made from incendiary materials such as bamboo. This was back in 1880 as he worked for a company which was in direct competition with Edison’s company. In 1884, he joined the Edison Electric Company and worked along the great American inventor.
Many buildings these days are fitted with CCTV systems to provide security around the premises 24/7. The pioneer of these systems was a black lady called Mary Van Brittan Brown. Mary was a nurse whose husband often traveled, leaving her home alone in their Queens home in New York. Being alone, she often felt insecure, so she devised a camera that could slide into, and peer at the exterior of the home through, the peepholes of the front door. She arranged the camera system in such a way that the images caught by the camera could be viewed on her screen in her room. That way she was able to know who was approaching the house and whether they were a welcome guest or not.
Additional features to the system enabled her to speak to the guest, to lock the door, or to contact the police while she was in her room. Mary’s system was the precursor of the modern day CCTV systems, which are in use all over the world.
Mary is not the only black woman or girl that has shown great aptitude for technological things. A few years ago, I featured a Nigerian girl called Esther Okade who turned out to be a Mathematical genius. At the age of ten, Esther was already in the University in the UK, studying Mathematics and doing extremely well in it. In at least one Mathematics examination she scored 100%. It is reported that Esther is expected to obtain her PhD in Mathematics at the age of fourteen. Her ambition is to own her own bank and employ thousands of people.
Other black women precede Okade in their prowess of Mathematics.The Apollo lunar missions of the 1960/1970s would not have been successful without a team of people having to perform critical mathematical calculations. Going to the Moon is tricky business. It is not like going from Blantyre to Mzuzu. The difference is that the position of Mzuzu relative to Blantyre does not change. The Moon, on the other hand, is a moving target. If you aim at it today and it takes you four days to get there, by the time you arrive, it will have moved to a different position. It therefore requires accurate calculations of speeds and trajectories, among other variables, to successfully get to the Moon (or to any other heavenly body for that matter).
Many women, among them black women, were engaged by NASA to perform the critical calculations that ended up placing man on the Moon. The best known of the black women was Katherine Johnson. It was Johnson’s calculations that enabled NASA to put man into orbit ahead of the Russians.
The contributions by blacks in music and sports are too numerous to mention. Jazz, for example, is a music genre that was originated by African Americans and is known today as “American classical music”. One of its most enduring figures was an African American by the name of Louis Armstrong. A captivating trumpet and cornet player who played with a number of influential jazz artists between the 1920s and the 1960s, Armstrong was posthumously inducted into the Blues and Rhythm Hall of Fame in 2017. Between 1993 and 1999, twelve of his recordings were inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. The Rock n Roll Hall of Fame placed Armstrong’s West End Blues in the list of 500 songs that shaped Rock n Roll music.
Space does not allow me to describe the exploits of people like Pele, Michael Jordan, Bob Marley, Usain Bolt, John Barnes, Peter Tosh, Michael Jackson, Eddie Murphy and, yes, the list is endless.
Searching within the black community is extremely rewarding because you find abundant brilliance at every turn.