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Recognizing a Luminary

Inventor Lewis Latimer, the son of slaves, made the light bulb a practical device

By Rhoda Amon | Staff Writer

Were it not for a modest 28-year-old draftsman-inventor, Alexander Graham Bell might not have gone down in history as the inventor of the telephone. And Thomas Alva Edison might have accumulated a lot fewer than his 1,093 patents.

Bell's telephone application, expertly drafted by young Lewis Latimer, was registered hours before an application by another inventor, Elisha Gray, in 1876. Latimer went on to become a key player on the Edison team and a major pioneer in the development of electric lighting.

The son of runaway slaves, Latimer didn't rate a mention in ``Edison, the Man,'' the 1940 film starring Spencer Tracy. Nor was he acknowledged in ``The Story of Alexander Graham Bell'' in 1939, in which Don Ameche played the title role.

But 70 years after his death, Latimer's name is getting the recognition that eluded him during his lifetime. His frame house in Flushing, declared a New York City landmark in 1995, is being restored as a house-museum to illuminate his life and work. To save it from demolition, the house was moved from Holly Street to 137th Street, in the shadow of Latimer Gardens, the housing project named for him.

His granddaughter, Winifred Latimer Norman of Manhattan, a retired social worker and leader in restoring the house, was recently visited by the founders of the Latimer Society of Chelsea, Mass., where Latimer was born. They wanted her help in establishing him as a role model for the town's young people.

A more appropriate role model would be hard to find.

Lewis Howard Latimer was born in 1848, the youngest of the four children of George and Rebecca Latimer. His father, born to a white Virginia stone mason and a slave, fled north in 1842 and became a cause celebre for anti-slavery leaders when he was recaptured and put on trial. After serving a jail term, he fought for laws to prevent the capture of fugitives.

But George Latimer was never to fully enjoy freedom. He moved his family from one place to another to avoid being recaptured under the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. He struggled to support them. Finally, when Lewis was 10, he left them.

``Perhaps George felt that his celebrated status as a runaway slave would make him an obvious target for slave hunters,'' Norman speculates in a biography of her grandfather. ``They might throw the whole family into jail.''

Latimer was sent to the Farm School, a Massachusetts institution that ``bound out'' young apprentices. He fled, rejoined his mother in Boston, and at 13 got a job as an office boy.

In 1864, when the ban on black enlistees in the Civil War was lifted, Latimer at 16 lied about his age and joined the Navy. Home again after the war and facing competition from immigrants pouring into Boston, he acted on a tip from a black office worker: Crosby and Gould, patent lawyers, were looking for an office boy ``with a taste for drawing.''

He got $3 a week and his first toe-hold in the Industrial Revolution. The office boy saved his small salary to buy drawing tools and a second-hand book, studied at night, watched the draftsmen at work and politely asked the head draftsman if he could do some drawings. Eleven years later Latimer was head draftsman at $20 a week (still $5 less than white draftsmen were paid). He also had his first patent, for the invention of an improved toilet for trains.

Soon after Alexander Graham Bell made his first telephone call, he asked Crosby and Gould for help in patenting his invention. Thus began the collaboration with Latimer that was to affect millions of lives. It didn't change Latimer's life. As the nation wallowed in the depression of the late 1870s, he left his position, worked at odd jobs, relocated to Bridgeport, Conn., and finally landed a draftsman job in a machine shop. Here Hiram Maxim, founder of the U.S. Electric Lighting Co. and Edison's arch rival, walked into Latimer's life.

Maxim reportedly said, ``I never saw a colored man making drawings. Where did you learn?'' Hired on the spot as a draftsman, Latimer soon displayed his ability as an inventor by improving Edison's 1878 light bulb. Edison's filament -- the slender wire that the current heats to incandescence -- lasted only a few days. Latimer invented a long-lasting carbon filament and made electricity affordable to millions. He oversaw the installation of electricity in the streets and buildings of New York, Philadelphia, Montreal, London.

It's not clear how many of Latimer's ideas were credited to his employers. ``Hiram Maxim was known to be especially quick to steal the credit for other people's ideas,'' Norman wrote. Leaving Maxim in 1883, he was soon recruited by Edison.

In 1890 Latimer published ``Incandescent Electric Lighting, A Practical Description of the Edison System,'' one of the first guidebooks to understanding electric lighting. He accumulated patents for an arc lamp, a cooling and disinfecting device, a locking rack for coats, hats and umbrellas.

By 1906, he had moved his family from Brooklyn to a 21/2-story house in Flushing, where, for the next two decades, he and his wife, Mary, entertained the leaders of New York's black community. Deeply concerned with the problems of his race, he corresponded with Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington and other activists.

``He was a Renaissance man,'' Norman says. ``He taught himself French and German so he could read publications in those languages. He was a musician, an artist, a poet.''

In later years he was a patent consultant and a member of the Edison Pioneers, a select group of men and women who had worked with The Wizard. He was a founder of the Unitarian Church in Flushing.

Lewis Latimer died at age 80 in 1928. He had followed his own advice written early in his career: ``Good habits and good manners are powerful means of advancement that rarely fail to bring reward.''