Okay, so after my post debunking the myth that Mary Seacole was a Crimean war nurse of the same stature as Florence Nightingale rather than a hotelier who only nursed the soldiery on three occasions, here’s another venture into the internet non-historian’s territory. One of the reasons I was reading three books on the history of science and invention last week was to check some of the claims made that some of the most important inventions were actually made by Blacks, who had the credit stolen from them. There are any number of such claims retailed in books such as Black Pioneers of Science and Invention. I found that book on the shelves of Bristol Central Library about two decades ago when I was working at the Empire and Commonwealth Museum. I took it out, trusting that it would be a reliable and informative book. And yes, it does appear very convincing. It made entirely credible claims that innovations such as the refrigerator and open heart surgery were made by Black engineers and experimenters, and that the phrase ‘the real McCoy’ for a brilliant invention or device referred to a gifted Black engineer in the US Navy. They weren’t as obviously false and incredible as the claims of the whackier Afrocentrists that the Ancient Egyptians knew about advanced physics or that people in 7th century Mozambique understood quantum mechanics. Nor was it like a claim I came across a few days ago, in which the Black speaker claimed that Blacks invented the helicopter. In fact Paul Cornu was experimenting with a twin-rotor helicopter in 1907, and Juan de Cierva made the first flight of an autogyro in Madrid on 9th January 1923. Not to mention the American pioneer, Igor Sikorsky.
I started to become suspicious of these claims while reading Nigel Barley’s The Coast, a historical novel set in 19th century West Africa. This has the Europeans resident in the fictional Black kingdom of Akwa enjoying a few cooled pints from a type of primitive refrigerator using sulphuric acid. This is very different from the type of fridge described in Black Pioneers. As for the phrase, ‘the real McCoy’, According to Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, revised edition Ivory H. Evans, (London: Cassell 1981) the phrase ‘the real McCoy, or alternatively McKoy, ‘as used in the U.S.A., but formerly in Britain it was the Real McKay. Various stories about an American boxer of the 1890s have been suggested as the origin of the phrase, but Eric Partridge in From Sanskrit to Brazil (1952), says with more probable truth that it dates from the 1880s and originated in Scotland where it was applied to whisky, men and things of the highest quality. The whisky was exported to both the U.S.A. and Canada where people of Scottish origin drank the whisky and kept the phrase alive. In the 1890s, however, there is no doubt that it was applied to an outstanding boxer whose name happened to be McCoy.’ (pp. 694-5).
There is a website, Black Invention Myths, dedicated to debunking these false claims of Black invention. The introduction to it runs
‘Perhaps you’ve heard the claims: Were it not for the genius and energy of African-American inventors, we might find ourselves in a world without traffic lights, peanut butter, blood banks, light bulb filaments, and a vast number of other things we now take for granted but could hardly imagine life without.
Such beliefs usually originate in books or articles about black history. Since many of the authors have little interest in the history of technology outside of advertising black contributions to it, their stories tend to be fraught with misunderstandings, wishful thinking, or fanciful embellishments with no historical basis. The lack of historical perspective leads to extravagant overestimations of originality and importance: sometimes a slightly modified version of a pre-existing piece of technology is mistaken for the first invention of its type; sometimes a patent or innovation with little or no lasting value is portrayed as a major advance, even if there’s no real evidence it was ever used.
Unfortunately, some of the errors and exaggerations have acquired an illusion of credibility by repetition in mainstream outlets, especially during Black History Month (see examples for the traffic light and ironing board). When myths go unchallenged for too long, they begin to eclipse the truth. Thus I decided to put some records straight. Although this page does not cover every dubious invention claim floating around out there, it should at least serve as a warning never to take any such claim for granted.
Each item below is listed with its supposed black originator beneath it along with the year it was supposedly invented, followed by something about the real origin of the invention or at least an earlier instance of it.’
The site then disproves the claims that Blacks invented the following:
The traffic signal, gas mask, peanut butter, automatic lubricator, blood bank, blood plasma, the plan of Washington D.C., the lightbulb filament, heart surgery, third rail railways, telegraph, refrigerated truck, air brake, air conditioner, airship, Automatic railway car coupler, automatic transmission, bicycle frame, cellular phone, first clock or watch in America, clothes dryer, dustpan, egg beater, electric trolley, elevator, fastest computer/ computation, fire escape, fire extinguisher, food additives, meat curing, fountain pen, golf tee, hairbrush, halogen lamp, hand stamps, heating furnace, horseshoe, ice cream, ironing board, laser cataract surgery, lawnmower, lawn sprinkler, mail box, mops, paper punch, pencil sharpener, permanent wave hairstyling machine, postmarking machine, printing press, ship’s propeller, refrigerator, rotary engine, lightbulb screw socket, small pox vaccine, locomotive smokestack, steam boat furnace, Street sweeper, car supercharger, toilet, railway car toilet, tricycle, turn signals and the typewriter.
The website has a bibliography and cites the patent literature to back up its conclusions. It’s at: https://www.blackinventionmyths.com/
There’s also a book debunking false claims of Black inventions: Troy Williams, Benjamin Banneker and the Myth of Black Invention – 60+ Facts and Lies of African American Inventors. This is available from Amazon at £11.54.
Looking through these fake claims, it’s apparent that many of them were genuine inventions, but based on or developments of preceding innovations. And it can be difficult working out just who was responsible for a particularly invention. Sir Humphrey Davy invented the electric light bulb in the early 19th century, which didn’t use a filament. Between his invention and Edison’s version there were 22 patents for refinements or developments of the idea. It seems to me that what the people making these false claims have done is seize on the version invented by a Black engineer or scientist, and disregarded everything previous to it, even when this is copiously supported by solid documentation. For example, Henri Giffard, the French inventor of the airship, flew round the Eiffel Tower in one in 1854 and was photographed doing so.
As for the reasons behind these false claims, it seems to me that it comes from a deep resentment of supposed Black intellectual inferiority, coupled with a suspicious attitude to official history that automatically assumes that Whites exploit Blacks and appropriate their culture and innovations and a fierce desire to outdo Whites. You can well understand all of these attitudes. Looking through the book Colour and Colour Prejudice, published in the 1940s, it’s depressing reading one expert of the time after another calmly asserting that Black culture and African civilisations are worthless. Black Americans see themselves, naturally, as Americans, and so to outdo White claims of inventiveness the people making these claims do what they accuse Whites of doing and appropriate inventions by Whites.
Nevertheless, I think there’s a positive side to this. This 19th and 20th centuries were periods of rapid scientific and technological change, especially in America. The claims that Blacks were solely responsible for the above inventions is false, but the history of these inventions shows that Black Americans were also as much part of this wave of innovation and discovery as Whites.
