Who Gets the Credit: Black Inventors and the Machinery of Attribution

by bam

Ideas get taken. Names get lost. But the interesting question is not whether that happened to Black inventors, which it plainly did, but HOW it happened, because the mechanism is a system you can learn and then use. This course teaches that system first: what a patent actually granted, who was legally permitted to hold one and when, the 1858 opinion that barred enslaved inventors and their enslavers alike, the Confederate answer to it, the assignment clause that moves a patent to an employer on the day it issues, and the several distinct ways a name disappears from work it did. Then it works through the verified cases with their documentation, patent numbers and dates included, from Thomas Jennings in 1821 to Lonnie Johnson in 1986. Then it does the thing most treatments of this subject refuse to do: it names the famous claims in this genre that do not survive checking, says what the evidence actually shows instead, and teaches you to run that check yourself in about ten minutes. A reader who can defend every claim they make is worth more to this history than a reader carrying a longer list.