Garrett Morgan

Garrett Augustus Morgan Sr. was born in Paris, Kentucky, on March 4, 1877, one of many children of Sydney and Elizabeth (Reed) Morgan, both formerly enslaved. His formal schooling ended after roughly the sixth grade, yet his hunger to learn did not. At about fourteen he left home for Cincinnati, Ohio, where he worked as a handyman for a wealthy landowner and hired a private tutor to continue his education while he labored.

Morgan later settled in Cleveland, the city he would call home for the rest of his life. There he mastered the sewing machine as a repairman, and in 1907 opened his own shop. A self-taught mechanic and relentless tinkerer, he turned a knack for fixing machines into a career of invention, earning a comfortable living and the freedom to imagine devices the world had not yet seen.

In 1914 he patented a "safety hood," a breathing device that shielded its wearer from smoke and fumes and became a forerunner of the modern gas mask. On July 25, 1916, after an explosion trapped workers in a water-intake tunnel far beneath Lake Erie, Morgan and his brother descended through the poisonous darkness wearing his hoods and carried survivors to safety, saving lives amid the disaster.

His restless mind kept working. Troubled by traffic collisions, he devised a three-position signal adding a cautionary interval between stop and go, patented in 1923 and sold to General Electric for $40,000. He also founded the Cleveland Call newspaper and championed his community until his death on July 27, 1963. We honor Garrett Morgan, a son of the once-enslaved who armored ordinary people against danger and taught the world to pause before it moved.