Granville Woods

Granville Tailer Woods was born on the twenty-third of April 1856 at Columbus, Ohio, the son of Cyrus Woods and Martha J. Woods, free Black residents of Ohio in the years before the Civil War. His formal schooling ended near the age of ten, and the education that mattered most he gathered at the forge and the machine shop, apprenticing as a machinist and blacksmith while teaching himself the new science of electricity in his own hours.

Through his youth he moved from trade to trade — firing railroad engines, laboring in a rolling mill, and serving as an engineer aboard a British steamship — gathering a working mastery of steam and current that no institution had granted him. In 1884 he received his first patent, for an improved steam-boiler furnace, and thereafter the inventions came in a steady procession, near sixty in all across his lifetime.

His greatest work bound the railroads to safety. The synchronous multiplex railway telegraph, patented in 1887, let moving trains and depots speak to one another and so warned dispatchers away from collision; from it grew his induction telegraph. He devised a trolley system for electric streetcars and a power pick-up that anticipated the modern third rail, and he defended his multiplex telegraph against a challenge from Thomas Edison and prevailed.

For that triumph the press of his day named him the Black Edison. Granville Woods died on the thirtieth of January 1910 in New York City. A free-born man who taught himself into genius, he is honored here for the light and the safety his mind gave to the age of rails.