Garrett Morgan

Garrett Augustus Morgan Sr. was born in Paris, Kentucky, on the fourth of March 1877, the son of formerly enslaved parents. He left school after the sixth grade and moved to Cincinnati at fourteen to work as a sewing-machine repairer; he relocated to Cleveland in 1895.

His first major invention was the safety hood — a portable breathing device with a long flexible tube whose inlet reached down to fresh air near the floor, allowing the wearer to function in smoke-filled or chemically contaminated spaces. He patented the device in 1914 and founded the National Safety Device Company to manufacture and market it.

On the twenty-fourth of July 1916, an explosion trapped thirty-two workers in Tunnel No. 5 beneath Lake Erie at the Cleveland Waterworks. Conventional rescue attempts had failed; gas and smoke had filled the tunnel for hours. Morgan and his brother personally entered the tunnel wearing his safety hoods and brought out the trapped workers alive. The municipal officials of Cleveland tried unsuccessfully for years afterward to suppress public knowledge of his role.

His second major invention was the three-position traffic signal — patented in 1923, after he witnessed a collision between an automobile and a horse-drawn carriage at a Cleveland intersection. Earlier traffic signals had only "stop" and "go" positions; Morgan's design introduced the intermediate "caution" warning that allowed drivers and pedestrians to clear the intersection before the perpendicular flow began. He sold the patent to General Electric for forty thousand dollars (approximately seven hundred thousand in current terms). His three-position design became the global standard.

He founded the Cleveland Call newspaper in 1920 — among the principal Black newspapers of the upper Midwest. He died in Cleveland on the twenty-seventh of July 1963, age eighty-six.

He is honored here as the inventor whose breathing device pulled thirty-two workers from a Cleveland tunnel.