Granville Woods

Granville Tailer Woods was born on the twenty-third of April 1856 at Columbus, Ohio, the son of Tailer Woods and Martha J. Woods, free Black residents of Ohio. The Ohio Black Laws then in force prohibited Black children from attending most public schools; he received the elementary education the laws permitted to the age of ten and was thereafter apprenticed to a machine shop in Columbus. He worked across his teens as a fireman on the Iron Mountain Railroad in Missouri and as an engineer on the British steamship Ironsides. He attended evening engineering courses at the East Coast colleges that admitted Black students from 1876 to 1878.

He filed his first patent in 1884 for an improved steam-boiler furnace and over the following twenty-six years filed a further fifty-eight patents in electrical and railway engineering. The body of work falls into three sustained projects: the inductive-rail telegraph for moving trains, the third-rail electrification system for elevated and underground urban railways, and the synchronous multiple telegraph receiver.

His decisive achievement was the synchronous multiplex railway telegraph of 1887 — United States Patent 373,915 — which permitted simultaneous voice and Morse communication between a moving train and the stationary dispatcher's office over a single induction circuit. The patent prevented for the first time the head-on collisions that had been the principal cause of railway deaths through the nineteenth century. Western Union and the American Bell Telephone Company contested the patent in extended litigation in 1890 and 1892; the courts in both cases sustained Woods's priority. Thomas Edison thereafter offered Woods a senior position at Edison Machine Works in New York at a higher salary than any Black scientist had previously commanded. He declined, preferring the independence of his own Woods Electric Company at Cincinnati.

The third-rail system he patented in 1901 — Patent 687,098 — became the standard electrification technology of the New York City subway, the Boston elevated, the Chicago L and the Philadelphia subway. The system is still operating in all four cities.

He died of cerebral haemorrhage at Harlem Hospital on the thirtieth of January 1910, at fifty-three.

He is honored here as the foundational inventor of the inductive-telegraph and third-rail electric-railway systems.