Lewis Howard Latimer

Lewis Howard Latimer was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts, on the fourth of September 1848, the son of George Latimer — a fugitive enslaved man whose 1842 escape from Virginia and subsequent legal case (Latimer v. Gray) had been one of the principal abolitionist court fights of the antebellum North. Lewis enlisted in the Union Navy at sixteen and served on the USS Massasoit during the final year of the Civil War.

He apprenticed as a draftsman in the Boston patent-law firm of Crosby & Gould after the war. In 1876 he was hired by Alexander Graham Bell as the engineering draftsman who prepared the technical drawings for Bell's telephone patent application — the most consequential patent application of the nineteenth century. Bell filed the patent on the seventh of March 1876, six hours before a competing application from Elisha Gray.

In 1879 Latimer joined the Hiram Maxim United States Electric Lighting Company. There he developed and patented (in 1881 and 1882) a process for manufacturing carbon filaments by treating cellulose fibers with hydrocarbon vapor — a process that produced filaments far more durable and uniform than the paper-and-cotton filaments Thomas Edison had used. The carbon-filament process Latimer patented became the industry standard and was the key technical advance that made electric incandescent lighting commercially viable.

He joined Thomas Edison's company in 1884 and worked there as the principal patent draftsman through the 1890s, defending Edison's patents in litigation and preparing the drawings for many of Edison's later electrical inventions.

He died in Flushing, Queens, on the eleventh of December 1928, age eighty.

He is honored here as the draftsman who drew Bell's telephone and the engineer whose carbon filament lit the modern world.