Lewis Latimer

Lewis Howard Latimer was born on the fourth of September 1848 at Chelsea, Massachusetts, the youngest of four children of George Latimer — a former enslaved Virginian who had escaped from the Norfolk household of James B. Gray in October 1842 and made the principal antebellum fugitive-slave case George Latimer v. James B. Gray (1842) at Boston — and Rebecca Smith Latimer, also a fugitive from the Norfolk household. The family was Boston Black fugitive-Quaker-supported of the antebellum period.

He was placed at six at the Boston Primary School and at the principal Boston-area schools for free Black children. He left school at ten in 1858 on his father’s departure from the household and worked across his adolescence at the office of his father’s former patron, the Boston barber Lewis Hayden, as a paperhanger and at the office of the Boston Trinity Church as a sexton’s assistant.

He enlisted in the United States Navy on the fifteenth of September 1864 at sixteen and served the closing year of the Civil War as a landsman aboard the USS Massasoit at the James River blockade of Richmond. He was discharged from the Navy on the third of July 1865.

He took employment in 1865 at the patent-law office of Crosby, Halstead and Gould at Boston — initially as an office-clerk and shortly thereafter as a draftsman, on the recognition by the office of his self-taught draftsmanship. He rose by 1872 to head draftsman of the office across the seven years 1865 to 1872.

He was the draftsman of the patent drawings of the telephone patent of Alexander Graham Bell — Bell’s United States Patent No. 174,465 of the seventh of March 1876, the foundational patent of the modern telephone industry. The patent drawings filed at the Patent Office at Washington with Bell’s application were drafted by Latimer at the Crosby, Halstead and Gould office at Boston.

He joined the United States Electric Lighting Company at Bridgeport, Connecticut in 1880 as a draftsman and electrical-engineering apprentice, and rose by 1882 to assistant manager of the company’s lamp-works.

He was issued United States Patent No. 252,386 of the seventeenth of January 1882 — the principal patent of his career — on the process for the manufacture of the carbon filament of the incandescent electric lamp. The patent secured to the United States Electric Lighting Company the principal carbon-filament manufacturing process of the period.

He was hired in 1885 by the Edison Electric Light Company at Manhattan as chief draftsman and patent expert. He served Edison Electric Light and its successor the General Electric Company across the remaining forty-three years of his life.

He was the sole Black member of the original Edison Pioneers — the twenty-eight-member founding circle of Thomas Edison’s closest collaborators — at the Pioneers’ founding in 1918.

He died at Flushing, New York on the eleventh of December 1928 of natural causes, at eighty.

He is honored here as the sole Black Edison Pioneer.