Sarah E. Goode

Sarah Elisabeth Jacobs was born into slavery in Toledo, Ohio, in 1855 — Ohio law theoretically barring slavery within the state, but her parents' status remains historically unclear. She married Archibald Goode, a carpenter, around 1877, and the couple moved to Chicago to enter the furniture-manufacturing trade. Sarah operated a furniture store on State Street; Archibald built the inventory in their adjoining workshop.

Her customers were predominantly the new urban working class of Chicago — many of them tenement-dwelling immigrants and Black migrants from the post-Reconstruction South — and her central commercial problem was the size of conventional bedroom furniture relative to the tenement apartments her customers lived in. Conventional beds occupied half the available floor space of a one-room apartment; sleep and daytime use of the room had to alternate.

Sarah Goode designed a folding cabinet bed — a piece of furniture that operated as a roll-top writing desk during the day and unfolded into a full bed at night — and patented the invention on the fourteenth of July 1885 under U.S. Patent No. 322,177. The patent made her the first African American woman to receive a U.S. patent in U.S. patent records.

The folding cabinet bed Sarah Goode patented became the technical antecedent of the twentieth-century Murphy bed — patented by William Lawrence Murphy in 1900 in a substantially similar configuration. Goode's furniture firm continued to operate in Chicago through the 1890s and produced and sold the cabinet beds in commercial quantities; the firm's record of patent licensing in subsequent litigation does not appear in the trade-press of the period.

She died in Chicago on the eighth of April 1905, age forty-nine.

She is honored here as the first African American woman patent-holder.