Henry Blair was the second Black person to ever get a patent. I could just leave it at that because that shit is nuts. Could you imagine creating something and not being able to get people to look at it or even acknowledge that you created it because of the color of your skin? Well, that was just how things were back then. Stupid country. Blair's first patent was for what he called a seed-planter which is basically a plow. I can't begin to imagine what it was like before he made this thing.
With this it let workers plant corn
faster, easier, and with less labor. You may notice that most early
inventions by Black people were things to make life just easier on
Black labor (farming equipment and cleaning tools) or to fit in (hair
straighteners). He also created the cotton planter. If you don't know
what this is just picture in those old cartoons where a horse would
be pulling a huge blade and it would leave a slice in the ground for
seeds to be dropped in. He was already a farmer and doing well
because of his inventions.
Blair was illiterate and it still isn't known if he was free or not. In 1857 some asshole slave owner claimed that he owned “all the fruits of the slave's labor” including anything they created. Could you imagine being such a silly bitch to believe that not only is it fine to own another human being, but its okay to take, profit, and get credit for what someone else made? Since slaves weren't considered citizens the government thought this was fine and a year later a law was changed that said slaves couldn't hold patents. This was changed years later in 1871 to grant men, but not women because history, the right to hold patents. So thank Henry Blair for creating this. Otherwise your summer job would've been far shittier.
Click here for previous Cool Shit Black People Invented.
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