Cool Shit Black People Invented: Valerie Thomas (plus bonus inventor)

Back when Valerie Thomas was a kid there was no place in science for women unless it was a movie and she was an evil lab assistant or something. But she was all like nuts to that nonsense and decided that even though she was a Black woman that she was gonna create cool shit. Most of the science related stuff was for boys and she attended an all girl school which was the equivalent of a year long slumber party. So after graduation she pursued science.

She graduated from Morgan State University with a degree in physics and accepted a spot at NASA. After a while they asked her if she could take over a project called Landsat that would let satellites project images from space. She started tinkering with an idea she saw at a seminar that showed an illusion that made it look like a light was still glowing even after it was turned off. She was like “Oh, I got this.” What she pretty much was working on was a hologram.

Before she started making this device using flat and concave mirrors creating the illusion of a solid object people just drew things out or had raggedy ass computer simulations. “Optical illusions may be produced by parabolic mirrors wherein such images produced thereby are possessed with three dimensional attributes. The optical effect may be explained by the fact that the human eyes see an object from two view points...” science science science. Not only did she make this possible but it was able to show images in real time.

Eventually this happened.

She later created programs that could help with research on comets and black holes. I know some of this may be over your head. It is for me. I just wrote this and barely understood what she did. So allow me to show a bonus invention.

This guy O. Dorsey and sometimes Osburn Dorsey is credited with creating a better doorknob and the doorstop in 1878. I assume before that doors were just ridiculous and slamming into walls and not staying opened or closed before he came along. I cant even find an actual image of this guy, that's how much of a mystery he is. Thank him for making a better doorknob and door stop, otherwise our parents would've had our asses standing at them all day letting folks in and out.

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