Garrett Morgan

Something was wrong. The high-speed of the needles in Garrett Morgan’s sewing machines were so fast that their friction scorched the woolen material it mended. High-speed needles were needed for efficiency, but they caused burn marks that damaged his customers’ fine apparel.

One evening, Morgan dabbed a liquid he concocted on the needle of one of his sewing machines in hopes to reduce the friction when sewing. When his wife called him to dinner, he wiped his hands – soiled with his liquid — on a nearby piece of horse fur rag.

Morgan returned after dinner to find the horse fur fibers fully straightened and standing erect. Curious, he daubed some of his creation on his neighbor’s dog, a coarse-haired Airedale, and got the same result: straightened fur. Determined now to see if his potion had the same results on human hair, he applied a small amount on a patch of hair on his head. Within minutes his hair became straight.

In 1913, Morgan received a patent to begin marketing G.A. Morgan Hair Refining Cream, the first human hair straightening product. The hair ointment became very popular, especially among African Americans.

But the hair straightening cream wasn’t Morgan’s first, last or most notable invention or business venture.

Besides repairing sewing machines, Morgan invented a belt fastener for sewing machine in 1901, opened a very successful tailoring shop in Cleveland in 1909, and owned and published the Cleveland Call newspaper in the 1920s.

Two of Morgan’s most well-known and undoubtedly most useful inventions were automated street traffic signals and the gas mask.

His gas mask, which he received a patent for in 1914, achieved worldwide acclaim after he used it two years later to rescue Cleveland workers trapped in a tunnel filled with dust, smoke and poisonous gases, and located more than 200 feet below Lake Erie.

The gas mask was later used by U.S. servicemen during World War I, and police and firefighters from fire companies from around the world placed orders for his gas mask.

Morgan invented the traffic signal to keep cars, horse-drawn buggies and pedestrians from colliding on the increasingly congested Cleveland streets. His device was designed to stand at intersections and notify cars and pedestrians when they should stop or go.

The son of former slaves, Morgan was born in Paris, Kentucky, in 1877. He received only a sixth-grade formal education. He moved to Cincinnati as a teenager and later to Cleveland, where he worked as a handyman and a self-taught sewing machine mechanic.

Morgan died in 1963 at age 86.