Global Black Inventor Research Projects, Inc. (New-York)
10 October 2008
press release
Black Inventors, Crafting Over 200 years of Success, clearly highlights the work of Black inventors from over seventy countries. The author, Keith C. Holmes, has spent more than twenty years researching information on inventions by Black people from Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, Canada, France, Germany, Ghana, Haiti, Jamaica, Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa, Trinidad and Tobago, to name a few. One cannot build any civilization without innovations, inventions, plans, financial resources, labor saving devices, materials and muscle .
This book documents a number of the inventions, patents and labor saving devices conceived by Black Inventors. Africans, before the period of their enslavement, developed: agricultural tools, building materials, medicinal herbs, cloth, and weapons, among many other inventions. Though many black people were brought to Canada, the Caribbean, Central and South America and the United States in chains and under the yoke of slavery, it is relatively unknown that thousands of them engineered labor saving devices and inventions that spawned companies which generated money and jobs, worldwide.
The focus of this book is to introduce the readers to the facts that inventions by black people both past and present were developed and patented on a global scale. This also means that there are inventors in every culture people whose ideas have been turned into inventions. In the past the focus has been on American and European inventors. The new giants in the patenting process are Brazil, China, India, Japan, Nigeria, South Africa and South Korea.
Black inventors, from the very beginning of their involvement in the invention and patenting process, have had an important and earth shattering impact on the world. This book highlights the work of early Black inventors from almost all fifty states in the U.S. It gives details about the first Black inventor who obtained a patent in both the Caribbean and the United States. In the United States, to date, sixteen African American men have been inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Two of these inventors, Jan E, Matzeliger, (Suriname) and Elijah McCoy, (Colchester, Canada) were born outside the United States. Recently, Dr. Patricia Bath was nominated to the National Inventors Hall of Fame; yet, an African American woman has not been inducted into this prestigious organization. Mr. Holmes documents the creativity of Black women inventors from Africa, Canada, the Caribbean, the United Kingdom and the United States, and provides readers with a comprehensive view of the ground-breaking achievements of Black inventors – both male and female.
This is one of the first books that addresses the diversity of Black inventors and their inventions from a global perspective. The material available in this book is an introduction to the world of Black inventors. It gives the reader, researcher, librarian, student and teacher the materials needed to effectively understand that the Black inventor is not only a national phenomenon, but also a global giant/
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