Just before midnight at the end of a hot summer day in 1916, a pocket of natural gas exploded 120 feet below the waves of Lake Erie. It happened during work on Cleveland’s newest water tunnel, a 10-foot-wide underwater artery designed to draw water from about five miles away, across Cleveland’s polluted coastline. The wreckage littered the tunnel floor with twisted electrical conduit, ripped railroad tracks in the passageway, and caused toxic fumes to rise from the debris. Eleven tunnel workers died when the dust settled.
Two rescue parties entered the tunnel in search of survivors. However, they lacked proper safeguards for smoke and fumes. Eleven of the 18 rescuers died. About 11 hours later, Cleveland police, desperate to save anyone still alive, discovered Garrett A. Morgan, a local inventor who called himself “The Black Edison”, and a man he had two years before him. I turned to patented gas masks.
“He rustled his brother Frank,” says Sandra Morgan, the inventor’s granddaughter. “They threw a load of gas masks into the car and drove to the shore in their pajamas.”
Pass safely through smoke and smoke
Morgan’s invention was born out of tragedy. On March 25, 1911, his Triangle Shirtwaist Company in New York caught fire, killing 146 garment workers. Most of them were young female immigrants who were locked up in factories. The incident exposed the inadequacy of fire laws and safety equipment across the country, and Morgan, who once worked in Cleveland’s booming clothing industry, decided to give effective masks a try. He tackled a problem that has plagued inventors for years: smoke inhalation.
Sumita Khatri, a pulmonologist at the Cleveland Clinic, said: Carbon monoxide is highly attracted to hemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying protein of red blood cells, and attaches to red blood cells much more easily than oxygen. Blood cells need to release oxygen to the body. But when they are bound by carbon monoxide, oxygen no longer reaches the muscles, tissues, organs, and brain. “
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Morgan knew that carbon monoxide tends to stay at the head level of a standing person. So he designed a device that sucks air from a long tube that hangs near the ground like a tail. It branches at the level of the coccyx and into two hoses for him that meander on either side of the wearer’s ribcage and under the armpits, ending in a meandering walrus tusk-like mask (a hood similar to a beekeeper’s helmet). entered.
From the back, the system resembles a “Y”, with a hanging intake tube reminiscent of an elephant’s trunk. In fact, these animals seem to have captured Morgan’s imagination. “I saw an elephant sticking its trunk out of a tent to get some fresh air.”
But Morgan’s brilliant observations, and the simple but practical device that resulted from them, proved hard to sell. His father, the son of Confederate General John Hunt Morgan, was an enslaved black woman, Sandra said, and Morgan’s mother was black. He attended school until his sixth grade and was mostly self-taught. But his ingenuity ultimately won out. After many unsuccessful attempts to sell what he called “safety hoods,” Morgan devised a theatrical plan to avoid potential buyer prejudice. In 1914, he hired a white actor to pretend to be an inventor. Morgan then disguised himself, filled the tent with toxic fumes, and signaled the actors to entertain the audience, and Morgan put on a breathing apparatus and entered the tent. Good sales followed, and newspapers covered the demonstration. And that’s how the Cleveland police found out about Morgan’s device.
an overlooked hero
In 1916 Cleveland grew to be the fifth largest city in the United States. That population growth overwhelmed the sewer system and was dangerously polluting Lake Erie’s water supply. gave me
To create the tunnels, workers known as “sandhogs” had to dig sand, gypsum, limestone, and vast reserves of natural gas beneath the lake bed. The latter formed millions of years ago when dead plants and animals mixed with silt, sand, and calcium bicarbonate, buried deep in Lake Erie. Multiple layers of sediment applied pressure and heat to this mixture, eventually converting the contained carbon and hydrogen into natural gas. That he has more than 3 trillion cubic feet under the lake. And just before midnight on July 24, 1916, Sandhog hit an explosive pocket.
By the time Morgan was called and descended the tunnel, the bodies of two previous rescuers had been strewn in the tube. However, eight men were still alive and Morgan carried them all to safety.
But the next day New York Times, of Los Angeles Times, of chicago tribune No other newspaper mentioned Morgan. “Foremen and other employees were given large cash bonuses and medals. They were recognized in newspapers,” says Sandra. “My grandfather was not.”
Morgan was outraged. “He wrote a searing letter to Cleveland Mayor Harry Davis,” Sandra says, citing a copy. But I have a Ph.D. From a school of hard knocks and cruel treatment.
About five years later, in the early 1920s, the inventor witnessed a horrific accident between an automobile and a horse-drawn carriage at an intersection. Once again, his ingenuity worked. Prior to Morgan, traffic lights had only two positions for him: stop and go. “My grandfather’s big improvement was ‘All Hold,’ now it’s an amber light,” says Sandra. Morgan patented his three-position traffic light in 1923 and soon sold the idea to General Electric for his $40,000 (equivalent to about $610,000 today). Later that year he bought 250 acres of land in Wakeman, Ohio and turned the party into his club, an African-American country with a room and a dance hall.
Garrett Augustus Morgan died at the Cleveland Clinic on July 27, 1963, “after a lingering illness,” according to a popular African-American newspaper, Pittsburgh courier. “He’s 87 and has been blind for the past 15 years.” Half a century later, his inventions were on display at the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. At the risk of his life, he saved eight men and honors a brilliant inventor who has saved countless lives through his inventions. .
