Woods, Granville T.

Granville T. Woods

Australian-born American inventor Granville T. Woods (1856-1910), dubbed “the black Edison,” contributed key inventions to several of the technologies that defined the modern era, including railroad braking, electric railroad systems, and telephony and telegraphy.

During his own life, Woods had to struggle not just for recognition but for financial solvency. He came from modest origins, worked independently, and had no way to market his inventions on his own. For most of his life he had to seek out associates and allies in order to try to realize financial gains from his work. Those allies, well aware of the value of Woods's inventions, used a variety of subterfuges to try to wrest his intellectual property from him, but through a series of lengthy court struggles he resisted their efforts. Woods's story offers many insights into the conditions faced by African-American inventors—and into the roles played by inventors in general during an age when the solo inventor was being supplanted by a different kind of figure, the engineer, employed by a large corporation.

Born in Australia

Many details of Woods's early life have been obscured by contradictory stories told about him, sometimes by Woods himself. His birthplace has often been given as Columbus, Ohio, but his biographer, Rayvon Fouché, relying on census records, Woods's death certificate, and detailed journalistic accounts of Woods's life published in the 1890s, has concluded that he was born in Australia on April 23, 1856. He was of a mixed ethnic background that probably included Australian Aboriginal, Malay, and African elements. As a foreign-born black person, Woods, like other black immigrants, likely found American racial prejudice especially difficult to take. Fouché noted that his “combative spirit, the forthright manner in which he interacted with whites, and his fearless public challenges to white authority—all of which, because of the severe consequences, most African Americans avoided well into the 20th century—indicate that he did not consider himself an American Negro.”

It is not known exactly when Woods came to the United States, nor what kind of formal education he received. He apparently spent some time in Columbus. Earlier biographies of Woods have reported that he left school at age ten to learn the trades of machinist and blacksmith, continuing to supplement his education by persuading white friends to check out textbooks from libraries that barred him from entering because of his skin color. In later testimony, however, he said that he began working as a machinist at age 15. He is said to have gone west to work on a railroad, perhaps the Iron Mountain Railroad in Missouri, to have worked in a mill in Springfield, Illinois, and to have attended an engineering college in the eastern United States. One magazine stated that Woods claimed to be a graduate of the electrical department of Stern's Institute of Technology; another article, quoted by Fouché, stated that “Mr. Woods has a first-class English education, and is an experienced mechanic, having received special training in mechanical engineering.” In the year 1878 Woods is variously reported to have served as an engineer on a British ship called the Ironsides and to have worked for the Pomeroy Railroad Company in southwestern Ohio.

Reliable records of Woods's activities from the late 1870s onward are available in the form of court testimony he later gave about his creative work as an inventor, largely unearthed by Fouché's research. He apparently moved from the Pomeroy Railroad to the Dayton and Southeastern Railroad around 1879, working there for 13 months and being entrusted with shifting cars in a rail yard in the town of Washington Court House, Ohio, northeast of Cincinnati. He stated that a friendly telegraph operator there instructed him in the scientific fundamentals of telegraphy, but the inventions that he was soon to devise suggested that, however fast he may have been as a learner, he had at some point received more training as an electrical engineer than could be gleaned from a few sessions in a telegraph operator's booth. What seems certain is that Woods obtained a strong working knowledge of the two hottest technologies of the 1880s, railroads and electronic communications. His technical expertise probably explained the relative prestige of the railroad jobs he held as a young man; most African Americans in southern Ohio, a region that reflected the attitudes of points farther south, were relegated to sheer manual labor at the time.

In 1880 Woods experienced the first instance of a problem that would plague him throughout most of his working life: he left the Dayton and Southeastern Railroad after the company failed to pay him the salary he had earned. They issued scrip that local merchants either refused to accept or devalued with huge surcharges. That year, Woods settled in Cincinnati and, possibly working with a brother, Lyates, started a small firm called the Woods Electrical Company. He began to explore the phenomenon of induction, the process of causing an electrical current in a conductor by generating or varying a nearby electromagnetic field. One of his earliest experiments produced an induction-based elevator signaling system, and he began showing drawings of the system to well-heeled Cincinnatians whom he saw as potential investors.

Suffered from Smallpox

Woods's career was soon interrupted, however: in the summer of 1881 he contracted smallpox, which was in its last years as a major threat in the United States. Often fatal, the disease sidelined Woods for most of a year and left him with chronic kidney and liver disease that may have been factors in his early death. Apparently Woods was married at this point; he spoke of having to take extreme measures in order to support his family. Unable to do sustained creative work, he found employers unwilling to hire him in his weakened condition. The only job he could find was at the Queen City Facing Mills, and that company, too, refused to pay him the salary it had agreed on. Woods launched a lengthy court action that recovered only $20 in the end.

By late 1882 and 1883 Woods was once again at work on new inventions. The first patent he received, in 1884, was for an improved type of steam boiler, and he also registered patents on a new telephone signal transmitter and an ingenious process combining features of a telephone and a telegraph machine that he called telegraphony. Rights to that invention were later acquired by Alexander Graham Bell's telephone company. Despite the flow of creative ideas he was experiencing, Woods lacked even the $15 fee necessary to file patents on these inventions. In cases where he did succeed, it was because Cincinnati investors and attorneys, who were becoming aware of his talents and alert to the possibility of a big payoff, fronted him the money.

Woods forged ahead, and by 1885 he had fleshed out his ideas for a true breakthrough invention called the Synchronous Multiplex Railway Telegraph. The system used induction to transmit telegraph messages from moving trains to wires running beside the tracks, thus enabling railroad personnel to monitor the locations of trains in the system—the previous impossibility of which had been the cause of numerous collisions. Woods and another inventor, Lucius J. Phelps, apparently conceived of such a system independently. Woods read of Phelps's work in Scientific American magazine and refined his own invention into a system with a wider scope. Using a borrowed battery at the headquarters of the Cincinnati Medicated Mud Bath Company, he constructed a working model, and once again he attracted the attention of well-heeled investors.

The railway telegraph was patented in 1887, but not before Woods had become embroiled in an expensive patent interference proceeding—an attempt by the U.S. Patent Office to determine priority among competing claims—in which Phelps asserted his rights to the invention. The process further sapped Woods's meager financial resources but did bring him a measure of publicity. A Catholic Tribune article quoted by Fouché even called him “the greatest inventor in the history of his race, and equal, if not superior to, any inventor in the country.” That led two investors, John Gano and Ralph Peters, to back a second Woods Electric Company, this one located across the Ohio River in Kentucky. Meanwhile, Woods had received feelers from the Westinghouse Corporation about a railroad air brake he had developed.

Relationship with Investors Deteriorated

Woods's relationship with Gano and Peters quickly deteriorated, as Woods alleged that they failed to pay him his agreed-upon salary of $50 a month, plus stock options, and did not reimburse him for trips to New York undertaken to promote his inventions. That led to a second set of lawsuits, complicated by the fact that two entities, one in Ohio and one in Kentucky, bore the name Woods Electric Company. By 1890 Woods had managed to sever his ties from Gano and Peters, but he was once again almost penniless.

Woods decided he had to move to New York, the center of American electronics engineering. Over the next ten years, the pattern of his life in Cincinnati repeated itself. Working first as an elevated railway porter for $1.20 a day, and sending most of that money to an ailing sister, Woods shopped his ideas to investors. The key idea Woods worked on in the 1890s was an electric train system. The ancestor of both overhead-powered trams and the “third rail” trains of today, the system Woods had in mind carried enormous potential benefits for investors. Others worked on similar ideas, and Fouché has disputed the often-repeated statement that Woods was the inventor of the third-rail power system. However, with the help of partners in his newly formed American Engineering Company, Woods devised key components of an electric street railway that was built on New York's Coney Island.

Unfortunately, Woods once again found himself in the hands of less-than-honest partners who conspired to cheat him of profits due. His relationship with the American Engineering Company devolved into a violent scene in which Woods confronted company executive James Zerbe over the theft of some of his drawings and ended up in a physical altercation with Zerbe and his son. After a more lengthy court proceeding involving a libel suit filed by Zerbe against Woods—Woods was once again vindicated but drained his savings in defending himself—the partnership was dissolved. The only silver lining was that the court proceedings once again brought Woods a measure of favorable publicity. He succeeded in registering a few more patents, including one in 1900 for a large-scale chicken egg incubator.

The degree to which racism played a part in Woods's troubles remains an open question. Given the fact that the 1890s marked a low point in post–Civil War race relations, he clearly suffered the effects of racial prejudice, and his precarious financial standing resulted from his inability to call upon the sources of capital that would have been available to white inventors. However, the problems Woods faced were shared to some extent by white inventors, including Thomas Edison, and all over the United States and the world freelance inventors like Woods were losing ground to large corporations that had the legal and financial muscle to see the work of engineers through to financial profits.

Woods, in fact, first began to prosper after he worked out a closer arrangement with two of those large corporations, General Electric and Westinghouse, in the last years of his life. Working primarily through an intermediary, H. Ward Leonard, Woods registered 20 patents between 1900 and 1907, most of them for electronic train-control devices. Most of these patents were assigned to General Electric and Westinghouse. Woods was able to purchase a farm in Monsey, New York. He may have married again, with unhappy results. A news account cited by C.R. Gibbs in Black Inventors: From Africa to America stated that Woods had filed suit against a Poughkeepsie estate owner, the employer of a maid named Elizabeth who claimed to be married to Woods but said that he had abused her and that she wanted to stay on in her job. Just as Woods began to realize proper remuneration for his life's work, he suffered a stroke on January 28, 1910. He died at Harlem Hospital in New York two days later.

Books

Fouché, Rayvon, Black Inventors in the Age of Segregation, Johns Hopkins, 2003.

Gibbs, C.R., Black Inventors: From Africa to America, Three Dimensions, 1995.

James, Portia P., The Real McCoy: African-American Invention and Innovation, 1619-1930, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989.

Notable Black American Men, Gale, 1998.

Simmons, William, Men of Mark: Eminent, Progressive and Rising, Rewell, 1887.

Periodicals

Jet, June 5, 1995.

Journal of Black Studies, March 1989.

New York Times, December 26, 2004.

Online

“Granville T. Woods: Inventor,” The Faces of Science: African Americans in the Sciences, https://webfiles.uci.edu/mcbrown/display/woods.html (December 28, 2007).

“Granville T. Woods: The Multiplex Telegraph,” Inventor of the Week, http://web.mit.edu/invent/iow/woods.html (December 28, 2007).