Garrett Morgan for kids: a true picture book

Garrett Morgan: a timeline of true facts

1. 1910s In Cleveland, Ohio, in the 1910s, cars were still new: bicycles, horse-drawn carts, cars and people on foot all shared the same streets, and crashes between them were common. source
2. 1910s Firefighters of the time struggled to breathe in the thick, choking smoke of the fires they fought, and the breathing devices of the day were hard to put on, too complicated, or did not work well. source
3. 1877 Garrett Morgan was born in Paris, Kentucky, to parents who had been enslaved; he left school after sixth grade, and at 14 he moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, to find work, paying a tutor so he could keep learning. source
4. 1895 In 1895 he moved to Cleveland and fixed sewing machines for clothing makers, and word spread that he was very good at fixing things. source
5. 1912 Garrett spent his life making inventions that kept ordinary people safe; after seeing firefighters struggle in the smoke, he invented a safety hood, and in 1912 he asked for a patent on it. source
6. 1912 Smoke rises and leaves a layer of cleaner air near the floor, so a tube dangled down from the hood to breathe that low air, and a wet sponge filtered out smoke and cooled the air. source
7. 1914 Many tries to sell the hood failed because buyers did not want an invention made by a Black man, so in 1914 Garrett hired a white actor to pose as the inventor while he himself wore a disguise. source
8. 1914 To show it worked, Garrett filled a closed tent with thick black smoke, walked in wearing the hood, stayed about 20 minutes and came out unharmed, and fire departments began to buy it. source
9. 1916 Just before midnight on a hot summer night in 1916, workers digging a tunnel deep under Lake Erie to bring clean water to Cleveland hit a pocket of natural gas, and an explosion filled the tunnel with smoke and gas. source
10. 1916 Two rescue teams went into the tunnel without the right gear for the smoke and fumes, and many of those rescuers did not come back out. source
11. 1916 In the middle of the night a messenger came for Garrett, and he and his brother Frank rushed to the lake still in their pajamas, bringing four of his hoods. source
12. 1916 Most rescuers there doubted the hood, so Garrett, Frank and two volunteers put on hoods and went into the tunnel themselves; Garrett came out carrying a man on his back, went into the tunnel four times in all, and others joined in after his team succeeded. source
13. 1916 Newspapers and city officials left Garrett out when they praised the rescuers, and some southern cities canceled their orders for his hood when they saw photos showing that its inventor was Black. source
14. 1920s Most traffic signals then had only two positions, Stop and Go, turned by hand with no pause in between, so cars often crashed at busy corners just as the signal switched. source
15. 1922 By then Garrett owned a car and drove Cleveland's busy streets himself, and after he saw a crash between a car and a horse-drawn carriage at a street corner, he set out to make traffic safer. source
16. 1923 His signal was a T-shaped pole that a worker turned with a crank, with three positions: Stop, Go, and a third that stopped traffic in every direction before the other road could go, which also let people on foot cross more safely. source
17. 1923 At night, or when the streets were quiet, the signal's arms could be set halfway up to tell drivers to go through carefully, just like the flashing yellow and red lights of today. source
18. 1923 On November 20, 1923, Garrett became the first person to get a U.S. patent for a three-position traffic signal, and he sold the rights to General Electric for $40,000. source
19. today Signals like his were used across North America until the red, yellow and green lights we know today replaced them, and the U.S. Department of Transportation calls his signal the basis of the modern traffic signal. source

Try this at home

• Build your own T-shaped traffic signal from cardboard and a paper-towel tube, with signs for Stop, Go and Everybody Stop, and spin it to direct toy cars and walkers on a floor road.
• Play Garrett's signal game: one person is the signal and calls Go, Stop or Everybody Stop, and everyone else drives, rides or walks only when it is their turn.
• Take a walk with a grown-up to a crosswalk and watch the lights change. Count how many cars wait while people cross, then draw what you saw.

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