Lewis Latimer Research Paper

1848-1928 Lewis H. Latimer was a leading engineer in the formative years of the electric power industry at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. He was a key member of the legendary group of inventors led by Thomas Edison. Latimer was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts, on September 4, 1848, to George Latimer and Rebecca Smith. Latimer’s father was well known as the central figure in a cause célèbre in Boston in 1842 when he was arrested as an escaped slave and ordered returned to his owner in Virginia. Thousands of Bostonians, with Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison leading the way, took up his cause. Latimer’s father was able to keep his freedom—and Latimer himself escaped being born into slavery—when a black Baptist minister named Samuel Caldwell raised the substantial sum of $400 from his congregation to pay off the owner. …show more content…
When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1857 that a slave named Dred Scott could not sue for his freedom, Latimer’s father, who had become a prominent activist for African American rights, went into hiding. As a result, Latimer and his two brothers were sent to a state school where residents were treated more like captives than children. As their parents had done before them, they gained their freedom by escaping. In 1864, at age 16, Latimer joined the Navy. His tour of duty lasted less than a year as the Civil War came to an end, and the Union discharged soldiers and sailors no longer needed. Latimer returned to Boston, and was able to secure modest work with a patent