Editor’s Note: Every February, a.k.a., Lies About Black History Month, the Black Invention Mythssite is frequently unavailable because its bandwidth is too limited toaccommodate all would-be readers. Since this site is such an importantresource, I have reproduced the main page below from http://www.archive.org/. The links lead either to external websites or to other pages at archive.org.
Black Invention Myths
Perhaps you’ve heard the claims: Were it not for the genius andenergy of African-American inventors, we might find ourselves in aworld without traffic lights, peanut butter, blood banks, light bulbfilaments, and a vast number of other things we now take for grantedbut could hardly imagine life without.
Such beliefs usually originate in books or articles about blackhistory. Since many of the authors have little interest in the historyof technology outside of advertising black contributions to it, theirstories tend to be fraught with misunderstandings, wishful thinking, orfanciful embellishments with no historical basis. The lack ofhistorical perspective leads to extravagant overestimations oforiginality and importance: sometimes a slightly modified version of apre-existing piece of technology is mistaken for the first invention ofits type; sometimes a patent or innovation with little or no lastingvalue is portrayed as a major advance, even if there’s no real evidenceit was ever used.