GARRETT A. MORGAN:: Innovation That Saved Lives and Built Community

His name was Garrett Augustus Morgan, and he was more than a brilliant inventor. He was in the business of inventions because he was equal parts inventor and businessman. Born on March 4, 1877, in Paris, Kentucky, the seventh of eleven children in a family that had been enslaved but was free by the time of his birth. His father, Sydney Morgan, was of mixed heritage, and his mother, Elizabeth Reed Morgan, brought African American and Native American lineage to the family.

Morgan grew up helping on the family farm and attending school, but by age fourteen, he had moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, to find work. There, he swept floors, hired a tutor, and began teaching himself mechanics, which was the start of a life spent inventing solutions to everyday dangers.

In 1895, Morgan moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where he repaired sewing machines for a clothing manufacturer. His early business success, including his own sewing and tailoring shop with his Bavarian wife Mary Anne Hassek, put him among the relatively few African Americans of his time who could afford a personal automobile, making him the first Black man in Cleveland to own a car.

Morgan also owned a big house at 5202 Harlem Avenue, but this isn’t MTV Cribs, so the fact that the house was demolished in 1990 is for another piece.

An Accidental Breakthrough Hair Care

Morgan’s first commercial patent success came not from safety gear or transportation tech, but from hair care. Around 1910, while experimenting with a chemical solution for sewing machines, he noticed it straightened cloth fibers, and later, animal fur and human hair.

He refined it into a hair-straightening cream and launched the G. A. Morgan Hair Refining Company in 1913.

Black folks' hair care has been a source of pride, contention, and frustration since plantation life, so the product sold widely, giving Garrett financial stability and the resources to pursue larger inventions.

Newspaper ad for G.A. Morgan Hair Refining Company

Breathing Life into Dangerous Situations: The Smoke Hood

Morgan’s first life-saving invention came from observing a grave problem: firefighters and rescue workers choking on smoke in burning buildings and industrial accidents. In response, he developed a safety hood, a canvas and tube breathing device that pulled cleaner air from near the ground into a wearer’s lungs. He patented it in 1914 and began marketing it through his National Safety Device Company.

Many simply called it the Smoke Hood, which in 2026 would have also been Mr. Morgan's rap name.

Racism complicated its acceptance. Particularly In Southern cities, where fire chiefs and fire departments resisted buying a safety device credited to a Black man. Morgan found a creative (and revealing) workaround: he hired a white actor to pose as the inventor while Morgan, disguised as a Native American character called Big Chief Mason, demonstrated the device’s effectiveness by staying in thick smoke for extended periods.

After those public demonstrations, business started to heat up (pun intended), and orders began to roll in.

The safety hood’s worth was sealed in 1916, when an explosion in a waterworks tunnel under Lake Erie trapped workers in smoke and toxic gas. Two previous rescue teams had failed. Morgan and his brother Frank brought several safety hoods and entered first, leading the effort that saved eight lives.

He was awarded medals for bravery from a Cleveland civic association and the International Association of Fire Engineers, but was denied the monetary compensation that other rescuers received. The Carnegie Hero Fund Commission awarded medals to four white men who had participated in the tunnel rescue, but the city refused to support Morgan’s nomination for the same.

Mr. Morgan rescuing people from the 1916 Lake Erie tunnel disaster

Several fire departments placed new orders, and several Southern cities canceled their orders for the smoke hood after learning the inventor was Black; a fact that Morgan “kept on the low” before the disaster.

For years afterward, Morgan quoted in his diary that he had “a Ph.D. from the school of hard knocks and cruel treatment,” a nod to how progress often came through struggle and resistance.

Car Crashes, Caution, and the Traffic Signal

As America entered the 1920s, automobiles were no longer rare curiosities. The success of the Model T Ford and other affordable cars put millions of vehicles on city streets, but the traffic infrastructure lagged. Roads were often rough dirt or cobblestone, intersections chaotic, and drivers inexperienced. Pedestrians, horse-drawn wagons, and cars all shared the same space, and accidents were common.

While driving around pushing his whip through Cleveland with his sons, Morgan witnessed a collision between an automobile and a horse-drawn cart that threw a young girl from the carriage. It sparked an idea: traffic signals needed not just “stop” and “go,” but a caution phase that told drivers to slow before conditions changed.

In 1923, he patented a three-position traffic signal, a mechanical device with movable arms that could order different lanes of traffic to stop, go, or pause.

Morgan later sold the rights to his design to General Electric for $40,000. It was a significant sum at the time, the equivalent of about $750,000 today, but far less than the long-term value that universal traffic control systems would accrue worldwide. That traffic signal logic, including the caution amber light, became the foundation of modern intersection safety.

Beyond Invention: Leadership and Legacy

Morgan’s life was about more than gadgets. He co-founded the Cleveland Association of Colored Men, an advocacy and civic organization that later merged with the NAACP, and he donated to historically Black colleges. In 1920, he founded the weekly Cleveland Call, one of the earliest African American newspapers in the U.S., which, in later years, merged to form the Call and Post, a major Black press institution.

He also purchased land and founded the Wakeman Country Club, a recreational space open to Black citizens excluded from white-only clubs, and remained an active figure in social and civic causes throughout his life. He was also an honorary member Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, Pi chapter at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, where he was associated with the Delta Alpha Lambda (DAL) alumni chapter.

Garrett Morgan died in 1963 in Cleveland, remembered today as one of the early century’s most inventive and community-minded figures. His inventions saved lives, made streets safer, and his entrepreneurial spirit helped build community infrastructure at a time when doors for Black creators were often closed. His legacy reminds us that progress frequently comes from people solving problems others ignored...and doing it without the recognition they deserved.

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