Garrett Morgan

What failed

He left home at fourteen with six years of schooling and paid a tutor out of a handyman's wages. He arrived in Cleveland sweeping floors for five dollars a week. He sold his first invention, a belt fastener for sewing machines, outright for a hundred and fifty dollars. An employer told him to end his relationship with the woman he would marry, who was white, or be fired; he quit, and her family had her excommunicated. Then he built a breathing hood that saved lives and could not sell it, because buyers would not deal with a Black inventor.

What happened next

In 1914 he hired a white actor to pose as the inventor while he performed the demonstrations himself under an alias. It worked: the hood won a first prize, fire departments ordered it, and on 25 July 1916 he used it to bring men alive out of a gas-filled tunnel under Lake Erie. The papers reporting the rescue the next day left him out, and Southern cities cancelled their orders once his race was known. In 1923 he sold his traffic signal patent to General Electric for forty thousand dollars.

The point

The usual telling is that nobody would buy his invention. The record is worse and more precise: it sold well, but only after he had hidden himself behind an actor and a false name. The failure was never the product.