To celebrate Black History Month, we are sharing amazing black STEM heroes. First is one of my favourites - a true inventor!
Marie Van Brittan Brown was a nurse living in Harlem in the 1960s. Her job meant she worked unusual hours and she often felt scared in her apartment alone. So, she took to solving this problem herself. She designed a camera system that allowed her to see her front door from inside her apartment and eventually it incorporated a microphone too and could buzz people up remotely.
This was the first CCTV system and led to the design of multiple home security systems, especially in apartment blocks.
Orphaned in 1898 at the age of 4, the family friend who raised him told him he was so bright, he could do anything he wanted. What he wanted was to design a home for families.
Despite there being no black architects as role models, and warnings that other black families couldn't afford to use him and white families wouldn't hire him, he became an architect anyway! And not just any architect, his work came to represent the glamour and refinement of LA to the rest of the country.
His clients included Frank Sinatra, Cary Grant and the Beverley Hills Hotel. His work remains famous to this day with Denzel Washington and Ellen DeGeneres having lived in Williams' homes. However, it wasn't easy for him.
He taught himself to draw upside down so white clients wouldn't be uncomfortable sitting next to him. He would walk around construction sites with his hands clasped behind his back as he wasn't sure everyone would want to shake his hand. In fact, many of the neighbourhoods in which his homes were situated were closed to him because of his race.
In 1937, Williams said "Virtually everything pertaining to my professional life during those early years was influenced by my need to offset racial prejudice, by my effort to force white people to consider me an individual rather than a member of a race."
Mary was born in 1805 in Kingston, Jamaica and spent her life living mostly between Jamaica and th UK. She had an interest in medicine and nursing from a young age and learnt a lot of what she knew from army doctors staying at her mother's boarding house. She used her medical and traditional healing skills for years in Jamaica, England and Panama.
However, it was in the Crimea during the war, from 1853 that she became a hero. After being turned down to travel there with groups of nurses, due to her race, she made her own way there and organised her own passage.
To treat injured soldiers, Mary went one step further than the other nurses at the time by riding a horse into the battlefields, even when under fire and treated men from both sides of the war. After the war, she received a medal for bravery and many of the soldiers she treated organised a charity gala, which 80,000 people attended, to raise money for her.
If you think about online searches, you usually think of 'Google' however before Google came along, an internet search facility existed and was invented by Alan Emtage. He was born in Barbados and after that, studied in Montreal, Canada. While at university, he also worked in the IT department where he was given the task of manually going through files that could be useful to the university.
He got so frustrated with how long this took, that he created a computer programme, which he called 'Archie', to automatically scour files during the night. Even as his research engine grew in usage across Canada, he saw no reason to patent it as no one was making money from the internet at the time. While Archie was the great great grandfather of Google and the modern search engines, Emtage is not well known and made no money from his world changing invention.
