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  • Wallace "Wally" Amos Jr.
    Born:July 1, 1936 -
    Invention: Famous Amos Chocolate Chip Cookie

    Wally Amos lived in Tallahassee, Florida until he was twelve. When his parents divorced, he then moved to Manhattan, New York with his aunt, where he enrolled at the Food Trades Vocational High School. He showed interest in cooking from a very young age, and it was from his aunt, who would bake cookies for him, that Amos would develop his chocolate chip cookies recipe. Amos would improve on his aunt's recipe, which was already common because it included several ingredients not generally associated with chocolate chip cookies. Shortly before graduation, Amos dropped out of high school to join the United ... » read more


  • George W. Carver
    Born: 1864-1943
    Invention: Peanut Butter

    It is rare to find a man of the caliber of George Washington Carver. A man who would decline an invitation to work for a salary of more than $100,000 a year (almost a million today) to continue his research on behalf of his countrymen. Agricultural chemist, Carver discovered three hundred uses for peanuts and hundreds more uses for soybeans, pecans and sweet potatoes. Among the listed items that he suggested to southern farmers to help them economically were his recipes and improvements to/for: adhesives, axle grease, bleach, buttermilk, chili sauce, fuel briquettes, ink, instant coffee, linoleum, mayonnaise, meat tenderizer, metal .. more

  • Elijah McCoy
    Born: May 2,1843-Oct
    Invention: Oil-Dripping Cup

    Elijah McCoyAfro-Canadian inventor and engineer. After studying engineering in Edinburgh, Scotland, and returning home to Canada, he found work as a fireman and oiler at the Michigan Central Railroad. In a home-based machine shop in Ypsilanti, McCoy invented an automatic lubricator for oiling the steam engines of locomotives and boats. For this he obtained his first patent, "Improvement in Lubricators for Steam-Engines" (U.S. Patent 129,843 ) on July 23rd, 1872. Similar automatic oilers had been patented previously; one is the displacement lubricator which had already attained widespread use and whose technological descendants continued to be widely used into the 20th ... more

  • George E. Alcorn Jr.
    Born: March 22, 1940
    Invention: Radio Frequency Mass Spectrome

    George Edward Alcorn, Jr. was born on March 22, 1940, to George and Arletta Dixon Alcorn. His father was an auto mechanic who sacrificed so Alcorn and his brother could get an education. Alcorn attended Occidental College in Pasadena, California, where he maintained an excellent academic record while earning eight letters in baseball and football. Alcorn graduated with a B.A. in physics in 1962, and in 1963 he completed a master's degree in nuclear physics from Howard University. During the summers of 1962 and 1963, Alcorn worked as a research engineer for the Space Division of North American Rockwell, computing ... more

  • Lewis H. Latimer
    Born: Sept 4, 1848 – Dec 11, 1928
    Invention: Carbon Filement

    He was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts on September 4, 1848 as the youngest of the four children of Rebecca (1826-1848) and George Latimer (July 4, 1818 [2] -c.1880). George Latimer had been the slave of James B. Gray of Virginia. George Latimer ran away to freedom in Boston, Massachusetts in October, 1842, along with his wife Rebecca, who had been the slave of another man. When Gray, the owner, appeared in Boston to take them back to Virginia, it became a noted case in the movement for abolition of slavery, gaining the involvement of such abolitionists as William Lloyd Garrison. ... more