The son of a fugitive from slavery taught himself to draw — and drew the telephone and the light bulb into the modern world.
In 1842 a man named George Latimer escaped slavery in Virginia and reached Boston with his pregnant wife, Rebecca. He was seized within weeks, and his case roused Massachusetts until supporters raised the money to buy his freedom. Six years later, in Chelsea, his son Lewis was born. The boy left school young to work, served in the Union Navy at sixteen, and then took a job as an office boy at a Boston patent-law firm, paid three dollars a week.
There he studied the draughtsmen at work and taught himself to draw in his own time — until the firm made him its head draughtsman. Within a decade his pen had drawn the patent figures for Alexander Graham Bell's telephone, and his own patent had made the carbon filament of the electric lamp cheaper and longer-lasting. The names on the lamps were Maxim and Edison. The hand behind them was his.
A life drawn to scale
The lifeline
1848
Born in Chelsea, Massachusetts, to parents who had escaped slavery in 1842
1864
Enlists at 16 as a landsman on the USS Massasoit in the Civil War
1876
Drafts the drawings for Bell's telephone patent application
1882
Patents a better process for manufacturing lamp carbons
1918
Named a charter member of the Edison Pioneers — its only Black member
1928
Dies at 80 at home in Flushing, Queens, on December 11
By the numbers
The measure of him
$3
His weekly pay as an office boy at the patent firm of Crosby & Gould
$20
His weekly pay by 1872 as the same firm's head draughtsman — self-taught
7
U.S. patents granted to him, from 1874 to 1910
1 of 28
Charter members of the Edison Pioneers in 1918 — and the only Black one
What his pen put on paper
The work
1874
His first patent, with Charles M. Brown: an improved water closet for railroad cars. U.S. 147,363
1876
The telephone drawings. He drafted the patent figures Alexander Graham Bell needed for his telephone application, filed that February.
1880
Into electric light. Hired as a draughtsman by Hiram Maxim of the U.S. Electric Lighting Company, then helped set up lighting plants and lamp works for Maxim's interests.
1882
"Process of Manufacturing Carbons." A method of forming filaments in cardboard envelopes so they baked without warping — cheaper, longer-lived lamps. U.S. 252,386
1890
Incandescent Electric Lighting. Now on Edison's staff — later as draughtsman and expert witness in patent cases — he wrote one of the first books explaining the electric lamp to the public.
1905
A book supporter — and earlier a locking rack for hats, coats and umbrellas (1896). An inventor's habit, kept to the end. U.S. 781,890
In the shadow of the bulb
Recognition
In his lifetime
Lamps and patents he worked on were sold under the Maxim and Edison names
His career was spent largely as the man behind the drawing — draughtsman, witness, engineer
The only Black member among the Edison Pioneers
Also a poet, publishing Poems of Love and Life, and a teacher of drawing and English to immigrants at the Henry Street Settlement
Today
Inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2006
His Flushing home, saved and moved in 1988, is a New York City landmark and museum
Schools in Brooklyn and an MIT invention program bear his name
A new gravestone was dedicated at his grave in Fall River, Massachusetts, in 2023
The place that kept him
Flushing, Queens
From 1903 until his death, Latimer lived in a modest frame house on Holly Avenue in Flushing with his wife, Mary, and their daughters. When the house was threatened with demolition in the 1980s, preservationists had it moved, whole, to a new lot on 137th Street — where it now opens his drawings, poems and patents to visitors.
25 yrs
He lived in the house, 1903 to 1928
1.4 mi
The distance the house was moved to save it, in 1988
1995
The year New York City designated it a landmark
"Like the light of the sun, it beautifies all things on which it shines, and is no less welcome in the palace than in the humblest home."
— Lewis H. Latimer, Incandescent Electric Lighting, 1890
