We’re celebrating National Inventors Day on February 11. We invented portable folding table risers. Not to toot our own horn or anything, but we are the #1 seller of folding table risers on Amazon. (Toot toot!)
But there are other inventors we’d like to highlight today. All but one are also Black inventors… but we had to give a shout-out to the inventors of the folding table, without which we wouldn’t have a business!
Boris Cohen and Joseph Pucci
You probably don’t spend a lot of time thinking about your folding table if you have one, and it may seem like they’ve been around forever. Yet Cohen and Pucci were the first to patent a foldable table that looks a lot like the ones we use today – and they did it in 1951.
George Crum
If you’ve ever eaten your way through an entire bag of chips, you can thank (or blame) Mr. Crum. He’s credited with creating the potato chip in 1853, when a customer at his restaurant complained the fried potatoes were too thick.
Granville T. Woods
A prolific inventor, Mr. Woods owned about 60 patents, many of them involved in the railroad business. In addition to patenting the induction telegraph, which allowed trains to communicate with each other, he also created the first electric railway.
George Washington Carver
He wasn’t just a peanut man, he conducted experiments on sweet potatoes and peanuts to try to increase their profitability. He developed a number of products from these crops, including soap, inks, dyes, synthetic rubber, and cosmetics.
Percy Lavon Julian
A chemist like Mr. Carver, his experimental crop was soybeans. Among other discoveries, he patented a drug that treats glaucoma.
Garret Morgan
Do you slow down or speed up when you see a yellow light? (You’re supposed to slow down, FYI!) Mr. Morgan patented the traffic light to include the yellow signal, instead of just red and green.
Mark Dean
A more recent inventor, Mr. Dean co-invented IBM’s original PC, and also the color monitors for PCs. (If you’re of a certain age, you might remember the dark screens with green characters.) He also invented the technology that lets your mouse, keyboard, and printer talk to your computer.
Lonnie Johnson
If you have fond memories of running around your backyard with a water gun, you probably have Mr. Johnson to thank. He patented the original Super Soaker!
If you noticed today’s article is all dudes, don’t worry: the female Black inventors are headed your way next week!
In the meantime, if you’re the beneficiary of Cohen and Pucci’s folding table technology, head on over to our online store to find our complete product line of folding table risers so you can stand at them comfortably.
Lift Your TableⓇ … SAVE YOUR BACK!
