Martin HenryIN BLACK History month my interests in Science and Technology and History have pleasantly intersected in some material on a string of inventions by Black people, inventions which have significantly shaped the modern world.
As everyone knows by this, I would be happiest in a colour-blind, non-racial world. But race is there colouring the human perspective on everything. Years ago I heard the story of Dr. Charles Drew who died after an automobile accident for want of a blood transfusion. Dr. Drew was denied access to a whites-only hospital in the US South. This was the man who made blood transfusion possible by developing techniques for preventing the clotting of blood and for preservation and storage of liquid blood!
Motorised transport owes a great deal to the inventive genius of Black persons. Mr. McKoy, from whose work we have derived the phrase "the real McKoy", developed devices which made the railway commercially possible as a safe mass transit system. Joseph Gammel greatly improved the internal combustion engine, and Robert Spikes gave the world the automatic gear shift. Another Black person, Garrett Morgan invented the traffic light (and the gas mask).
BALANCED SCHOLARSHIP
On the domestic scene, basic things like the mop, the dustpan, the clothes dryer, the refrigerator, the lawn mower and the ironing board are the products of black inventiveness. John Love, a Black man, created the pencil sharpener, William Purvis gave the world the fountain pen, and the typewriter came from Lee Burridge. The elevator, which has made high-rises possible, was developed by Alexander Miles a Black person. The mailbox, the postmark and cancelling machine are Black creations.
The list is long. Benjamin Banneker built the first striking clock in colonial America. George Washington Carver developed some 300 products from peanut alone. A black woman, Grace Murray Hopper, created the COBOL computer programme. And World War II physical therapist Bessie Blount, who invented an electric device by which amputees could feed themselves, declared, "a black woman can invent something for the benefit of humankind".
The documentation is useful to offset the stereotype of Black prowess in sports and entertainment, but little else. But we should avoid making 'Black History' a mere reaction to the negation of 'White History.' See we are people too, and we have done significant things too. That's a given, not something to strenuously prove.
The local universities are now insisting that all their students take core or foundation courses in the principles of Science and Technology as an integral part of their general education. One of the exercises in the UTech S&T course, which was developed largely by Paul Ward in the School of Engineering, is to ask students to research the contributions of one black or female scientist, technologist or inventor. This is an excellent and eye-opening exercise for students. Too often for them, unconsciously, knowledge is foreign and white -- certainly S&T knowledge and capabilities.
I was thumbing the published Elsa Goviea Memorial Lectures the other day. One of the well-earned tributes paid to this distinguished UWI historian in whose honour that annual lecture series is named, was that she laboured to give West Indians their own history. And she did this with objective rigour and balanced scholarship in the finest tradition of historiography. The region has been fortunate that in the formative years of independent nations we have had a number of storytellers more committed to unearthing what happened than to feel good 'heroic' history. The writers and repeaters of heroic history have had the better press in more recent times.
One of the big gaps in Jamaican and Caribbean History has been in our technological and scientific history. A few works are now emerging. This column has previously discussed, Discovering the Future: The Emergence, Development and Future of Science and Technology in Jamaica by Henry Lowe, Yvonne Brown and Ken Magnus. Last year, Senator Anthony Johnson, backed by the resurrected Farquharson Institute of Public Affairs and the Environmental Foundation of Jamaica, put out under his own Teejay label the second in his series on Great Jamaicans, a booklet on seven Jamaican scientists. Happily two of the seven are women. Nineteen "Other Jamaican World Class Scientists" are listed in an appendix.
Johnson, who has the penchant of a first class sleuth for digging up little known facts which others walk over, tells us about the development of the Gros Michel banana by Francois Pouyat at Bel Air in St Andrew in 1836. The House of Assembly awarded Pouyat a special prize for his work and the Gros Michel went on to become the foundation fruit of the international banana industry out of Port Antonio in 1870.
FOLK TECHNOLOGY
The ortanique was developed by Charles Jackson of Glinock, St Elizabeth, mid-20th century. Historian Johnson sets out to demonstrate that "Jamaica has made a significant contribution to the world of formal science."
For Black History Month, the Self-Access Communication Learning Centre at the University of Technology has chosen, rather unusually, to display the work of two Jamaican scientists, coincidentally both originating from Portland: the pharmacologist Manley West and the cattle breeder, Thomas Lecky. West is from the eastern town of Boston, the home of the famous jerk pork. Jamaican jerk seasoning, a folk technology, is now internationally marketed by Walkerswood Enterprise and by others.
We know the struggles of Manley West and his research partner Dr. Albert Lockhart to commercially develop canasol and asmasol from ganja. These patriots were determined to retain patent rights within Jamaica for Jamaica. The absence of venture capital financing to move innovations and inventions to market is a serious handicap to applying local S&T to development.
I don't know how the NetServ issue is going to turn out for Industry, Commerce and Technology Minister, Philip Paulwell, but the Minister has my sympathies for his willingness to provide what is essentially venture capital from the public purse. If the Government has to jump-start innovative ideas with public money, so be it. Just act sensibly and apply reasonable precaution going in. Few of the Black inventors we were talking about earlier made a dollar from their inventions. They were excluded from access to financing and recognition by a racist system. Our people may be equally marginalised by lack of support.
Martin Henry is a communications consultant.
