Thomas Jennings, born in 1791, is generally credited as the first African American to receive a patent in the United States, for a dry cleaning process that he patented in 1821.

Jan Ernst Matzeliger, who invented an automatic shoe lasting machine in 1883, transformed the American shoe industry even though the United Shoe Manufacturing Company that eventually commercialized his invention was never the kind of equity-sharing arrangement that would have made him wealthy from his own work.

Granville T.

Woods, sometimes called the “Black Edison,” held more than 50 patents in electrical and mechanical engineering in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and spent much of his career fighting patent disputes against larger companies.

The pattern across these cases — extraordinary inventive achievement combined with limited commercial reward and, in many cases, near-total historical obscurity — is not a coincidence.