No to Edison

Granville Woods left school around the age of ten. By 1887 he had patented the Synchronous Multiplex Railway Telegraph, a device that let moving trains talk to stations and to each other so they would stop crashing into one another. The American Catholic Tribune called him the greatest electrician in the world.

Thomas Edison disagreed, and sued him for the patent. Woods won. Edison sued him again, on a related claim. Woods won that one too.

At which point Edison, who had a sense of when a fight was over, offered Woods a position at the Edison Electric Light Company. A self-taught Black man, in the country he was living in, was offered a permanent salaried chair inside the most powerful electrical concern on earth, by the man who had just twice tried to take his work in court.

Woods said no.

Then, from outside it, he sold the company patents as a vendor. What he wanted, it turned out, was not a desk. He wanted the cheque, the credit line on the patent, and the door he could shut on his way out.

He filed roughly fifty more before he was finished.