Chelsea History, part 2 of 6. Part 1: the Winnisimmet Ferry.
Lewis Howard Latimer was born in Chelsea on September 4, 1848. His parents, George and Rebecca Latimer, had escaped slavery in Virginia six years earlier, and before their son was born their names were known across Massachusetts.
The case that changed state law
George and Rebecca Latimer ran from Norfolk, Virginia on October 4, 1842, and reached Boston. On October 20 George was arrested on the claim of the man who said he owned him, and Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw of the state’s highest court refused to free him. The arrest set off one of the largest petition drives of the era. A petition to the Massachusetts Legislature asking that state officers and state jails never again be used to hold people accused of escaping slavery carried 64,526 signatures and, by one count, weighed 150 pounds when it was delivered on February 17, 1843. George’s freedom was bought for $400 in the meantime, and in 1843 the Legislature passed what became known as the Latimer Law, barring Massachusetts officials from helping to detain fugitives and closing state facilities to the practice.
The family settled in Chelsea, and that is where their son was born.
A self-taught draftsman
Lewis Latimer enlisted in the Union Navy in 1864, at 16, and served aboard the USS Massasoit until the summer of 1865. Back in Boston he took a job as an office boy at a patent law firm, Crosby Halstead and Gould, for $3 a week. With no formal education, according to the Lewis H. Latimer House museum in Queens, he taught himself mechanical drawing by watching the firm’s draftsmen, and the firm made him its head draftsman.
In 1876 Alexander Graham Bell hired him to draw the figures for the telephone patent application. The Latimer House calls those drawings crucial to securing the patent.
The light bulb
Latimer moved to Bridgeport, Connecticut, and then to New York to work for the United States Electric Lighting Company, the firm of Hiram Maxim, one of Thomas Edison’s rivals. On January 17, 1882 he received U.S. Patent No. 252,386 for a “Process of Manufacturing Carbons,” a better way to make the carbon filaments that glow inside an incandescent bulb, which he assigned to the company. He also helped install public electric lighting in New York, Philadelphia, Montreal and London.
In 1884 the Edison Electric Light Company hired him as a draftsman and an expert witness in the patent fights over who owned the electric light. In 1890 he published one of the first books on the subject, Incandescent Electric Lighting, and in 1918 he was admitted to the Edison Pioneers, the association of people who had worked with Edison in the early years. He was its first member of color.
Chelsea’s son
Latimer also wrote poetry, taught English and mechanical drawing to immigrants at the Henry Street Settlement in New York, and was active in civil rights causes. He died in Flushing, Queens on December 11, 1928, at 80. His house there is now a museum.
He is one of the most consequential people ever born in Chelsea, and his story starts with his parents’ flight to Massachusetts and the 64,526 people who signed their names to keep them free. The site’s older Lewis Latimer page lists his patents.
Next in the series: the Palm Sunday fire of April 12, 1908, which destroyed 2,822 buildings in a single day.