NYS Grade 8 Practice Test 1

The Draftsman Who Drew the Light

¹In the winter of 1876, Alexander Graham Bell was in a hurry. He had invented a device that could carry the human voice along a wire, and he knew that other inventors were working on similar ideas. To protect his invention, Bell needed a patent, a legal document that describes an invention so exactly that no one else can claim it. Words alone would not be enough. The application also required precise drawings showing every part of the device and how the parts fit together. Those drawings were made by a young draftsman at a Boston patent firm, a man whose pen was steadier than almost anyone's. His name was Lewis Latimer, and he had taught himself nearly everything he knew.

²Latimer was born on September 4, 1848, in Chelsea, Massachusetts, just outside Boston. His parents, George and Rebecca Latimer, had escaped slavery in Virginia six years earlier. Soon after they reached Boston, George Latimer was arrested by a man who claimed to own him. Boston's antislavery activists protested so loudly that money was raised to buy his freedom, and the case helped persuade Massachusetts to pass a law protecting people who had escaped slavery. Lewis grew up in a family that knew freedom could not be taken for granted.

³The family had little money, and Lewis left school while still young to help support it. In 1864, at the age of sixteen, he enlisted in the Union Navy and served on a warship until the Civil War ended the following year. When he came home, he found a job as an office boy at Crosby Halstead and Gould, a Boston firm of patent lawyers. The pay was three dollars a week.

⁴An office boy ran errands, delivered letters, and kept the rooms tidy. It was not the kind of job that usually led anywhere. But the firm also employed draftsmen, the skilled workers who turned inventors' rough sketches into the careful, measured drawings the patent office demanded. Latimer watched them whenever he could. He studied how they held their pens, how they used their rulers and compasses, and how they showed a three-dimensional machine on a flat sheet of paper. Then he saved his wages, bought a secondhand set of drafting tools and a few books on drawing, and practiced at night.

⁵When he finally asked to try a real drawing, the draftsmen were doubtful. His work changed their minds. Latimer was promoted to draftsman and, over the next several years, to head draftsman. By 1872 he was earning twenty dollars a week, more than six times his starting pay. Four years later, his drawings became part of one of the most famous patents in American history: Bell's patent for the telephone, granted in March 1876.

⁶Latimer's talents did not stop at drawing other people's inventions. In 1879 he moved to Bridgeport, Connecticut, and found work in a machine shop. There he met the inventor Hiram Maxim, and in 1880 Latimer joined Maxim's United States Electric Lighting Company, which was competing with Thomas Edison to make the electric light bulb practical. Early bulbs gave off light when electricity passed through a thin thread, or filament, of carbon. The filaments were fragile and costly to make, and many broke before they ever reached a customer. During manufacturing, the filaments were heated to turn them into carbon, and this step often made them warp and crack. Latimer developed a better method: each filament was sealed inside a cardboard envelope while it was heated, which helped it keep its shape. He received a patent for the process in 1882. Stronger filaments meant bulbs that lasted longer and cost less to produce, which helped bring electric light within reach of ordinary families.

⁷His knowledge made him valuable far from the drafting table as well. Latimer helped supervise the installation of electric lighting in cities including New York, Philadelphia, and Montreal, and he traveled to London to oversee lighting work there. Electric light was so new that few workers anywhere had experience with it, and every installation was, in a sense, an experiment.

⁸In 1884, Latimer went to work for Edison's company in New York. He served as a draftsman and also as an expert in patent cases, in which companies went to court to argue over who had invented what. His sharp eye for detail and his deep knowledge of patent drawings made him a valuable witness. In 1890 he published Incandescent Electric Lighting, a book that explained how electric lighting systems worked. It was among the first books on the subject.

⁹In 1918, Latimer became a member of the Edison Pioneers, a group of people who had worked with Edison in the early years of the electric industry. He was the first person of color to join the group.

¹⁰Latimer's interests reached far beyond engineering. He gave his time to people who were just starting out, as he once had: at a settlement house in New York City, a community center that served newly arrived immigrants, he taught English and mechanical drawing. He also wrote poetry and later published a collection of his poems. He played the flute, painted portraits, and wrote plays.

¹¹Latimer spent the last part of his life in Flushing, Queens, where he lived from the early 1900s until his death in 1928 at the age of eighty. His house still stands, although it was moved from its original street, and it is now a museum devoted to his life and work.

¹²Latimer is often described as the man who helped Edison light the world, and that is true as far as it goes. But it leaves out what may be the most remarkable part of his story. Latimer did not begin with a laboratory, a degree, or a wealthy sponsor. He began with a broom, a borrowed view of other people's work, and a willingness to practice after a long day was over. The precision he developed in those night hours ended up in some of the most important inventions of his century. And once he had mastered his craft, he turned around and handed it to others.