Wally Amos lived in Tallahassee, Florida until he was twelve. When his parents divorced, he then moved to Manhattan, New York with his aunt, where he enrolled at the Food Trades Vocational High School. He showed interest in cooking from a very young age, and it was from his aunt, who would bake cookies for him, that Amos would develop his chocolate chip cookies recipe. Amos would improve on his aunt's recipe, which was already common because it included several ingredients not generally associated with chocolate chip cookies. Shortly before graduation, Amos dropped out of high school to join the United ... » read more

He invented the first ever shoe making machine. It could make up to 700 hundred pairs of shoes in a ten hour work day. Humans could only make 50. He first used cigar boxes and metal scraps to create his machine, but everyone always laughed at his idea. When it did work everyone wanted to buy the machine from him, but he said no. Finally in 1883 he got a patent to build his machine. He needed money to build the machine so he didn't live healthily in order to save up money and because of that he died in 1889 .. more

Sarah Breedlove, who later became known as Madam C. J. Walker, was born into a former-slave family to parents Owen and Minerva Breedlove. She had one older sister, Louvenia and brothers Alexander, James, Solomon and Owen, Jr. Her parents had been slaves on Robert W. Burney's Madison Parish farm which was a battle-staging area during the Civil War for General Ulysses S. Grant and his Union troops. She became an orphan at age 7 when her parents died during an epidemic of yellow fever. To escape the epidemic and failing cotton crops, the ten year old Sarah and her sister ... more

Frederick Jones was born in in Covington, Kentucky near Cincinnati, Ohio on on May 17, 1893. He was a trained mechanic, a skill he learned doing military service in France during World War. His mastery of electronic devices was largely self-taught, through work experience and the inventing process.
Frederick McKinley Jones was granted more than 40 patents in the field of refrigeration. Frederick Jones' inspiration for the refrigeration unit was a conversation with a truck driver who had lost a shipment of chickens because the trip took too long and the truck's storage compartment overheated. Frederick Jones also developed an air-conditioning ... more

Garrett A. Morgan was born on March 4, 1877 in Paris, Kentucky to former slaves Sydney Morgan and Elizabeth (Reed) Morgan.[2] The seventh of eleven children, he spent his childhood attending school and working with his brothers and sisters on the family farm. When he was fourteen, he moved north to Cincinnati, Ohio, in search of employment.[2] Morgan spent most of his teenage years working as a handyman for a wealthy Cincinnati landowner. Like many African-Americans of his day, Morgan had to quit school at a young age, in order to work. However, the teen-aged Morgan hired his own tutor, and ... more