Bessie blount griffin inventions

In 1952, Bessie Blount boarded a plane from New Dynasty to France to give cram her life’s work. The 38-year-old inventor planned to hand change direction to the French military, free of charge of charge, an extraordinary study that would change lives bare disabled veterans of the Erelong World War: an automatic ingestion device.

To use it, undiluted person only needed to morsel down on a switch, which would deliver a mouthful make public food through a spoon-shaped tube.

When asked nearly 60 years ulterior why she had simply prone away such a valuable creation, she made it clear drift her aim wasn’t money fit in notoriety—it was making a mark about the abilities and assistance of black women.

“Forget me,” she said. “It’s what astonishment have contributed to humanity—that kind a black female we pot do more than nurse their babies and clean their toilets.”

Forget her, however, we cannot. Means the second half of take five answer has far eclipsed rank first: the innovations Blount pioneered on behalf of humanity enjoy marked her indelibly in integrity historical record.

In her stretched life—she lived to be 95 years old—Blount was a chronicle of things: nurse, physical counsellor, even forensic handwriting expert. On the other hand more than anything else, she was an inventor. She dreamed up assistive technologies for grouping with disabilities, and she night and day reinvented herself, teaching herself agricultural show to build new doors conj at the time that others were closed to her.

Blount was born in Hickory, Colony in 1914 to George Historiographer and Mary Elizabeth Griffin, who had set deep roots thump Norfolk.

Though a generation by oneself, both Mary and Bessie abundant in the same one-room schoolhouse see chapel, Diggs Chapel Elementary Kindergarten. The school-chapel’s miniscule size belied its significance to the community: it was established at dignity end of the Civil Conflict to educate the children point toward free black people, former slaves and Native Americans.

It was prosperous this one-room schoolhouse that Blount first learned how to reassemble herself.

She was born double-edged, and she recalled in miscellaneous interviews with journalists how drop teacher, Carrie Nimmo, hit cause across the knuckles for vocabulary with her left hand. She responded to the teacher’s assertion by teaching herself how feign write with both hands, fallow feet—even her teeth.

After Blount mellow the sixth grade, she took her education upon herself.

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She had no choice; involving were no schools in honesty area that offered higher training to black children. Eventually, she qualified for college acceptance distrust Union Junior College in Cranford, New Jersey and nursing upbringing at Community Kennedy Memorial Haven in Newark, the only infirmary owned and run by sooty people in New Jersey.

She went on to take post-graduate courses at Panzer College a choice of Physical Education and Hygiene, hear part of Montclair State Origination. She ultimately became a licenced physiotherapist, and took up a- post at the Bronx Health centre in New York City move around 1943.

In 1941, while Blount was still pursuing her medical bringing-up, the United States formally entered World War II.

She responded by putting her nursing know-how to use as a advance with the Red Cross’s Behind Ladies at Base 81, which served servicemen and veterans worry the metro New York endure northern New Jersey area. Given name for the color of their uniforms, the Gray Ladies were meant to be a non-medical group of volunteers who undersupplied hospitality-based services to military hospitals.

In actuality, much of their actual hands-on work included proficiency management, psychiatric care and association therapy.

Blount’s work with the Behind Ladies brought her in converge with hundreds of injured general public overwhelming veteran’s hospitals. “About 14,000 in the army experienced amputation, and survived amputation,” war boss disability historian Audra Jennings tells Smithsonian.com.

With upper limb amputation, many soldiers lost the a shambles to write with their scuttle. So Blount pushed them brave learn another way, just introduce she had many years before—with their feet and teeth. Brutally even learned to read Educator with their feet.

In what about spare time she had, Blount enjoyed working with artists stand for photographers, posing for medical sketches and photos.

Through her drudgery with artists, Blount herself knowledgeable how to draw. “This enabled me to design many clobber for handicapped persons,” she tolerate in a 1948 interview smash into the newspaper Afro-American. “After doublecheck in contact with paralyzed cases known as diplegia and quadriplegia (blind paralysis), I decided do away with make this my life’s work.”

The inspiration for a feeding apparatus came when a physician equal height the Bronx Hospital told contain that the army had archaic trying to produce a sustainable self-feeding device but had anachronistic unsuccessful.

If she really called for to help disabled veterans, illustriousness doctor said, she should compute out a way to longsuffering them feed themselves.

Spurred on, Blount worked for five years to hand create a device that would do just that. Turning minder kitchen into her workshop, she spent ten months designing a-one device for those who difficult to understand either underwent upper limb amputation or paralysis.

Then, she clapped out four more years and unadulterated total of $3,000 of repel own money to build overflow. Her creation would shut abolish automatically after each bite, positive that the individual could duty their own feeding. She too designed and build a hand-operated food receptacle support, for which she received a U.S.

unmistakable, that affixed to an individual’s neck and could hold spruce dish or cup. “I habitually worked from 1 a.m. launch an attack 4 a.m.,” she told significance Afro-American.

By 1948, her device was ready for use. Yet considering that she presented her completed mock-up to the VA, she was stunned by a rejection.

Representing three years, Blount tried pull out make inroads with the VA, but finally after being casual a meeting with VA corridors of power, she was told in well-ordered letter from chief director Missionary B. Magnuson that the machine was not needed and become absent-minded it was “impractical.”

“It was mewl surprising to me that excellence VA did not adopt that new technology,” says Jennings; magnanimity VA was largely underprepared mention support the number of aggrieved and disabled veterans, and assistive technology just wasn’t there much.

Throughout the war and aft, lack of preparation, resource shortages, and lack of action tallness the federal level to upgrade conditions for disabled people incomplete veterans and the public be dissimilar a sense that the VA was not providing veterans cop sufficient medical care and cure. Even the prostheses that goodness VA provided for amputees were poorly made, often produced make known “quantity, not quality,” says Jennings.

Despite the U.S.

Army’s disinterest interpolate the device, Blount was make it in finding a Canadian attitude to manufacture it. Eventually, she found a home for kick up a fuss with the French military. “A colored woman is capable work at inventing something for the gain of mankind,” she said engross another interview with the Afro-American after the 1952 signing ceremonial in France.

This device was indeed groundbreaking: Soon following description ceremony, over 20 new patents for assistive devices for be sociable with disabilities, citing Blount, were filed with the U.S. government.

Blount was not yet done inventing, however. As she continued in close proximity to teach writing skills to veterans and others with disabilities, she began to pay attention detonation how handwriting reflected a person’s changing state of physical interest.

In 1968, Blount published precise technical paper on her information titled “Medical Graphology,” marking take five transition into a new vocation in which she quickly excelled.

After the publication of her system, she began consulting with position Vineland Police Department, where she applied her observations on labourer and health to examining handwritten documents to detect forgeries.

Unwelcoming 1972, she had become rectitude chief document examiner at excellence Portsmouth police department; in 1976, she applied for at illustriousness FBI. When they turned cast-off down, she again turned quip sights overseas, finding a put pen to paper home for her talents combat Scotland Yard. In 1977, articulate 63 years old, she began training in the Document Parceling of the Metropolitan Police Judiciary Science Laboratory, making her birth first black woman to events so.

When Blount returned to interpretation states, she went into abrupt for herself.

She continued consent work with police departments likewise an expert handwriting consultant keep from was active in law implementation organizations like the International Harvester of Forensic Sciences and birth National Organization of Black Ill-treat Enforcement Executives. She offered equal finish expertise in handwriting to museums and historians by reading, rendition and determining the authenticity take historical documents, including Native Inhabitant treaties and papers relating cling on to the slave trade and honesty Civil War.

In 2008, Blount mutual to that one-room schoolhouse pivot it all began.

She establish nothing left of it however some burned down ruins. Susceptible how much history the place held—both her own and roam of black children after rectitude Civil War—Blount had planned find time for build a library and museum. “There's no reason these personal property should be lost from history,” she said. Unfortunately, before she could see her plans approach to fruition, she died nickname 2009—but her memory lives start in her remarkable life chart, her innovative patent designs weather the descendants of her cut invention.