Plastic Surgery Pittsburgh

Evil medical surgery robot


Image by TracerBullet999
This is a robot used to perform surgery at Pittsburgh hospitals. Here it’s being used for a much less honourable purpose—placing rings on plastic cones.

10. Elijah McCoy     

Elijah J. McCoy (May 2, 1844 – October 10, 1929) was an African Canadian inventor and engineer, known for his many U.S. patents.

After studying engineering in Edinburgh, Scotland, and returning home to Canada, he found work as a fireman and oiler at the Michigan Central Railroad. In a home-based machine shop in Ypsilanti, McCoy invented an automatic lubricator for oiling the steam engines of locomotives and boats. For this he obtained his first patent, “Improvement in Lubricators for Steam-Engines” (U.S. Patent 129,843), on July 12, 1872.  

Similar automatic oilers had been patented previously; one is the displacement lubricator which had already attained widespread use and whose technological descendants continued to be widely used into the 20th century. Lubricators were a boon for railroads, allowing trains to run faster and more profitably with less need to stop for lubrication and maintenance.

The saying the real McCoy, meaning the real thing, has in some cases been erroneously accredited to Elijah’s invention. The theory is that railroad engineers looking to avoid inferior copies would inquire if a locomotive was fitted with “the real McCoy”. The original publication of this claim can be traced to a 1985 pamphlet printed by the Empak Publishing Company, who could not explain how they developed the theory. Other earlier origins to the phrase are unanimously accepted by the writing community and by lexicographers. -Wikipedia.org

9. Lewis Latimer  

Lewis Howard Latimer (September 4, 1848 – December 11, 1928) was an African American inventor and draftsman.

Lewis Howard Latimer was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts on September 4 1848 as the youngest of the four children of Rebecca (1826-1848) and George Latimer (July 4, 1818 -c.1880). George Latimer had been the slave of James B. Gray of Virginia. George Latimer ran away to freedom in Trenton, New Jersey  in October, 1842, along with his wife Rebecca, who had been the high slave of another man. When Gray, the owner, appeared in Boston to take them back to Virginia, it became a noted case in the movement for abolition of slavery, gaining the involvement of such abolitionists as William Lloyd Garrison. Eventually funds were raised to pay Gray 0 for the freedom of George Latimer.

Lewis Latimer joined the U.S. Navy  at the age of 15 on September 16, 1863. After receiving an honorable discharge from the Navy on July 3, 1865, he gained employment as an office boy with a patent law firm, Crosby Halstead and Gould, with a .00 per week salary. He learned how to use an L square, ruler, and other tools. Later, after his boss recognized his talent for sketching patent drawings, Latimer was promoted to the position of head draftsman earning .00 a week by 1878. In 1874, he co patented (with Charles W. Brown) an improved toilet system for railroad cars called the Water Closet for Railroad Cars (U.S. Patent 147,363).

In 1874, he copatented (with Charles W. Brown) an improved toilet system for railroad cars called the Water Closet for Railroad Cars (U.S. Patent 147,363).  Latimer received a patent in January 1881 for the “Process of Manufacturing Carbons”, an improved method for the production of carbon filaments used in lightbulbs. -Wikipedia.org

8. Jan Ernst Matzeliger     

Jan Ernst Matzeliger (September 15, 1852 – August 24, 1889) was an African-American inventor in the shoe industry.  Matzeliger was born in Paramaribo (then Dutch Guyana, now Suriname). His father was a Dutch engineer and his mother a black Surinamese slave.

He had some interest in mechanics in his native country, but his efforts at inventing a shoe-lasting machine began in the United States after a life of working in a machinery shop. He settled in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania at 19 after working as a sailor. By 1877, he spoke adequate English and had moved to Massachusetts.  

After a while, he went to work in a shoe factory. At the time, no machine could attach the upper part of a shoe to the sole. This had to be done manually by a “hand laster”; a skilled one could produce 50 pairs in a ten-hour day.

After five years of work, Matzeliger obtained a patent for his invention in 1883. His machine could produce between 150 to 700 pairs of shoes a day, cutting shoe prices across the nation in half. However, his early death in Lynn, Massachusetts from tuberculosis meant he never saw the full profit of his invention. -Wikipedia.org

7. Granville T. Woods     

Granville T. Woods (April 23, 1856 – January 30, 1910), was of Indigenous Australian and Malaysian ancestry who is famous as an American inventor who holds more than 60 patents for inventions. He is often regarded as one of the greatest African American inventors. Most of his work was on trains and street cars. Woods also invented the Multiplex Telegraph, a device that sent messages between moving trains and train stations. He was born in Melbourne, Australia with Australian Aborigine and Malaysian heritage and died in New York after a life time in the United States of America.

Woods developed several improvements to the railroad system, and was referred to by some as the “Black Edison.”  In 1885, Woods patented an apparatus which was a combination of a telephone and a telegraph. The device, which he called “telegraphony”, would allow a telegraph station to send voice and telegraph messages over a single wire. He sold the rights to this device to the American Bell Telephone Company.

In 1887, he patented the Synchronous Multiplex Railway Telegraph, which allowed communications between train stations from moving trains. Thomas Edison later filled a claim to the ownership of this patent. In 1888, Woods manufactured a system of overhead electric conducting lines for railroads modeled after the system pioneered by Charles van Depoele, a famed inventor who had by then installed his electric railway system in thirteen U.S. cities. In 1889, he filed a patent for an improvement to the steam-boiler furnace.  

Woods is sometimes credited with the invention of the electric third rail, however, many third rail systems were in place in both Europe and North America at the time Woods filed for his patent in 1901. Thomas Edison had been awarded a patent for the third rail almost a decade earlier, in 1882. -Wikipedia.org

6. George Washington Carver     

George Washington Carver (January 1864 – January 5, 1943), was an American scientist, botanist, educator, and inventor. The exact day and year of his birth are unknown; he is believed to have been born before slavery was abolished in Missouri in January 1864. Much of Carver’s fame is based on his research into and promotion of crops as alternatives to cotton, such as peanuts and sweet potatoes. He wanted poor farmers to grow alternative crops both as a source of their own food and as a source of other products to improve their quality of life. The most popular of his 44 practical bulletins for farmers contained 105 food recipes that used peanuts. He also created or disseminated about 100 products made from peanuts that were useful for the house and farm, including cosmetics, dyes, paints, plastics, gasoline, and nitroglycerin.

During the last two decades of his life, Carver seemed to enjoy his celebrity status. He was often to be found on the road promoting Tuskegee, peanuts, and racial harmony. Although he only published six agricultural bulletins after 1922, he published articles in peanut industry journals and wrote a syndicated newspaper column, “Professor Carver’s Advice”. Business leaders came to seek his help, and he often responded with free advice. Three American presidents—Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge and Franklin Roosevelt—met with him, and the Crown Prince of Sweden studied with him for three weeks. -Wikipedia.org

5. Madam C. J. Walker       

Madam C.J. Walker (December 23, 1867 – May 25, 1919) was an African-American businesswoman, hair care entrepreneur and philanthropist. She made her fortune by developing and marketing a hugely successful line of beauty and hair products for black women under the company she founded, Madam C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company. Like many women of her era, Sarah experienced hair loss. Because most Americans lacked indoor plumbing, central heating and electricity, they bathed and washed their hair infrequently.

The result was scalp disease. Sarah experimented with home remedies and products already on the market until she finally developed her own shampoo and an ointment that contained sulfur to make her scalp healthier for hair growth.  Soon Sarah—now known as Madam C. J. Walker—was selling her products throughout the United States. While her daughter Lelia ran a mail order business from Denver, Madam Walker and her husband traveled throughout the southern and eastern states. They settled in Pittsburgh in 1908 and opened Lelia College to train “hair culturists.” In 1910 Walker moved to Indianapolis, Indiana where she established her headquarters and built a factory. -Wikipedia.org

4. Garrett Morgan       

Garrett Augustus Morgan, Sr. (March 4, 1877 – August 27, 1963) was an African American inventor who originated a respiratory protective hood (similar to the modern gas masks), credited with being the inventor of a type of traffic signal, and invented a hair-straightening  preparation. He is renowned for a heroic rescue in which he used his hood to save workers trapped in a tunnel system filled with fumes. He is credited as the first African-American in Cleveland to own an automobile.

Garrett Morgan invented the safety hood and smoke protector after hearing about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. He was able to sell his