Henry Blair (1807–1860) was the second

African American African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans and Afro-Americans) are an ethnic group consisting of Americans with partial or total ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa. The term "African American" generally denotes descendants of ens ...

inventor to receive a US

patent A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of the invention."A p ...

. He was born in Glen Ross, Maryland, United States in 1807. His first invention was the Seed-Planter, patented October 14, 1834, which allowed farmers to plant more corn using less labor and in a shorter time. On August 31, 1836 he obtained a second patent for a

cotton Cotton is a soft, fluffy staple fiber that grows in a boll, or protective case, around the seeds of the cotton plants of the genus ''Gossypium'' in the mallow family Malvaceae. The fiber is almost pure cellulose, and can contain minor perce ...

planter. This invention worked by splitting the ground with two shovel-like blades which were pulled along by a horse. A wheel-driven cylinder followed behind which dropped the seed into the newly plowed ground. Blair had been a successful farmer for years and developed the inventions as a means of increasing efficiency in farming."The Black Inventor On-line Museum." Accessed December 4, 2012. http://www.blackinventor.com/pages/henry-blair.html . In the patent records, Blair is listed as a "colored man," making this identification the only one of its kind in early patent records. Blair was illiterate, therefore he signed his patents with an "x". It is said that Blair was a

freedman A freedman or freedwoman is a formerly enslaved person who has been released from slavery, usually by legal means. Historically, enslaved people were freed by manumission (granted freedom by their captor-owners), emancipation (granted freedom a ...

. At the time that his patents were granted, United States patent law allowed both freed and enslaved people to obtain patents. In 1857, this law was challenged by a slave-owner who claimed that he owned "all the fruits of the slave's labor," including his slave's inventions. This resulted in a change of the law in 1858 which stated that slaves were not citizens, and therefore could not hold patents. Blair died in 1860. In 1871, six years after the

American Civil War The American Civil War (April 12, 1861 – May 26, 1865; also known by other names) was a civil war in the United States. It was fought between the Union ("the North") and the Confederacy ("the South"), the latter formed by states th ...

ended, the law was changed to grant all men patent rights.

References

External links

The patent text and drawings for the Seed-Planter
from Today in Science.

from Today in Science. {{DEFAULTSORT:Blair, Henry 19th-century American inventors Farmers from Maryland 1860 deaths 1807 births People from Montgomery County, Maryland African-American inventors African-American history of Montgomery County, Maryland African-American farmers American farmers