Sarah Elisabeth Goode (1855 – April 8, 1905) was an American entrepreneur and inventor. She was the second known African-American woman to receive a

United States patent Under United States law, a patent is a right granted to the inventor of a (1) process, machine, article of manufacture, or composition of matter, (2) that is new, useful, and non-obvious. A patent is the right to exclude others, for a limited ...

, which she received in 1885.

Biography

Born in 1855 in Toledo, Ohio to Oliver and Harriet Jacobs, Goode was originally named as Sarah Elisabeth Jacobs. Little is known about Goode’s early life but it is believe that in 1870, Goode’s family moved to Chicago, Illinois where she married Archibald Goode and had children with him. Archibald considered himself as a stair builder and an upholster and he and Sarah opened a furniture store.

Invention of folding bed

Most customers of Goode's furniture store were working-class people that lived in small apartments that couldn’t fit a lot of furniture, including beds. As well as this, at the time of her invention, New York City passed a law that restricted buildings to be under 80 feet.

Tenement A tenement is a type of building shared by multiple dwellings, typically with flats or apartments on each floor and with shared entrance stairway access. They are common on the British Isles, particularly in Scotland. In the medieval Old Town, i ...

buildings were also restricted to footprints of 25 feet by 100 feet. As Goode heard this problem from her customers in Chicago, she set out to help Chicago apartment dwellers with limited space in their apartments. Goode invented a folding bed that would become the precursor to the Murphy Bed - a hide-away bed. It was a cabinet bed which folded into a roll-top desk which had compartments for writing supplies and stationery. Her goal for the innovation was to balance the weight of the folding of the bed so it could be easily lifted up and held in its place and also provided supplementary support to the center of the bed when it was unfolded. In 1885, for her invention of the folding bed, Goode received a patent as the first African American in the United States. The patent was for a folding bed that would go on to become the modern-day murphy bed. File:Sarahgoodbed2.gif, Patent issuded a canbinetbed for peoples homes and needs

Legacy

Sarah Elisabeth Goode died in Chicago on April 18, 1905. In 2012, the Sarah E. Goods STEM Academy, a science and math based school! was opened in south Chicago to honor her contributions to the world. The school emphasizes on science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) to help prepare students in their future careers. It is part of the

Chicago Public Schools Chicago Public Schools (CPS), officially classified as City of Chicago School District #299 for funding and districting reasons, in Chicago, Illinois, is the third-largest school district in the United States, after New York and Los Angeles. ...

Urban Model High School (UMHS) Sarah E. Goode STEM Academy is also a P-TECH school which stands for Pathways in Technology Early College High School. Not only does P-TECH connect high school students to employment opportunities in promising fields, it also offers them the chance to take college courses while in high school and to earn credits toward both—a concept called dual enrollment.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Goode, Sarah E. 19th-century American inventors 1855 births 1905 deaths African-American inventors Women inventors People from Toledo, Ohio Businesspeople from Chicago 20th-century African-American women 20th-century African-American people 19th-century African-American women 19th-century American businesswomen 19th-century American businesspeople African-American women in business 19th-century American merchants