He attended school through sixth grade and was largely self-taught. His father was the son of Confederate General John Hunt Morgan and an enslaved Black woman, Sandra says, and Morgan’s mother was Black, which meant the inventor was fully subject to racism. “It was boiling hot, and he saw the elephants stick their trunks out of the tent to get fresh air.”īut Morgan’s brilliant observation, and the simple but practical device that resulted from it, proved difficult to sell. These animals, in fact, seem to have fired up Morgan’s imagination: “As I understand it, he took inspiration from elephants at the circus,” Sandra says. It diverged at tailbone level into two hoses that snaked up either side of the wearer’s rib cage and below the underarms, finally entering the mask (a hood resembling a beekeeper’s helmet) like serpentine walrus tusks.įrom behind, the system resembled a “Y,” and its dangling intake tube was reminiscent of an elephant’s trunk. So, he designed his device to draw air through a long tube that hung near the ground like a tail. Morgan knew carbon monoxide tends to linger at roughly the level of a standing person’s head, whereas cleaner air hovers closer to the feet. Credit: Western Reserve Historical Society You’re basically suffocating from the inside, at the cellular level.” Cover of an advertising pamphlet showing Morgan’s invention, the national safety hood and smoke protector, circa 1914. But when they are bound by carbon monoxide, oxygen isn’t getting to your muscles, tissues, organs and brain. Blood cells need to release oxygen to the body. Carbon monoxide is very attracted to hemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying protein in our red blood cells, and attaches to the red blood cells much easier than oxygen. “Pulmonary complications following smoke inhalation account for about 77 percent of fire-related deaths,” says Sumita Khatri, a pulmonologist at Cleveland Clinic, “and it’s mostly from carbon monoxide poisoning. He attacked a problem that had stymied inventors for years: smoke inhalation. The incident put the inadequacy of fire codes and safety equipment on national display, and Morgan, who had himself once worked in Cleveland’s booming garment industry, decided to try his hand at an effective mask. A fire enveloped New York’s Triangle Shirtwaist Company on March 25, 1911, killing 146 garment workers-most of them young female immigrants who were locked in the factory. Morgan’s invention was born out of tragedy. “They threw a bunch of gas masks in the car-remember, they were selling these things-and in their pajamas, drove down to the lakefront.” Safely through the smoke and fumes “He rustled his brother Frank,” says the inventor’s granddaughter, Sandra Morgan. Morgan-a local inventor who called himself “the Black Edison”-and the gas mask he had patented two years earlier. Some 11 hours later, desperate to save anyone still alive, the Cleveland Police turned to Garrett A. But they lacked proper safety equipment for the smoke and fumes 11 of the 18 rescuers died. Two rescue parties entered the tunnel searching for survivors. When the dust settled, 11 tunnel workers were dead. The blast left twisted conduit pipes littering the tunnel floor and tore up railroad tracks inside the corridor, with noxious smoke curling off the rubble.
It happened during work on Cleveland’s newest waterworks tunnel, a 10-foot-wide underwater artery designed to pull in water from about five miles out, beyond the city’s polluted shoreline.
Just before midnight at the close of a hot summer day in 1916, a natural gas pocket exploded 120 feet beneath the waves of Lake Erie.
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