Black Inventors part 2

The second inventor of our series is Andrew Jackson Beard.  Beard was born, and up until age 15, was  a slave in Alabama in 1849.  Over the years he patented a series of inventions: in 1881, he patented a plow.  A second plow was patented in 1887, and in 1892 it was a rotary engine.

In 1897, he addressed an issue that was very personal to him by making an improvement to the railroad train coupler called the Jenny coupler.  As many people did in those days, he lost a leg while manually hooking two train cars together.  With his Jenny coupler, the two cars would automatically link when they bumped each other.

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