Dr. George Washington Carver was an American scientist, educator and inventor. Photo courtesy National Archives and Records Administration.

Invented printer’s ink as one of the many ways he found to make legumes profitable. Most of today’s oil-based printer ink uses linseed or soybean oil as a solvent to combine pigments, and dries through evaporation.

Carver was born into slavery and became one of the most prominent botanists and inventors of his time. He was accepted into Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa, where he said “the kind of people at Simpson College made me believe I was a human being.” Before that, Highland College in Kansas had been impressed enough by his application essay to grant him a full scholarship, then turned him away when he arrived because they had not known he was Black.

His art mentor, Etta Budd, encouraged him to pursue botany after noticing his unusual attention to detail in his paintings of plants and flowers. Iowa State Agricultural College, now Iowa State University, was so impressed by his study of common fungal infections in soybean plants that they asked him to join the faculty while he worked on his master’s degree.

Holds three of the nine patents for the original IBM personal computer, along with many others from his IBM career. He was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1997 for US Patent 4,528,626, for a microcomputer system with bus control means for peripheral processing devices. Dean also managed the team that created the one-gigahertz processor chip.

He graduated with straight A’s from Jefferson City High School, then graduated at the top of his class at the University of Tennessee in 1979, where he studied engineering. He went on to earn a master’s degree and a doctorate from Stanford University.

He holds the most patents for the personal computer, from the first color PC monitor to the first gigahertz chip. He helped launch the personal computer age by developing the Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) systems bus, which allowed peripheral devices like disk drives, printers and monitors to be plugged directly into computers. The result was more efficiency and better integration.

“Black History Month Profile: Mark Dean.” YouTube, uploaded by Entertain_DC, 5 February 2016.

Clatonia Joaquin Dorticus.

Dorticus’s photo washing machine. Bellis, Mary. “Clatonia Joaquin Dorticus.” ThoughtCo, 3 January 2021.

Invented an improved washing machine for photographs and negatives, patent number 537,968. Photographs and negatives need to be soaked in chemical baths during development, to prevent bleaching and staining from residual chemicals and to prevent overwashing.

Dorticus was born in Cuba to a Spanish father and a Cuban mother. He married Mary Fredenburgh and they had two children. He was living in Newton, New Jersey in 1895, the year his patents were published. He died in 1903 at the age of 39.

Invented the ultraviolet camera, or spectrograph, which gave NASA crucial information about the Earth’s atmosphere and its pollutant concentrations. It was used on 21 April 1972 during the Apollo 16 flight.

The invention proved the existence of hydrogen in interstellar space and captured UV images of 550 stars, galaxies and nebulae.

Carruthers’s father encouraged his early interest in science. At ten he built his own telescope from cardboard tubes and mail-order lenses, bought with money he earned as a delivery boy. In high school he won three awards at Chicago science fairs, including first prize for a telescope he designed and built himself.

For the spectrograph he was awarded NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal. In the 1980s one of his inventions captured a UV image of Halley’s Comet, and his later work included the camera used on a 1991 Space Shuttle mission.

George R. Carruthers with President Barack Obama, 1 February 2013. Image by Brendan Hoffman / Getty Images North America.

Earth photographed by Carruthers’s Far Ultraviolet Camera. NASA.