Garrett Morgan: Inventor of the Gas Mask and Traffic Signal

Garrett Morgan was born in Paris, Kentucky, to parents who had been enslaved. He left home as a teenager and eventually settled in Cleveland, Ohio, working repairs on sewing machines — hands-on experience that shaped a lifelong instinct for figuring out how machines worked and where they failed.

In the years before World War I, Morgan developed a safety hood, a forerunner of the modern gas mask, and famously used it himself to help rescue trapped workers after a tunnel explosion beneath Lake Erie. He later turned that same problem-solving instinct to the streets: his early traffic signal introduced a stop-in-all-directions position, bringing order to intersections where cars, horse-drawn buggies, and pedestrians all competed for the same space.

What he left behind

• Developed a protective safety hood, a forerunner of the modern gas mask
• Used his invention to rescue trapped workers after a Lake Erie tunnel explosion
• Invented an early traffic signal featuring a stop-in-all-directions position, improving traffic control and pedestrian safety
• Founded a newspaper and supported educational institutions as part of his broader civic advocacy

Morgan's inventions answered the hazards of a rapidly industrializing, increasingly motorized America — dangerous job sites and chaotic city streets alike.

What most bios leave out

Selling the safety hood meant working around prejudice that had nothing to do with whether the device worked. Outside Ohio, especially in the South, Morgan hired a white actor to pose as the hood's inventor at sales demonstrations while he himself performed in disguise as "Big Chief Mason," a fictional Native American character, stepping into a tent full of toxic smoke to show the mask worked. It was a theatrical workaround for a simple problem: buyers who wouldn't purchase a safety device once they learned a Black man had invented it.

That same bias followed him after the Lake Erie tunnel rescue. Morgan and his brother Frank raced to the scene in their pajamas and helped bring out survivors and recovered bodies using the safety hoods. Afterward, the City of Cleveland awarded medals to the white rescue workers involved — and left Garrett and Frank Morgan out of the official recognition entirely, despite their central role. It took a separate honor from the International Association of Fire Engineers, who gave Morgan a gold medal the following year, to formally credit the invention that had actually saved the men.

About this set

Morgan's card is one of six in Lightbearers, part of the Continuum: Past | Present | Becoming postcard series. Lightbearers gathers inventors and scientists whose work quite literally changed how people lived, worked, and moved through the world.

Shop Garrett Morgan's postcard pack or browse the full Continuum collection.