26 Black Inventions That Quietly Run the World

For centuries, Black innovation has powered daily life in ways that rarely receive the credit they deserve. Not because the work wasn’t groundbreaking, but because history has a habit of separating brilliance from the people who produced it.

As Urban One celebrates 100 Years of Black History, it’s worth stopping to acknowledge how many of the tools, systems, and conveniences we rely on every single day trace back to African-American inventors whose names were often left out of the mainstream narrative.

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From how we commute and communicate to how we cook, clean, and cool our homes, Black ingenuity has been quite literally embedded into the infrastructure of modern life. Some of these inventions were improvements on existing ideas. Others were solutions born out of necessity, creativity, and an insistence on making everyday life safer, easier, and more efficient.

Here are 26 Black inventions that quietly run the world and the inventors behind them:

1. Fountain Pen — William B. Purvis

Born: August 23, 1838
Died: August 10, 1914
Invented: 1890
Purvis improved the fountain pen by creating a self-filling ink tube system, making writing cleaner, more reliable, and accessible at a time when penmanship was central to education and business.

2. GPS Technology — Dr. Gladys West

Born: October 27, 1930
Died: January 17, 2026
Developed: 1970s–1980s
Dr. West’s mathematical modeling of the Earth’s shape became the foundation for modern GPS systems.