Page 13 - Desert Oracle Nov 2018

In 1952, Bessie Blount boarded a plane from New

York to France to give away her lifeʼs work. The 38-year-old inventor

planned to hand over to the French military, free of charge, an

extraordinary technology that would change lives for disabled

veterans of the Second World War: an automatic feeding device. To
use it, a person only needed to bite down on a switch, which would

deliver a mouthful of food through a spoon-shaped tube.

When asked nearly 60 years later why she had simply given away

such a valuable invention, she made it clear that her aim wasnʼt
money or notoriety—it was making a point about the abilities and

contributions of black women. “Forget me,” she said. “Itʼs what we

have contributed to humanity—that as a black female we can do

more than nurse their babies and clean their toilets.”

Forget her, however, we cannot. For the second half of her answer

has far eclipsed the first: the innovations Blount pioneered on behalf

of humanity have marked her indelibly in the historical record. In her

long life—she lived to be 95 years old—Blount was a lot of things:

nurse, physical therapist, even forensic handwriting expert. But more
than anything else, she was an inventor. She dreamed up assistive

technologies for people with disabilities, and she constantly

reinvented herself, teaching herself how to build new doors when

others were closed to her.

Blount was born in Hickory, Virginia in 1914 to George Woodward and
Mary Elizabeth Griffin, who had set deep roots in Norfolk. Though a

generation apart, both Mary and Bessie attended the same one-room

schoolhouse and chapel, Diggs Chapel Elementary School.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/woman-who-made…edium=email&utm_term=0_f5693aed98-a1a5a8d517-114324049