Enlightened Free Thinking Nubian Kings And Queens

Alfred L. Cralle was an African American businessman and inventor who was best known for inventing the ice cream scoop in 1897. Cralle was born on September 4, 1866, in Kenbridge, Lunenburg County, Virginia, just after the end of the American, Civil War. He attended local schools and worked for his father in the carpentry trade as a young man. During that period, he also became interested in mechanics.  Cralle was sent to Washington D.C. where he attended Wayland Seminary, a branch of the National Theological Institute, one of a number of schools founded by the American Baptist Home Mission Society immediately after the Civil War to help educate newly freed African Americans. After attending the school for a few years, Cralle moved to Pittsburgh,Pennsylvania, where he worked as a porter at a drugstore and at a hotel. While working at the hotel, he developed the idea of the ice cream scoop.  It came to him when he noticed ice cream servers having difficulty trying to ge...

Born a slave on a plantation near Mt. Pinson, Andrew Jackson Beard had no formal education. He learned instead how to care for animals, make plants grow, and fix things when they broke. Because he was gifted with imagination and intelligence, young Andrew excelled at all these tasks, especially the last. As a grown man working for the railroad, Beard created gadgets that solved on-the-job problems. His experiments soon led to an idea that was worth protecting with a patent. Since Beard could not read or write, he turned to Birmingham's mayor, Melville Drennen. With Drennen's help, Beard completed the necessary forms, and on July 5, 1892, he was granted a patent on a rotary engine. When he later saw a man lose an arm while trying to couple two rail cars together, he went to work on his most famous and profitable invention, the automatic car-coupling device. This invention not only saved lives and limbs of railroad workers around the world, it also made Beard a rich man; h...