From Slave To Inventor

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; he is thought to be Jefferson County's first black millionaire.