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Benjamin Banneker was born Nov. 9, 1731, and died Oct. 9, 1806. His parents were free Blacks living near Baltimore. He was an astronomer, scientist, inventor, abolitionist and farmer.
Banneker was self-educated, with handed-down textbooks as his resources. His white grandmother taught him how to read at an early age before attending a small Quaker school for a brief time.
Dr. Shirley Jackson is an American physicist. She received her Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1973, becoming the first African-American woman to earn a doctorate at MIT in nuclear physics. Currently, Jackson is the 18th president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y.
In addition to her academic achievements, she also has an impressive list of inventions to her credit. Her experiments with theoretical physics are responsible for many telecommunications developments, including the touch-tone telephone, the portable fax, caller ID, call waiting and the fiber-optic cable.
Marie Van Brittan Brown received a patent in 1969, making her the first person to develop a patent for closed- circuit television security. Brown’s system was designed with four peepholes and a motorized camera that could slide up and down to look at each one. Her invention became the framework for the modern closed-circuit television system that is widely used for surveillance, crime prevention and traffic monitoring.