‘Reclaiming Narratives’ is the theme for this year’s Black History Month in the UK, ensuring that historical inaccuracies are corrected and untold success stories receive the recognition they deserve. In honour of this, we’d like to share a few stories of Black engineers and innovators whose achievements inspire us.
The youngest girl to ever pass A-level computing at age 11, Dr Imafidon went on to receive a Master’s Degree in Mathematics and Computer Science at age 20 from the University of Oxford. She holds a number of honorary doctorates and was the 2022-23 President of the British Science Association.
Her experience as one of just three girls in a class of 70 Maths and Computer Science students at university was one of the main inspirations behind her move to co-found the award-winning social enterprise ‘Stemettes’. Their mission is to inspire girls, young women, and non-binary young people to pursue careers in STEAM.
Winner of the hardware trailblazer award from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and a 2019 Royal Academy of Engineering Africa Prize finalist, Roy Allela of Kenya invented Sign-IO. It combines a mobile app with smart gloves to translate sign language into speech in real time.
Allela’s inspiration came from his young niece, who was born deaf and struggled to communicate with other family members. Sign-IO works through embedded hardware in the gloves that capture movement and transfer it back to the mobile app by Bluetooth. The app then produces audio speech, which users can adjust according to language, gender and pitch. With an accuracy rate over 90%, Sign-IO is an example of how assistive technology can improve people’s lives.
Born in 1852 in what was then Dutch Guyana (now Suriname), Matzeliger had an interest in machines from an early age. At 19 he immigrated to the US where he found work in a shoe factory. At the time, the soles of shoes had to be attached to the upper part by hand, meaning that even a skilled worker could only make fifty pairs a day.
Matzeliger revolutionised the industry by inventing a machine that automated this process, increasing the pairs produced per day to as many as seven hundred. This resulted in more affordable shoes and increased wages for labourers. Tragically, Matzeliger died at age 36 of tuberculosis and due to his race was only recently recognised for his achievement, which was later acknowledged as one of New England’s most important inventions.
Walker was born in Louisiana in 1867 and was orphaned at a young age. Despite her difficult start in life, she went on to become the first female self-made millionaire in the U.S. She owed her success to the company she founded, the ‘Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company’ which provided cosmetics and hair care products for Black women. The company’s training programme for sales agents aimed to encourage Black women’s economic independence and women held many of its key management positions.
She invented a hot comb as part of her unique grooming method which promoted hair growth. In addition to being a successful entrepreneur, she’s also known for her work as a philanthropist and activist, supporting causes that benefitted Black Americans. Her legacy continued on even after her death in 1919 as her will ensured that two-thirds of her estate’s future profits were given to charity.
Dr Folayan is a chartered engineer and Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology. She has also been named one of the Top 100 Most Influential Women in Engineering by the Financial Times.
In 2007 she co-founded the Association for Black and Minority Ethnic Engineers in the UK (AFBE-UK), a not-for profit that seeks to support and inspire black and minority ethnicity people to study and pursue careers in engineering. Since their founding they have supported over 20,000 people who are seeking to work in engineering and related fields.
Nigerian-American engineer Ijemma Onwuzulike is passionate about both technology and languages, having studied Japanese, Literature and Computer Science at Dartmouth College. Driven by a mission to make Igbo more accessible to people in the Nigerian diaspora and beyond, she invented the first Igbo voice-to-text AI model known as IgboSpeech.
Her journey started with the development of the Igbo API which serves as a digital dictionary and enables applications like the generation of subtitles and transcription services. It also serves as the foundation for Nkowa Okwu, an Igbo language learning platform also founded by Onwuzulike.
Further learning and resources
The lack of diversity in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) has been a long-standing challenge. Following the publication in 2021 of two reports highlighting the inequalities in UK STEM higher education, the president of the Royal Society said, “Our reports show that Black people are more likely to drop out of science at all points of the career path. It is time that the whole science community comes together to find out why and put it right.”
This is why it’s important to recognise the contributions that Black people have made in STEM fields like engineering, ensuring that the untold or underappreciated success stories of the past are celebrated and the talented individuals with the potential for impact today are supported. We’ve collected some excellent resources below for more learning that we hope you will enjoy.
Reading:
- The Royal Society, ‘Ethnicity in STEM academic communities – reports commissioned by the Royal Society’.
- Black History Month UK, stories in Science and Medicine.
- noirpress, Crafting a Liberated Black Future.
- Cecile Blanc, ‘Where are the Black inventors of the Industrial Revolution?’
Organisations & Events:
- Black Tech Fest 2024 (10 October in London)
Building a diverse network is important to us. Check out our Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Framework to learn more and sign up for free as a pro² member today. Make your voice heard in the effort to democratise digital device production.
Photo credits:
Dr Anne-Marie Imafidon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne-Marie_Imafidon
Roy Allela: permission to use photo given by Mr Allela.
Jan Ernst Matzeliger: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Ernst_Matzeliger
Madam C. J. Walker: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madam_C._J._Walker
Dr Nike Folayan: https://twitter.com/nikefolayan