CeCe on Alice Parker

Transcript

Exactly as spoken. Tap a line to play from there.

So it is cold outside, and you walk in the house and hit the thermostat, and the whole place just gets warm. You never think about it.

But somebody had to invent that, and it was a Black woman named Alice Parker. Now mind you, this is nineteen nineteen, and back then you heated a house with a fireplace, which meant somebody had to keep getting up all night to feed it wood.

So she designed a furnace that ran on natural gas, and then split it into separate units, so you could send the heat to different rooms.

Long story short, that is central heating, and that is zoned heating too. And she filed that patent back when most Black women could not even get a bank account.