Free Black AI Voice Generator — Midwest Woman, Upbeat

So after the Second World War, hospitals were full of men who had lost their arms. And a nurse named Bessie Blount Griffin watched them getting fed by somebody else, every single meal.

Now mind you, she'd been teaching them to write with their teeth, so she knew what they could do. But she kept coming back to the dinner thing.

Because it wasn't about the food, it was about the dignity. So she built a machine that pushed one bite at a time, triggered by biting down on a tube.

And that meant a man could feed himself, with nobody standing over him. But she couldn't get anybody in this country to take it. So she gave the patent to France, for free.

Long story short, she said being first was worth more than the money.

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.

So you know that little blue dot on your phone, the one that always knows exactly where you are? And somebody had to do the math for that, and her name was Gladys West.

Now mind you, this is a Black woman from rural Virginia, born in the, working at a naval base back when they still had her sitting in a segregated section. But she was one of only four Black employees on that whole base.

And she spent years modeling the actual shape of the Earth, by hand, because the computers back then could not do it without her. So every single time your map finds you, that is her math.

Long story short, they did not put her name on it, and she did not get recognized until she was in her eighties.

So everybody got a doorbell camera now, right? Come to find out, that whole idea started with a nurse in Queens named Marie Van Brittan Brown.

Now mind you, this was nineteen sixty-six, and she was working nights, and the police in her neighborhood were slow to come when anybody called. So instead of waiting on them, she built her own.

And she cut peepholes into her door, rigged a camera that slid and down to see who was standing there, and ran that picture to a monitor in her bedroom.

So then she put a button on it that called for help. Whole time, that is the blueprint for every Ring doorbell sitting on a porch today. But you never heard her name.

So Doctor Patricia Bath noticed something nobody else was writing down. Her Black patients in Harlem were going blind at twice the rate of her white patients.

And it wasn't genetics, it was access. They couldn't get to an eye doctor. So she invented a whole field for that, and called it community ophthalmology.

But she wasn't finished, because she kept losing patients to cataracts. Now mind you, back then they took cataracts out by hand, with a blade. So she figured out how to do it with a laser instead, faster and way more precise.

And she became the first Black woman doctor in this country to patent a medical device. Come to find out, some of the people she treated had been blind for thirty years.

And she gave them their sight back.

Okay so this one sounds made up, but it isn't. Valerie Thomas wanted to build things, but her school wouldn't let girls take physics.

So she taught herself, got the degree anyway, and ended up at NASA. And one day she sees a trick with two mirrors that makes a light bulb look like it's floating.

Now most people see that and go, huh, neat. But she thought, what if I could do that with real images, over a distance? So she spent years on it, and in nineteen eighty she patented the illusion transmitter.

And that math is under the three dimensional images you watch now. Whole time, she was running the satellite programs that told us the ozone layer was in trouble.

Long story short, she made light lie, and then she went back to work.