Welcome to Karen Hunter is awesome.

I'm Karen Hunter, and a man born in 1819 in Virginia, enslaved, figured out how to invent some things that transformed the railroad system.

His name, Benjamin Montgomery.

And you want to stay tuned because Shantavia Johnson tells us why we should know his name,

why we should know this man.

Well, Shantavia Johnson, patent attorney, and me talking about Benjamin Montgomery up next.

Okay, welcome back to our patent series.

And again, this is about bridging knowledge for everybody watching.

And I'm so grateful that we have intellectual properties attorney, patent attorney,

extraordinaire, Shantavia Johnson, joining us once again to talk about somebody who did something back in the day.

Thank you, Karen. It's always good to see you. You look beautiful, as always.

And this will be a wonderful conversation. So I'm excited to be here today and to talk about this person who everybody should know named Benjamin Montgomery.

Are you familiar with Benjamin Montgomery in his story? Never know. Tell me, who was Benjamin Montgomery? Oh, my gosh.

So this is someone everybody needs to know and understand, and for a specific reason.

And that specific reason is because, particularly during American slavery, black inventors,

many of them enslaved or formerly enslaved, would create things that not only shaped

American economic success, but also just created this innovation ecosystem that otherwise the country

would not have had. And so Benjamin Montgomery was one of those. He never received a patent because

he was enslaved. But he's got a really, really unique, interesting story that we just have to

talk about today. So he was in bond, born in bondage?

He was. So he was born into slavery in 1819. And he invented something called a, it's called a

steamboat propeller. And what was unique about this particular steamboat propeller was that it was

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