It is 1880 and we're in Bridgeport, Connecticut at the U.S. Electric Lighting Company, a rival of Thomas Edison's.

A year earlier, Edison had patented his incandescent electric lamp with a carbon filament.

While an improvement on any previous electric light, Edison's filament burned out in a short matter of hours,

making its light impractical and expensive.

At his desk in Bridgeport sits 32-year-old Louis Latimer, whose parents decades before had

escaped slavery in Virginia and fled to New England.

In the ensuing years, their son Lewis has become an expert draftman

and has worked on a number of groundbreaking inventions

and refines Edison's original design, eventually having his own light bulb moment,

creating and patenting a more durable filament,

which burns far longer and is more easily manufactured,

making incandescent electric light practical and affordable.

America and the world would no longer have to remain in the dark. Hello all and welcome to American history hit. I'm Don Wildman. Nice to have you.

We speak today of an American with one of those lives that simply defies description.

His name is Louis Latimer.

Of course, many of you listening have heard of him, but far too many have not.

An African American whose long life straddles the late 19th and early 20th century,

who as a youngster was offered little education beyond elementary school, yet he ends up becoming a sought-after inventor and skilled

draftman with expertise in technical matters as well as legal.

He was a polymath, fluent in several languages, a musician, poet, writer, a genius in design.

The man was in the rooms where it happened for the invention of both the telephone and the

light bulb.

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