Granville Woods was born in Columbus, Ohio, on Apr. 23, 1856 to free African-Americans. He held various engineering and industrial jobs before establishing a company to develop electrical apparatus. On Nov. 21, 1893, Woods patented an electric railway conduit. He registered nearly 60 patents in his lifetime including a telephone transmitter, a trolley wheel and the multiplex telegraph (over which he defeated a lawsuit by Thomas Edison). Woods died in 1919.
