We are Civics Unchained! In 2024, we helped people play our 100 Citizenship Questions game.
Now we have our Fabulous Forgotten Americans matching game and timeline.
Hang out here and learn all about the folks people who wrote history text books didn’t think were very important.
Spoiler alert: They were, in fact, quite important.
We are all about people who did cool things. These are the folks who never appeared in history books - but they should have.
How much more fun would civics and history be if they DID?
Back in the 1800’s, train engineers got fed up engines either overheating from going too fast or freezing up solid.
Those engines needed oil dripped on the parts juuust right to work perfectly.
Only one Black man, son of escaped slaves, train fireman himself, a machine that could do that. It dripped that oil on hot train engines at a perfect rate. Engines sped along perfectly.
Engineers were willing to pay for that small part.
But fakers kept trying to rip off the Black inventor - driving the engineers nuts. They said, “We want the REAL McCOY!”
‘‘I AM the ‘real McCoy’! Do not try me. You cannot fake me. Your dollar store drippers are fails.”
Josephine Cochrane, invented the dishwasher, 1886. She is still listed on the board of directors of Kitchen Aid.
Josephine Cochrane was left without any money when her husband died - and she had five kids to feed. In those days, women didn’t just go out and get jobs. So she was in trouble.
What’s a woman to do? Well, she hated washing dishes, so she invented a dishwasher - mechanical, with cranks, since there wasn’t electricity yet. She had an engineering background, because her father and brothers were all engineers.
“I couldn’t get men to do the things I wanted in my way until they had tried and failed in their own,” Cochrane said.
“And that was costly for me. They knew I knew nothing, academically, about mechanics, and they insisted on having their own way with my invention until they convinced themselves my way was the better, no matter how I had arrived at it.”
Josephine Garis Cochran was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2006. As a testament to the far-reaching impact of her invention, the government of Romania—a country with which Cochran had no connection—issued a stamp with her face on it in 2013, in honor of World Intellectual Property Day.
First dishwasher ever built. Cochrane designed a similar one but MUCH bigger, to work for hotel restaurants. She sold it for $800! $25,000 in today’s money. Eventually she founded her own company - later called Kitchen Aid, now part of Whirlpool. She is still listed as on the Board of Directors of Kitchen Aid
1942….
Japanese American Fighting unit earned more than 4,000 medals. 4,000 purple hearts… more than any other unit.
While their families were being put in camps and losing their homes and businesses- these men won medals for bravery fighting the Nazis.
Lewis Latimer in 1876 started working with Thomas Edison - who had a problem.
Edison’s lightbulb lit up just fine.
But then it burned out too quickly. Latimer figured out that carbon filaments would burn for a long, long time.
Latimer had also taught himself mechanical drawing. And Edison needed a mechanical drawing if he was going to patent his light bulb.
Latimer drew up the design (with his carbon filament), and Edison got his patent.
Later, Latimer drew up plans to light up cities around the world - Philadelphia, New York, and Montreal. Cutting crime waaay down.
