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Pioneer

Granville T. Woods

Electricity & Grid Pioneers

Granville T. Woods was an African American inventor who held more than fifty patents across his career, many of them in railway electrical systems and electrical distribution equipment. His 1887 induction telegraph system let moving trains communicate with stations and with each other without physical wire contact, sharply reducing collisions, and several of his patents on electrical control and distribution equipment were purchased by major companies including General Electric and Westinghouse, who found his engineering work valuable enough to acquire outright rather than contest in the patent disputes he sometimes had to fight to keep his inventions.

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