When Americans think about the pioneers of the automobile industry, names like Henry Ford, Ransom Olds and the Dodge brothers usually come to mind.

But in a small Ohio town more than a century ago, another automotive entrepreneur was attempting something extraordinary.

His name was Frederick Douglass Patterson.

Patterson took a successful Black-owned carriage company established by his father and guided it into the emerging automobile age. In 1915, C.R. Patterson & Sons introduced the Patterson-Greenfield automobile, making the company an extraordinary part of both Black history and American automotive history.

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture describes C.R. Patterson & Sons as the only African American-owned and operated automobile company in American history.

But Frederick Patterson’s story actually begins a generation earlier.

From Slavery to Entrepreneurship

Frederick’s father, Charles Richard “C.R.” Patterson, was born in Virginia in 1833.

Historical accounts differ regarding exactly how the Patterson family left Virginia and reached Ohio, but records place the family in Greenfield, Ohio, by the middle of the 19th century.

C.R. learned blacksmithing and became skilled in the carriage-making trade.

In 1873, he entered a business partnership with white carriage maker J.P. Lowe. Twenty years later, Patterson acquired Lowe’s interest and eventually operated the business as C.R. Patterson & Sons.

The company developed a reputation for quality workmanship, producing numerous styles of horse-drawn vehicles.

By the beginning of the 20th century, the business employed an integrated workforce and had become a successful manufacturing operation.

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But transportation was changing.

And C.R.’s son Frederick saw what was coming.

Frederick Patterson Takes the Wheel

Frederick Douglass Patterson was born in Greenfield in 1871.

His path to success wasn’t easy.

According to the Historical Society of Greenfield and the Automotive Hall of Fame, Frederick was initially denied admission to Greenfield’s white high school because he was Black. His father challenged the discrimination, and Frederick was eventually admitted.

He later attended The Ohio State University, where he made history again as the university’s first Black football player.

Eventually, Frederick returned to Greenfield and became involved with the family business.

When C.R. Patterson died in 1910, Frederick assumed control of the company.

And he faced a major decision.

America was falling in love with the automobile.

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The horse-drawn carriage—the foundation of the Patterson family’s success—was headed toward obsolescence.

Rather than fight the change, Frederick embraced it.

From Carriages to Cars

C.R. Patterson & Sons began repairing and servicing automobiles as the new machines became increasingly common.

That work gave Patterson employees valuable experience with automobile construction and mechanical systems.

Then Frederick made the leap from repairing automobiles to building them.

On September 23, 1915, the Patterson-Greenfield automobile was introduced in Greenfield’s local newspaper.

The company advertised the car for $685.

The Patterson-Greenfield was designed as a practical family automobile and featured equipment including a Continental four-cylinder engine, electric starting and lighting and a split windshield for ventilation.

Various body styles were offered during the company’s brief automobile-production period, including coupes, sedans and even a sporty model called the Red Devil.

A Black-owned company in small-town Ohio had entered America’s rapidly expanding automobile industry.

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Taking On an Industry That Was Changing Fast

Unfortunately, Patterson wasn’t simply competing against other automobiles.

He was competing against a revolution in manufacturing.

Companies such as Ford were transforming automobile production through assembly-line techniques and enormous economies of scale.

Large manufacturers could purchase components in huge quantities and produce automobiles faster and more cheaply.

C.R. Patterson & Sons operated on a much smaller scale.

Its reputation for craftsmanship could not overcome the enormous economic advantages enjoyed by mass-production manufacturers.

The Patterson-Greenfield automobile was produced from approximately 1915 to 1918.

Exactly how many were manufactured remains uncertain. Historical estimates vary, and the Historical Society of Greenfield states plainly that the number built and sold is not known.

Unfortunately, no Patterson-Greenfield automobile is known to survive today.

But the end of passenger-car production wasn’t the end of the Patterson company.

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Patterson Reinvents the Business Again

Frederick pivoted.

Instead of trying to compete directly with Detroit’s increasingly powerful passenger-car manufacturers, C.R. Patterson & Sons moved toward commercial vehicles.

The company manufactured truck and bus bodies, eventually finding an important market producing buses for schools.

It was another example of Patterson’s willingness to adapt the family company as transportation technology changed.

Frederick was also active beyond the factory.

He participated in Greenfield civic life and became involved with the National Negro Business League, the organization founded by Booker T. Washington to encourage Black entrepreneurship and economic development.

Frederick served as one of the organization’s vice presidents.

The Patterson Story Continues

Frederick Patterson died in 1932.

His sons continued operating the family business, but economic pressures eventually became too great.

C.R. Patterson & Sons finally closed in 1939.

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The company had survived for decades through one of the greatest technological transformations in transportation history—from horse-drawn carriages to automobiles and motorized buses.

Yet today, relatively few Americans know the Patterson name.

More Than a Footnote in Automotive History

The story of Frederick Patterson deserves more than a passing mention during Black History Month.

He was an entrepreneur who recognized technological disruption and attempted to reposition a family manufacturing company for an entirely new era.

His father had built a successful carriage business at a time when opportunities for Black entrepreneurs were severely restricted.

Frederick took that foundation and moved the company into one of the most important emerging industries of the 20th century.

He wasn’t merely watching the automobile revolution.

He participated in it.

And more than a century after the Patterson-Greenfield first appeared on the streets of Ohio, the company remains a remarkable chapter in American history.

A Black family built carriages.

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Then they built automobiles.

Then they built buses.

And for a brief but extraordinary period, Frederick Douglass Patterson stood among America’s automobile manufacturers.

That’s a legacy worth remembering.

Forgotten Genius Friday

Forgotten Genius Friday is an STM Daily News series highlighting innovators, inventors, entrepreneurs and pioneers whose contributions helped shape the world but whose stories are too often overlooked.

What other forgotten innovator should we feature? Leave a comment and join the conversation.

Source and Related Links

Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture — The Only African American Automobile CompanyAutomotive Hall of Fame — Frederick Douglass PattersonHistorical Society of Greenfield — Patterson Automobile History

Elevators transformed American cities, allowing buildings to rise higher and making upper floors more accessible. But early elevator travel carried a serious danger: doors had to be opened and closed manually, and an elevator shaft could remain exposed if someone failed to secure it properly.

Alexander Miles, a Black inventor, barber and businessman, developed an innovative solution. His patented mechanism helped elevators operate their car and shaft doors automatically, making elevator travel safer and more convenient.

The danger of early elevators

By the late 19th century, elevators were appearing in hotels, offices and other multistory buildings. Although they made vertical travel easier, many depended on operators or passengers to close the doors manually.

A carelessly opened shaft door could expose an empty elevator shaft. Miles recognized that elevator safety could not always depend on someone remembering to close every door.

He designed a system that connected the movement of the elevator car with the operation of its doors.

Alexander Miles’ elevator innovation

On October 11, 1887, Miles received U.S. Patent No. 371,207 for what he described as “new and useful improvements in elevators.”

His design addressed two related problems. It provided a way to close shaft openings above and below the elevator car, and it allowed the movement of the car to help open and close the elevator doors at the appropriate floor.

Miles’s mechanism used a flexible belt attached to the elevator car, along with drums positioned at the top and bottom of the shaft. A system of levers, rollers and specially designed grooves helped control the car and shaft doors as the elevator moved.

The goal was straightforward but potentially lifesaving: prevent elevator-shaft openings from being left unprotected because of human negligence.

Did Alexander Miles invent the elevator door?

Alexander Miles is sometimes described as the inventor of the automatic elevator door. The complete history is more complicated.

John W. Meaker received a patent for an earlier automatic elevator-door mechanism in 1874, approximately 13 years before Miles received his patent. Therefore, Miles should not be credited with inventing the first automatic elevator door.

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What Miles did was develop and patent his own important improvement to the way elevator car and shaft doors operated. His design advanced the effort to make elevators safer, more reliable and easier to use.

Recognizing that distinction does not diminish his accomplishment. Invention is often a continuing process in which engineers and innovators improve existing technology. Miles contributed a valuable new solution to a dangerous problem.

More than an inventor

Born in 1838, Alexander Miles built a successful life during an era when Black Americans faced severe restrictions on economic opportunity.

Miles worked as a barber before establishing himself in Duluth, Minnesota. He operated a barbershop in the city’s St. Louis Hotel and invested in real estate. He also became the first Black member of the Duluth Chamber of Commerce.

His achievements extended beyond mechanical invention. In Chicago, Miles later established the United Brotherhood, an organization intended to provide life insurance to Black Americans who were frequently denied coverage by established insurance companies.

That part of his story demonstrates the larger scope of his work. Miles was not only interested in solving mechanical problems. He also attempted to create economic security and opportunity for members of his community.

A lasting contribution to elevator safety

Modern elevators use far more sophisticated electrical controls, sensors and computerized safety systems than those available during Miles’s lifetime. His exact mechanism is not the system operating inside every elevator today.

However, the safety principle behind his work remains essential: an elevator should coordinate the movement of the car with the opening and closing of its doors, while preventing passengers from entering an unprotected shaft.

In recognition of his contribution, Alexander Miles was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2007.

Remembering Alexander Miles accurately

Alexander Miles did not invent the elevator, and he was not the first person to patent an automatic elevator-door system. He was a creative Black inventor who recognized a serious safety hazard and developed a patented method for addressing it.

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Everyday technologies are rarely the work of only one person. They develop through generations of experimentation, refinement and improvement. Miles deserves recognition as one of the innovators who helped move elevator technology toward the safer automatic operation passengers now expect.

His work is another reminder that Black inventors helped build and improve many of the technologies that shaped modern American life.

Forgotten Genius Friday celebrates the Black inventors, scientists and innovators whose ideas helped shape the world—even when their names were left out of the history books.

Sources

• Alexander Miles — U.S. Patent No. 371,207
• Alexander Miles — National Inventors Hall of Fame
• Alexander Miles Patent — IEEE REACH
• Alexander Miles — Lemelson-MIT Program
• Alexander Miles — Duluth Public Library’s Vintage Duluth

Historical context

• John W. Meaker’s 1874 self-closing elevator-shaft patent

You’ve probably seen them hundreds of times.

They sit outside supermarkets, convenience stores and shopping centers—or sometimes stand alone in small roadside kiosks. You bring an empty bottle, usually one, three or five gallons, put in some money, push a button and watch purified water pour into your container.

For many people in California, Arizona and other parts of the American West, water vending machines seem like they’ve simply always been there.

But when did we actually start buying water this way?

The answer takes us back more than a century, although the machines we recognize today didn’t really arrive until the 1970s.

The Water Vending Machine’s Surprising Ancestor

The story begins in Boston in 1908 with a man named Lawrence Luellen.

Luellen was working on something that sounds surprisingly modern: a machine that would allow someone to pay a penny and receive a clean drink of water in an individual disposable cup.

At the time, public drinking water was often consumed from a communal cup or metal dipper—a practice that increasingly worried public-health officials because of the potential spread of disease.

Luellen developed a paper drinking cup along with what became known as the Luellen Cup & Water Vendor. The porcelain machine contained water, ice, disposable cups and a place for discarded cups.

For one penny, a customer could get a drink of cold water in a fresh cup.

Historical records at Lafayette College’s Hugh Moore Dixie Cup Company Collection show that Luellen completed work on the vending apparatus in early 1908. His company, the American Water Supply Company of New England, was incorporated on April 4 of that year.

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There was just one problem.

The complete water machine was expensive to manufacture.

The company eventually concentrated on selling the disposable cups and cup dispensers instead. Those cups ultimately evolved into one of America’s most recognizable household products—the Dixie Cup.

So although Luellen’s machine wasn’t the five-gallon refill station we know today, the basic idea was already there:

Put money into a machine and receive drinking water.

The Modern Water Vending Machine Arrives

The next major chapter didn’t occur until roughly 65 years later.

According to histories of the water-vending industry, the first practical machines designed to sell purified water in bulk appeared during the mid-1970s.

These were fundamentally different from Luellen’s machine.

Instead of giving customers a cup of water, the new machines treated water—typically municipal tap water—and allowed customers to fill their own reusable containers.

And we have unusually strong evidence that these machines were operating by 1976.

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On July 26, 1976, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued a memorandum specifically addressing the regulatory status of water vending machines.

The EPA described machines that filtered and disinfected water with ultraviolet light and then dispensed the treated water into a customer’s own container using a coin-operated mechanism.

In other words, by the summer of 1976, the basic water-refill machine many of us recognize today was already operating in the United States.

Why the 1970s?

The timing wasn’t accidental.

Americans had become increasingly concerned about pollution and drinking-water quality during the 1960s and 1970s.

Congress passed the Safe Drinking Water Act in 1974, establishing a federal framework for protecting public drinking-water supplies. National drinking-water regulations followed during the decade.

Meanwhile, technologies such as filtration, activated carbon treatment, ultraviolet disinfection and eventually reverse osmosis made it practical to build relatively compact systems capable of treating municipal water at the point where it was sold.

The result was a new business opportunity:

Instead of transporting thousands of bottles of water to a store, a vending company could connect a machine to the local water supply, purify that water on site and sell it by the gallon.

Customers supplied the bottle.

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California Helps Turn It Into a Business

California became one of the industry’s most important early markets.

One company that would eventually become a major player was founded by Robert G. Miller.

In 1983, Miller established Bottle Water Vending Inc., the predecessor of Glacier Water Services.

The company manufactured water vending machines and placed many of them outside supermarkets. Customers brought their own containers, while participating stores often sold reusable plastic jugs nearby.

The machines treated municipal water using combinations of filtration, reverse osmosis, carbon treatment and ultraviolet sterilization.

The idea caught on quickly.

In 1984, the company expanded from California into Arizona.

Nevada followed in 1986.

By 1987, the company reportedly had nearly 900 water vending machines operating.

Texas and Florida followed in 1988.

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The familiar supermarket water-refill station was becoming a significant business.

Then Came the Drive-Up Water Kiosk

Another variation appeared at almost exactly the same time.

In 1984, Lani and Don Dolifka developed what became Watermill Express in Colorado.

Their idea was an automated stand-alone purification kiosk capable of taking municipal water, processing it through multiple purification stages and selling the finished drinking water directly to customers.

Instead of walking into a supermarket, customers could pull up to the kiosk with their bottles.

Later Watermill Express systems were designed to accommodate reusable containers ranging from one to five gallons, using treatment processes including sediment filtration, activated carbon, reverse osmosis, ultraviolet disinfection and ozone treatment.

That basic concept remains familiar today.

Why Five-Gallon Bottles?

The five-gallon container was already well established through traditional bottled-water delivery services.

But refill vending changed the economics.

Instead of purchasing another filled bottle—or waiting for a delivery—a customer could keep the same container and refill it repeatedly.

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That eliminated much of the packaging and transportation involved with conventional bottled water.

It also made purified drinking water relatively inexpensive.

Bring the jug.

Buy the water.

Take the same jug home.

Bring it back when it’s empty.

More than four decades later, that’s still essentially how the system works.

So Who Invented the Modern Water Vending Machine?

That’s where the story gets complicated.

There doesn’t appear to be a single universally recognized inventor of the modern bulk purified-water vending machine.

Lawrence Luellen developed an important early coin-operated water vending concept in 1908, but his machine dispensed an individual drink and disposable cup—not gallons of purified water into a customer’s reusable bottle.

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The modern bulk-water machine emerged much later, apparently during the mid-1970s, as water-treatment technology and consumer concern about drinking-water quality converged.

By 1976, the EPA was already dealing with the regulatory implications of machines that treated municipal water and sold it through coin-operated dispensers into customers’ own containers.

Entrepreneurs and companies then refined and expanded the idea during the 1980s.

From a Penny Cup to Five Gallons at a Time

The evolution is remarkable.

1908: Put in a penny and receive a cup of cold water.

Mid-1970s: Machines begin treating municipal water and selling purified water in bulk.

1976: The EPA documents coin-operated machines dispensing treated water into customers’ containers.

1983: Bottle Water Vending, the predecessor of Glacier Water Services, begins operations in California.

1984: Glacier’s predecessor expands into Arizona, while Watermill Express develops its automated purification kiosk in Colorado.

Late 1980s and beyond: Water refill machines become increasingly familiar outside supermarkets and at stand-alone locations throughout the United States.

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Today, paying a few coins—or tapping a card—and filling a five-gallon jug might seem thoroughly ordinary.

But the machine sitting outside your neighborhood supermarket represents more than a century of evolution in how Americans buy something that once seemed almost unimaginable to sell from a vending machine:

a drink of water.

Sources and Further Reading

U.S. EPA — Status of Water Vending Machines Under Public Law 93-523

Lafayette College — Hugh Moore Dixie Cup Company Collection

U.S. EPA — Safe Water Research Milestones

Glacier Water Services Company History

World Vision — History of Watermill Express

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