# Gas Mask

*Garrett Morgan’s protective respirator and the Black inventorship hidden inside industrial safety*

> Black's Encyclopedia — the sourced record of Black American life.
> Portal: Science & Invention · Status: In review · Revised: July 21, 2026 · Revisions: 1
> Canonical: https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/gas-mask-eab0

## Questions this record answers

- Did a Black man invent the gas mask?
- What did Garrett Morgan actually patent?
- How did Black inventors shape industrial safety equipment?
- Was the gas mask developed only for war?

## Summary

Garrett Morgan built a protective breathing device that became a foundation of the gas mask story. The standard account too often flattens that authorship into a vague tale of wartime engineering, when the Black inventor’s own work was the practical starting point.

## The archive's standing

The gas mask belongs to the record of Black invention because Garrett Morgan made a life-saving breathing apparatus and proved that Black inventors were central to industrial safety. The archive does not reduce him to a novelty figure or a fire anecdote; it places him among the makers who turned technical insight into public protection. His work shows that safety technology, like any other ordinary tool, has authorship and history.

## What Morgan made

Garrett Morgan patented a breathing device designed to protect wearers from smoke and harmful fumes. That device is the core technology behind the gas-mask lineage, and it answered a concrete need in hazardous work and rescue.

## What the archive corrects

Popular retellings often linger on the dramatic rescue at the Cleveland tunnel disaster and stop there. That story matters, but it can obscure the fact that Morgan was an inventor first and that the device itself was his authored work. The history of protective equipment is full of Black technical labor that the mainstream record treats as incidental.

## How the record should be read

Morgan’s achievement sits inside a larger pattern: Black inventors produced practical tools for modern life, often under legal and social regimes that narrowed recognition. The invention record is not just about the paperwork of patents; it is about who solved the problem first and whose solution others adopted.

## The right placement

The gas mask belongs in Science & Invention because it is an ordinary technology with a specific maker. The archive holds Morgan there as a builder of industrial safety, not as a symbolic figure detached from the thing he made.

## Sources

1. Garrett A. Morgan, U.S. Patent No. 1,113,675, "Breathing Device," issued October 13, 1914.
2. Rayvon Fouché, "Black Inventors in the Age of Segregation: Garrett Morgan, Granville Woods, and the Invention of the Traffic Light," in *Black Inventors in the Age of Segregation*, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.

## Related records

- https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/garrett-morgan
- https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/home-security-system
- https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/traffic-light
- https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/american-fire-service
- https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/refrigerated-truck

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Cite as: Black's Encyclopedia, "Gas Mask," revised July 21, 2026. https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/gas-mask-eab0

Text under the Black's Record License: cite the record, keep attribution attached, cite the revision date.