What Garrett Morgan Can Teach Entrepreneurs About Invention and Persistence
Garrett Morgan can teach entrepreneurs that meaningful inventions often begin with close observation, practical experimentation, and the determination to continue despite rejection or unfair barriers.
Born in Kentucky in 1877 to formerly enslaved parents, Morgan moved to Cincinnati as a teenager and later settled in Cleveland, Ohio. He worked as a sewing-machine repairman, established his own repair shop, built a successful garment business, and developed hair-care products. He also patented safety-related inventions, including a breathing device and a three-position traffic signal.
Morgan’s journey offers valuable business lessons about recognizing everyday problems, developing useful solutions, creating multiple sources of income, marketing unfamiliar products, protecting intellectual property, and persisting when society does not provide equal opportunities.
Learn How Existing Products Work
Morgan began his working life with limited formal education, but he possessed strong mechanical curiosity. His experience repairing sewing machines allowed him to study how machines operated, why they failed, and how they might be improved.
Entrepreneurs do not always need to begin with a completely original industry. They can learn by working closely with existing products, services, and systems. Repair technicians, customer-service representatives, installers, operators, and frequent users often notice weaknesses that designers and executives overlook.
Understanding how something works—and where it repeatedly fails—can reveal valuable opportunities for improvement.
Before developing a solution, entrepreneurs should observe the problem directly, speak with users, examine existing alternatives, and understand the practical conditions in which the product will be used.
Invent Around Real Problems
Morgan’s inventions addressed recognizable safety concerns. His breathing device, patented in 1914, was designed to help users breathe in environments containing smoke or harmful fumes. A version of the device gained attention after Morgan and others used it during rescue efforts following a 1916 tunnel disaster beneath Lake Erie.
Morgan later patented a traffic signal with three positions. His design included an intermediate warning position intended to improve the transition between stop and go. He did not invent the first traffic signal, but his patented improvement contributed to the continuing development of traffic-control systems.
This distinction offers an important lesson: invention frequently means improving an existing solution rather than creating an entire category from nothing.
Entrepreneurs should ask where current products remain unsafe, confusing, inefficient, expensive, or unreliable. A carefully designed improvement can create considerable value when it solves a genuine problem.
Test Ideas Under Real Conditions
An invention may look promising in a workshop but perform differently when exposed to heat, pressure, movement, weather, or human behavior.
Morgan’s safety equipment addressed situations in which performance could have serious consequences. Products involving transportation, health, construction, security, or emergency response require especially careful evaluation.
Entrepreneurs should test prototypes under conditions resembling actual use. They should document limitations, seek qualified expertise, and avoid making claims that exceed available evidence.
A demonstration may help attract attention, but dependable performance creates lasting credibility. The more serious the customer’s risk, the greater the inventor’s responsibility to validate the product properly.
Build Businesses That Support Invention
Morgan was not only an inventor. He operated businesses, including a sewing-machine repair shop, a garment enterprise, and a company selling grooming products.
These commercial activities provided income, practical management experience, and a foundation from which he could pursue additional ideas.
Modern entrepreneurs may also need one dependable business to support experimentation elsewhere. Consulting, services, licensing, repairs, subscriptions, or established product lines can generate revenue while a newer invention is being developed.
Diversification should remain manageable. Pursuing too many unrelated ideas can divide attention and capital. However, a stable source of revenue can give an entrepreneur more freedom to test promising innovations without depending entirely on outside financing.
Understand That Marketing Affects Adoption
Creating a useful product does not guarantee that customers, distributors, or public agencies will recognize its value.
Morgan had to demonstrate his safety device and actively persuade potential buyers. As a Black inventor operating during an era of severe racial discrimination, he faced barriers that had nothing to do with the quality of his ideas. Historical accounts indicate that racial prejudice sometimes affected how his products were presented and received.
Entrepreneurs should prepare to explain what their invention does, who needs it, how it differs from existing alternatives, and what evidence supports its value.
Demonstrations, testimonials, educational materials, distribution relationships, and credible third-party evaluations can help an unfamiliar product gain acceptance. Marketing should clarify genuine benefits without hiding the identity or contribution of the inventor.
Protect and Commercialize Intellectual Property
Patents helped document Morgan’s inventions and created opportunities to benefit commercially from his work. He eventually sold rights to his traffic-signal patent to General Electric.
A patent does not automatically create customers or revenue. It gives the inventor certain legal rights, but commercialization still requires manufacturing, licensing, distribution, marketing, and negotiation.
Entrepreneurs should consider how intellectual property fits into the broader business strategy. Depending on the invention, they might manufacture the product, license it to another company, sell the rights, or form a partnership with an organization capable of bringing it to market.
Qualified legal advice can help inventors evaluate patentability, ownership, contracts, confidentiality, and licensing terms before publicly disclosing valuable ideas.
Persist Without Ignoring Evidence
Morgan’s persistence was especially significant because he developed businesses and inventions while confronting widespread racial discrimination and restricted access to opportunity.
Persistence, however, does not mean repeating the same approach indefinitely. Entrepreneurs should continue believing in a worthwhile problem while remaining willing to improve the design, change the message, select a different market, or pursue another commercialization strategy.
Feedback should be evaluated carefully. Rejection may reveal a weakness in the product, but it may also reflect misunderstanding, institutional resistance, or unfair bias. Strong entrepreneurs learn to distinguish between these possibilities.
Sanj Talks Takeaway
Garrett Morgan demonstrated that invention begins with curiosity but succeeds through practical problem-solving, experimentation, business discipline, and persistence.
His experience reminds entrepreneurs that they do not need to invent an entirely new category to make an important contribution. Improving safety, reducing confusion, or making an existing system work better can produce lasting value.
The central lesson is to observe closely, learn continuously, protect worthwhile ideas, test products responsibly, and prepare a realistic path to market. Entrepreneurs may encounter financial limitations, skepticism, discrimination, or repeated rejection. Persistence matters most when it is combined with evidence, adaptability, and a solution that genuinely improves people’s lives.
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