Born Sarah Breedlove, Madame C.J. Walker became the first Black woman millionaire by inventing a line of cosmetics and hair products aimed at Black consumers in the first decades of the 20th century. Walker pioneered the use of female sales agents, who traveled door to door across the U.S. and Caribbean selling her products. An active philanthropist, Walker also was an early champion of employee development and offered business training and other educational opportunities to her workers as a means of helping other Black women achieve financial independence.

Inventor Lonnie Johnson holds more than 80 U.S. patents, but it's his invention of the Super Soaker toy that is perhaps his most endearing claim to fame. An engineer by training, Johnson has worked on both the stealth bomber project for the Air Force and the Galileo space probe for NASA. He also developed a means of harnessing solar and geothermal energy for power plants. The Super Soaker, first patented in 1986, is his most popular invention. It's racked up more than $1 billion in sales since its release.

George Edward Alcorn Jr. is a physicist whose work in the aerospace industry helped revolutionize astrophysics and semiconductor manufacturing. He is credited with 20 inventions, eight of which he received patents for. Perhaps his best-known innovation is for an X-ray spectrometer used to analyze distant galaxies and other deep-space phenomena, which he patented in 1984. Alcorn's research into plasma etching, for which he received a patent in 1989, is still used in the production of computer chips, also known as semiconductors.

Benjamin Banneker was a self-educated astronomer, mathematician, and farmer. He was among a few hundred free Black Americans living in Maryland, where enslavement was legal at the time. Among his many accomplishments, Banneker is perhaps best known for a series of almanacs he published between 1792 and 1797 that contained detailed astronomical calculations of his, as well as writings on topics of the day. Banneker also had a small role in helping to survey Washington, D.C., in 1791.

Charles Drew was a doctor and medical researcher whose pioneering research into blood helped save thousands of lives during World War II. As a postgraduate researcher at Columbia University in the late 1930s, Drew invented a means of separating plasma from whole blood, allowing it to be stored for up to a week, far longer than had been possible at the time. Drew also discovered that plasma could be transfused between persons regardless of blood type and helped the British government establish its first national blood bank. Drew worked briefly with the American Red Cross during World War II, but he resigned to protest the organization's insistence on segregating blood from White and Black donors. He continued to research, teach, and advocate until his death in 1950 in a car accident.

Thomas Jennings holds the distinction of being the first Black American to be granted a patent. A tailor by trade in New York City, Jennings applied for and received a patent in 1821 for a cleaning technique he'd pioneered called "dry scouring." It was a precursor to today's dry cleaning. His invention made Jennings a wealthy man and he used his earnings to support early anti-enslavement activism and civil rights organizations.

 Elijah McCoy was born in Canada to parents who had been enslaved in the U.S. The family resettled in Michigan a few years after Elijah was born, and the boy showed a keen interest in mechanical objects growing up. After training as an engineer in Scotland as a teen, he returned to the U.S. Unable to find a job in engineering because of racial discrimination, McCoy found work as a railroad fireman. It was while working in that role that he developed a new means of keeping locomotive engines lubricated while running, allowing them to operate longer between maintenance. McCoy continued to refine this and other inventions during his lifetime, receiving 60 patents.

 Garrett Morgan is best known for his invention in 1914 of the safety hood, a precursor to the gas mask. Morgan was so confident of his invention's potential that he frequently demonstrated it himself in sales pitches to fire departments across the country. In 1916, he earned widespread acclaim after donning his safety hood to rescue workers who were trapped by an explosion in a tunnel beneath Lake Erie near Cleveland. Morgan later would invent one of the first traffic signals and a new clutch for auto transmissions. Active in the early civil rights movement, he helped found one of the first Black American newspapers in Ohio, the Cleveland Call.

If you've ever used a microphone, you have James West to thank for it. West was fascinated by radio and electronics from an early age, and he trained as a physicist. After college, he went to work at Bell Labs, where research on how humans hear led to his invention of the foil electret microphone in 1960. Such devices were more sensitive, yet they used less power and were smaller than other microphones at the time, and they revolutionized the field of acoustics. Today, foil electret-style mics are used in everything from telephones to computers.