Thomas L. Jennings

American businessman

• Born: 1791
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: February 11, 1859
• Place of death: New York, New York

Jennings innovated a dry-cleaning technique to wash stains from garments without using water immersion and agitation. He submitted an application registering that procedure with the U.S. Patent Office, obtaining the earliest-known patent issued to an African American.

Primary field: Chemistry

Primary invention: Dry cleaning

Early Life

Thomas L. Jennings was born during the last decade of the eighteenth century in were chosen. Most sources state his birth year as 1791, based on two obituaries written soon after his death in winter, 1859, which say that Jennings was sixty-eight years old. According to the 1850 U.S. Census, Jennings was fifty years old as of August 1, 1850, and he was fifty-five when the New York State census was taken in 1855, suggesting he was born around 1799. Neither record indicates who provided Jennings’s age to census enumerators and how they knew that information.

Sources describe Jennings as a free African American without clarifying if he or his parents were ever enslaved and, if so, how Jennings secured his freedom. They do not tell who Jennings’s parents were, nor do they specify what name his middle initial represents. In 1790, near the time of Jennings’s birth, 1,011 free blacks and 2,369 slaves lived in New York City, composing 9.7 percent of that city’s population. Jennings was free in 1820 when he applied for a patent.

Few details about Jennings’s childhood are known, except that as a boy he began working as an apprentice to a New York tailor who, sources vaguely commented, was an acclaimed man. Jennings acquired skills to create and modify clothing to meet customers’ specifications. No facts confirm that Jennings attended school, but his activities as an adult reveal that he was knowledgeable and literate, writing documents discussing legal issues. During the War of 1812, he dug trenches on Long Island to protect the city.

Jennings married a woman named Elizabeth, who had been born in New Jersey and was five years younger than him. They lived at 167 Church Street in the Fifth Ward of New York County and had two daughters, Elizabeth and Matilda, and two sons, Thomas and William. In addition to earning income from making clothes, Jennings operated a boardinghouse.

Life’s Work

Jennings concentrated on a tailoring career after being employed in several other positions. He offered his services to customers who sought alterations for their clothing or desired new garments, which he designed and fitted. The quality of his craftsmanship attracted more clients, both in the city and elsewhere, who traveled to hire Jennings to assist them with their clothes, as people recommended him and promoted his work. Profiting from his sewing talents and entrepreneurial abilities, Jennings invested his income to establish a clothing store located on Church Street that developed into a prominent garment business.

In the late 1810’s, Jennings contemplated how to resolve a common complaint his customers voiced regarding their clothing becoming stained. Instead of keeping their dirty clothes, some people replaced them if they could afford to do so, although many customers did not have that option. Jennings sought ways to clean and restore garments, stressing that he wanted to assist less prosperous clients and to prevent people from discarding clothes he had invested his time and skills to make. He realized that regular washing techniques using water might damage fragile materials.

Jennings evaluated the effectiveness of applying chemicals used by tradesmen for cleaning tasks in other professions to remove stains from diverse fabric samples. He mixed chemicals together in varying ratios until he probably determined that turpentine was the most useful cleaning fluid to lift greases and oils from fabrics without harming materials. No available information reveals whether he constructed machinery for his process. Jennings offered his innovative cleaning procedure, referring to it as dry scouring, to his clientele. This early form of dry cleaning pleased Jennings’s customers and secured him more business producing clothes and cleaning them.

Aware that customers spread news of his successful dry scouring work, Jennings sought to protect his invention from other people appropriating his techniques without reimbursing him. In 1820, he submitted a patent application to the U.S. Patent Office. Sources do not indicate whether Jennings initiated the patenting process alone or whether he had legal counsel who assisted him, nor do they identify witnesses who signed his application. At the time Jennings applied, patents did not state the race of individuals patenting inventions, and the Patent Office did not discriminate against inventors based on ethnicity. The 1793 patent law in effect at that time permitted both free and enslaved African Americans to secure patents.

Jennings received a U.S. utility patent on March 3, 1821, for his invention entitled “Dry Scouring Clothes.” He framed the certificate, which bore the signatures of Secretary of State John Quincy Adams and Attorney GeneralWilliam Wirt. The Patent Office listed Jennings’s invention in a contemporary publication noting registered patents. Although most historians credit Jennings as the first African American to receive a patent, there could have been prior African Americans who achieved patents who have not yet been identified. Jennings’s patent became well known because Frederick Douglass mentioned it in a eulogy praising Jennings in the April, 1859, issue of The Anglo-African Magazine.

The Patent Act of 1836 resulted in patents receiving numbers listed chronologically from the time they had been first issued, assigning patent number 3,306x to Jennings’s invention, with the x indicating that the patent had been registered before 1836. A December 15, 1836, fire at the U.S. Patent Office burned most patent records stored there, including Jennings’s application and any associated materials supporting it. Without that application, specific information and Jennings’s description of his invention remain uncertain. His dry scouring invention was the sole U.S. patent he obtained. Sources do not mention if he sought foreign patents or ever attempted inventing any other processes or objects useful to his business.

Jennings generated ample income from his patent, although records do not specify any monetary amounts. Some sources claim that Jennings initially used profits to purchase enslaved relatives, suggesting that perhaps his parents or his wife’s family were slaves. In 1820, 10,368 free African Americans and 518 slaves resided in the New York City area. Jennings invested his patent earnings into bettering his community, particularly funding abolition efforts. He promoted suffrage for African Americans and educational opportunities and participated in civic groups devoted to political, economic, and intellectual activities. Jennings helped the Phoenix Literary Society provide clothes to impoverished children so they could attend schools.

After New York ended slavery in 1827, Jennings voiced his opinions regarding issues that many free African Americans experienced, especially prejudices and animosity. Freedom’s Journal, the first African American newspaper in the United States, printed one of his speeches in its April 4, 1828, issue. He was a delegate to People of Color conventions in the 1830’s. In 1837, Jennings took petitions demanding African American suffrage to the state legislature. He organized the Legal Rights Association in 1854, serving as president, to seek equal transportation services for blacks after his daughter experienced discrimination on a public omnibus. When Jennings died at his home on February 11, 1859, his framed patent was displayed by his bed.

Impact

Jennings’s inventiveness achieved professional and personal results. In addition to providing a useful cleaning service to his community, Jennings gained financial means to enhance his business and lifestyle and reinforce his efforts to seek legal changes to improve conditions for African Americans. Whether Jennings was aware the process of inventing and patenting would assist him economically and socially is unknown. Sources do not reveal whether Jennings had any access to other inventors who might have motivated him to pursue innovative efforts and suggested potential benefits, both immediate and future.

Although Jennings’s contemporaries were aware of his invention, or at least of the novel dry scouring he offered, no records indicate how Jennings might have inspired other African American inventors or convinced skeptics of African Americans’ technological and scientific abilities. Other dry cleaners might have appropriated aspects of Jennings’s invention for variations they developed but for which they did not seek patents, which might have confirmed his influence.

Many antebellum African American craftsmen and laborers devised objects or methods to resolve problems they encountered. Often, those inventors did not seek patents, or other people, particularly slave owners, claimed patents for those inventions. The U.S. Patent Office first identified an African American inventor thirteen years after Jennings’s received his patent when the race of Henry Blair, a free African American, was included on his 1834 and 1836 patents for agricultural tools. No records connect Blair and Jennings or suggest that Jennings inspired Blair to file for patents. Many sources incorrectly identify Blair as the first African American patent holder.

African American congressman George Washington Murray did not include Jennings in his list of African American inventors for the Congressional Record in 1894, nor did Henry E. Baker, an African American patent examiner, who published information he compiled regarding African American inventors. Those omissions could have occurred because Jennings’s patent was overlooked because of destroyed records, because his race was unknown to those men, or because his invention achievements were no longer publicized after his family, customers, and peers died.

Bibliography

Bolden, Tonya. Strong Men Keep Coming: The Book of African American Men. Foreword by Herb Boyd. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1999. The section about Jennings consists mostly of Frederick Douglass’s 1859 tribute memorializing Jennings, which includes information about Jennings and his patent unavailable in other sources.

Freeman, Rhoda Golden. The Free Negro in New York City in the Era Before the Civil War. New York: Garland, 1994. Historical depiction of Jennings’s community, noting Jennings’s civic work and providing statistics, contemporary perceptions regarding free African Americans, and diverse ways slaves obtained freedom. Illustrations include an 1855 city map.

Harris, Leslie M. In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Discusses groups and activities in which Jennings participated, especially conventions and relief organizations, to promote abolition and suffrage efforts for African Americans. Citations identify useful primary sources.

Hewitt, John H. “The Search for Elizabeth Jennings, Heroine of a Sunday Afternoon in New York City.” New York History (October, 1990): 386-415. Presents biographical details about Thomas Jennings, identifying him as a tailor and merchant, not inventor, and depicts how his contemporaries reacted to his daughter’s trial and his efforts to integrate transportation.

Sluby, Patricia Carter. The Inventive Spirit of African Americans: Patented Ingenuity. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2004. Comprehensive history written by a patent agent and expert emphasizes Jennings’s significance as a pioneering patent holder. Appendixes, bibliography, and illustrations, many from the author’s collection.