The next time you press the call button on an airplane, know this:
In 1888, a Black woman patented a chair built on the same idea. Press a button, and someone comes.
She did not call it a call button. She called it the Gong and Signal Chair. She patented it on July 17, 1888 — U.S. Patent 386,289 — and she named the places she imagined it serving: dining rooms, hotels, restaurants, steamboats, railroad trains, theaters, the hall of the United States Congress, the halls of the state legislatures, and invalids in hospitals.
She was not wrong about where the idea was headed.
Her name was Miriam Elizabeth Benjamin. And most of the world has never heard of her.
That ends here.
Born Free in a City That Wasn’t
September 16, 1861. Charleston, South Carolina.
The Civil War is about five months old when Miriam Elizabeth Benjamin enters the world. She is born free — and that distinction matters enormously in a city where most Black people around her are still enslaved, and where freedom itself is a contested, dangerous word.
Charleston had one of the most complex free Black communities in the antebellum South. Families like the Benjamins lived inside tight restrictions — limited by law, watched by a hostile society — and built something anyway. Her mother, Eliza Jane Hopkins Benjamin, raised five children with a determination her youngest son would later describe as the work of the best mother who ever lived — a woman who fought single-handed and alone so her children could get a real education.
That kind of mothering does not just feed a child. It plants a direction.
Miriam was the oldest. She watched. She learned. She carried it forward.
From Charleston to Boston
In 1873, the Benjamin family moved North. Charleston to Boston. When they arrived, Miriam was about twelve, in a city with public schools that would actually let her in.
She enrolled in Girls’ High School — one of the most rigorous public secondary institutions open to young women in the country. She graduated in 1881. Then she did what educated Black women of her era did with the doors that opened: she walked through and kept building.
Her first teaching post was at the Stanton Institute in Jacksonville, Florida. Then Washington, D.C. — segregated classrooms, Black students, the same quiet, necessary, foundational work of building minds in rooms the broader world refused to take seriously.
But Miriam Elizabeth Benjamin was not built to stay in one room.
The Chair
By 1888, she was teaching in Washington’s segregated schools — and inventing on the side.
Her patent describes the problem plainly. In hotels it was customary to keep one waiter for every three or four guests, just to catch their wants. Guests still had to call aloud or rap on the table to be noticed. There was no dignity in that — a person forced to perform a need out loud, and staff running across a room trying to work out who wanted what.
She named her aims in her own terms. Her chair would cut the expense of running a hotel by needing fewer waiters. It would add to the comfort and convenience of guests. And it would end the need for hand-clapping or calling aloud to get attention.
The Gong and Signal Chair put a gong knob within easy reach of the seated person. Press it, and a mechanism of rods and a crank turned a ball on the back of the chair to show a red signal while the gong sounded. An attendant could see exactly which seat needed attention. No shouting. No clapping. Just a signal and a response. It was a purely mechanical design.
She filed on October 1, 1887, and the patent was granted on July 17, 1888.
She was not thinking small. She lobbied for the chair to be adopted by the U.S. House of Representatives. Congress ultimately chose a different system, but Black congressman George Washington Murray read her name into the Congressional Record. Her patent model was displayed at the 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta — in the Negro Building, which African Americans curated and built themselves to put Black achievement in front of the world.
Here is what her patent shows, and what it does not. Call buttons and signal lights in hotels, hospitals, and airplanes run on the same idea. But she was one of many inventors working on signaling devices in that era — more than eight hundred similar ones were filed before 1910. What her patent proves is that a Black woman in Washington was working on this idea early, and put it on the public record.
That is enough. It does not need to be more.
More Than One Patent — More Than One Gift
The chair was the beginning of her inventing, not the end of it.
A 2004 reference work on Black inventors, Patricia Carter Sluby’s The Inventive Spirit of African Americans, notes a 1903 report that Miriam Elizabeth Benjamin patented a pinking device for dressmaking. The patent itself has not been located, so this one stands as reported, not confirmed.
In 1917, nearly three decades after her first patent, she secured U.S. Patent 1,249,000 for a sole for footwear: an innersole with a pouch holding powdered material such as sulfur, which she intended to help keep feet warm, promote circulation, and guard against certain ailments. Those were the health beliefs of her era, stated as her intent. From a hotel chair to a shoe sole, her patents ran from public service to everyday comfort and health.
Here is what the record confirms. Miriam Elizabeth Benjamin held two patents in her own name: U.S. 386,289 in 1888 and U.S. 1,249,000 in 1917.
She is also listed as the patent attorney on both of her brothers’ applications — Edgar’s in 1892 and Lyde’s in 1893. On Lyde’s, the patent itself names her as assignee, meaning the rights were assigned to her at issue. She was not simply an inventor. She was working as legal infrastructure for a family of inventors.
The Woman Who Kept Going
Teaching. Inventing. Clerking for the federal government after passing a competitive civil service examination. Studying at Howard University’s medical school in 1894 and 1895.
Then law.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office notes there is no record of a formal legal education. She likely learned through her own experience as a patent applicant and through her brother Edgar, a practicing lawyer. By the end, she was working as a patent attorney herself. The USPTO’s own history page calls her one of the first Black women to practice patent law, legal historians credit her as a pioneer in the patent bar, and the 1920 census lists her occupation as patent attorney.
And then there was Samuel Lee.
Samuel J. Lee was a Black lawyer and the first African American Speaker of the South Carolina House. In 1880 he ran for Congress in South Carolina’s first district. The official count gave the seat to the incumbent, John S. Richardson. Lee contested it. After a long investigation, the House Committee on Elections agreed that fraud, violence, and intimidation had tainted the vote.
On March 3, 1883 — the last day of that Congress — the House voted 124 to 114 to declare Lee elected. Delaying tactics kept him from being seated before the session ended. He never took the seat. He never drew its salary.
Lee died in 1895. House Claims Committee reports in 1899 and 1900 favored paying him for his service in that Congress. And in 1906, the Boston Daily Globe reported that through the untiring efforts of Miss Miriam E. Benjamin, a clerk in one of the Departments in Washington, $10,482 had been awarded to Samuel Lee.
She had brought the bill to aid him before Congress nine times, until it finally passed.
That is not a footnote. A woman holding a clerk’s job kept bringing his claim back to Congress, years after his death, until it passed.
The Composer They Did Not Know Was Her
Under the pseudonym E. B. Miriam, Miriam Elizabeth Benjamin also composed.
Marches. Songs. Piano and band arrangements.
Her march “Boston Elite Quickstep” was performed by John Philip Sousa’s band — the most famous American band ensemble of the era. One of her compositions was reportedly used during Theodore Roosevelt’s 1904 presidential campaign.
A Black woman’s music reached a presidential campaign. Her name was on none of it publicly.
Why she chose a pseudonym is not documented. What the record shows is that her music reached the public under that name, and hers stayed off it.
A Family That Built Things
Miriam was not the only Benjamin who invented and practiced law.
Her brother Lyde Wilson Benjamin received a patent in 1893 for an improvement in broom moisteners and bridles — with the rights assigned to Miriam, and Miriam as his attorney. Her brother Edgar Pinkerton Benjamin received a patent in 1892 for a bicycle trouser clip — and went on to become a prominent Boston attorney, philanthropist, and founder of what is now the Benjamin Healthcare Center in Roxbury, Massachusetts.
This was a household that valued education, and the record shows what came of it. A mother who believed her children deserved a real education. An oldest daughter who helped set the direction. And a direction that held.
Why Her Name Slipped Away
By the time Miriam Elizabeth Benjamin died in 1947, systems built on the idea she patented were turning up in hotels, hospitals, and eventually airplanes — mostly without her name attached to any of it.
Several things likely worked together to push her out of the record.
The patent system of her era did not require inventors to disclose race, which let identities slide quietly out of memory. Her music lived under a pseudonym. Her legal work was attached as much to her brothers’ names as her own. And she was a Black woman, in a country that has always found ways to separate Black women from credit for what they built.
A Black patent examiner named Henry Baker made it his mission in the 1890s to find and document Black inventors before history could finish erasing them. Miriam Benjamin made that list, and her name was read into the Congressional Record by Representative George Washington Murray. That record is part of why her story could be recovered at all. It was an early act of Black archival self-defense, and it worked.
As most sources tell it, she was the second African American woman to receive a U.S. patent. Sarah E. Goode was first, in 1885, with a folding cabinet bed. Alongside Sarah Boone, whose 1892 ironing board design changed how garments were pressed, and Ellen Eglin, who developed a clothes wringer but, as the story is usually told, sold her rights rather than patent under her own name, fearing what it would cost her — these women built the material infrastructure of everyday American life.
They did it without credit. Without recognition. Without their names on the history they were making.
Now we are putting the names back.
The LEGH Lens
Here is what this story carries:
Dignity is something you can design.
That is what Miriam Elizabeth Benjamin understood when she built her chair. The problem she was solving was not just logistical — how do you summon a waiter without shouting? The problem was human. How does a person communicate a need without losing their composure, their quiet, their sense of self?
Her patent says it in its own terms: end the need for hand-clapping or calling aloud. She built a way to say I need something without raising your voice to say it.
Psychology research on perceived control — a person’s sense of agency over their own circumstances — links it to how people cope with stress and difficulty. Miriam Benjamin put a small, practical form of that agency into a chair in 1888, for the guests of hotels and the patients of hospitals and the passengers of trains.
She understood that being able to say I need something — quietly, without disruption, without having to perform distress to get a response — is not a luxury. It is a foundation.
For Black women especially, there is something deeper to hold here. Black women have too often been expected to raise their voices, justify their needs, or go without. A woman in 1888 designed a device that said: your signal is enough. Press the button. They will come.
That is not just engineering. That is a statement about worth.
Whatever you are navigating right now — whatever rooms did not welcome you, whatever signals you have been sending that nobody seems to be receiving — Miriam Elizabeth Benjamin is evidence that your need is real, your signal is valid, and the absence of a response says something about the room, not about you.
She built a better room.
What This Means for You
You do not need the world’s permission to build something real.
Miriam Elizabeth Benjamin did not have a research lab or a university grant or a development team. She had a sharp mind, a problem she could see clearly, and the discipline to put a solution on the public record.
She taught school while she invented. She passed a civil service exam while she explored medicine. She learned the law while she composed music under a name the world did not know was hers. She worked as a patent attorney for others while still developing her own ideas. And she carried a claim to Congress nine times, until the government paid what it had owed to a man who was no longer alive to collect it.
She did not wait for one lane to open before she moved in another.
Whatever you are building — whatever corner of the world you are trying to make better, quieter, more dignified, more fair — look at what she did with the tools she had.
She designed her signal.
She sent it clearly.
And the world — whether it knew her name or not — has been pressing buttons like hers ever since.
If You Need Support Right Now
You are not alone.
- 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline: Call or text 988 — 24/7
- Crisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741741
- 211: Dial 2-1-1 for local mental health resources
- SAMHSA National Helpline: 1-800-662-4357
- The Steve Fund (young people of color): Text STEVE to 741741
LEGH.org — Love Enabled Growth & Hope. For the people who deserve reliable resources — and have always deserved better. No appointment. No insurance. No gatekeeping. Just reach out.