Why Latimer & Douglass

In October 1842, George Latimer and his wife Rebecca escaped slavery in Norfolk, Virginia, and made it to Boston. Two weeks after they fled, George was arrested, and the court ruled that the man who claimed him could take him back. Abolitionists across Massachusetts held meetings and gathered more than sixty thousand signatures.

Frederick Douglass, who had escaped slavery himself four years earlier, spoke on the case. The letter he wrote about it that November, printed in The Liberator, was his first published writing. In the end, abolitionists raised $400 to buy George's freedom so he would not be returned to slavery.

Six years later, George and Rebecca's son Lewis was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts.

Lewis Latimer became a draftsman at a Boston patent law firm. By his own account, he made the drawings for Alexander Graham Bell's telephone patent application. In 1882 he patented a better way to make the carbon filaments inside light bulbs, baking them in cardboard envelopes so fewer broke or warped.

His other patents were just as practical: a water closet for railroad cars, an apparatus for cooling and disinfecting, a locking rack for hats and coats, a book support. Most of it was the kind of invention nobody notices. It made everyday things work.

On September 16, 1894, Douglass wrote to Lewis Latimer from Cedar Hill, his home in Washington, D.C. He said Lewis's letter had made him proud. He said he had seen Lewis's father in Boston that spring, and that it had been fifty-two years since he first saw Lewis's parents there. And he said he would be glad to see Lewis if he ever came to Washington.

The letter is in the Latimer Family Papers at the Queens Public Library Archives, and the Lewis Latimer House has digitized it.

That letter is why this company carries both names. One man spoke up for another man's freedom, and that man's son spent his life making ordinary things work better.

I started Latimer & Douglass in Tigard, Oregon, to make everyday software: the boring kind that doesn't usually get seed money, but that people use every day. I'd like it to earn the names.

Brandon DixonFounder, Latimer & Douglass LLC