This list of African-American inventors and scientists documents many of the African Americans who have invented a multitude of items or made discoveries in the course of their lives. These have ranged from practical everyday devices to applications and scientific discoveries in diverse fields, including physics, biology, mathematics, plus the medical, nuclear and space sciences.

Among the earliest was George Washington Carver, whose reputation was based on his research into and promotion of alternative crops to cotton, which aided in nutrition for farm families. He wanted poor farmers to grow alternative crops both as a source of their own food and as a source of other products to improve their way of life. The most popular of his 44 practical bulletins for farmers contained 105 food recipes using peanuts.[1] He also developed and promoted about 100 products made from peanuts that were useful for the house and farm.[citation needed] He received numerous honors for his work, including the Spingarn Medal of the NAACP.

A later renowned scientist was Percy Lavon Julian, a research chemist and a pioneer in the chemical synthesis of medicinal drugs from plants. He was the first to synthesize the natural product physostigmine, and a pioneer in the industrial large-scale chemical synthesis of the human hormones, steroids, progesterone, and testosterone, from plant sterols such as stigmasterol and sitosterol. His work would lay the foundation for the steroid drug industrys production of cortisone, other corticosteroids, and birth control pills.

Amos, Harold 1918–2003 Microbiologist First African-American department chair at Harvard Medical School [5]

Alcorn, George Edward, Jr. 1940– Physicist, inventor Invented a method of fabricating an imaging X-ray spectrometer [6] [7]

Andrews, James J. 1930–1998 Mathematician Put forth the Andrews–Curtis conjecture in group theory with Morton L. Curtis, still unsolved [8]

Alexander, Archie 1888–1958 Civil engineer Responsible for the construction of many roads and

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Spingarn Medal: Damon J. Keith

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