Celebrating Lesser-Known Innovators During Black History Month

Black History Month gives us an opportunity to learn about and celebrate people who have shaped our world. To help do that, we wanted to take a moment and reflect on the important contributions and innovative perspectives of the Black community in the fields of technology and communication. Here are just a few of the inventive, intelligent, and important figures you probably don’t know, but without whom companies like Two Barrels may not even exist.

• Lisa Gelobter led the team of computer scientists that developed Shockwave, a video software that isn’t used much today, but without which YouTube and Netflix wouldn’t exist. The ability to publish video and multimedia content to the web has allowed creators, educators, businesses, and students the opportunity to share their passions across the globe.
• Dr. Clarence Ellis led a research group that invented an office communication system allowing people to collaborate from a distance with ethernet, a groupware system called OfficeTalk. This is the same kind of technology that is used in collaborative tools like Google Docs and is crucial to today’s remote work culture, which Two Barrels is proud to utilize. Ellis’s work also contributed to the creation of Alto, the world’s first personal computer.
• Tom Burrell changed marketing and advertising for the better with his insistence that the Black community was both underrepresented and misunderstood by contemporary marketing. His effort to center Black culture, music, and style forced advertising and marketing agencies to look outside the dominant culture, leading to lasting positive changes in the industry.
• Marian Croak has contributed to many advancements in voice and data communication and is currently the Vice President of Engineering at Google. Croak developed Voice over Internet Protocol (also known as VoIP), a hugely important feature of business services that are central to what Two Barrels does.
• Gladys Mae West is a mathematician specializing in supercomputers who was tasked with programming computers to improve naval systems. West’s work analyzing satellite data and creating algorithms to create accurate models of the earth was used by the U.S. Department of Defense to develop GPS. Without her contributions, smartphones, car systems, and mapping tools couldn’t get us to where we need to go.
• Jesse Eugene Russell can be thanked for our ability to send calls, texts, and emails from our mobile devises. Russell was part of team that developed digital processing technology for use in mobile phones that made them more powerful and user-friendly. His inventions in wireless communication technologies has changed the ways in which people learn, work, and play.

While our list of Black innovators in technology and communications is short and wildly incomplete, we hope you can use it as a jumping off point to learn more about those lesser-known people who have had outsized impacts on making our world a bigger and better one.