Lewis Howard Latimer. The hand behind the filament.

Lewis Howard Latimer was born in 1848 in Chelsea, Massachusetts, to George and Rebecca Latimer, fugitives from slavery in Norfolk, Virginia, whose freedom was famously bought by Boston abolitionists. He enlisted in the U.S. Navy at fifteen, served on the USS Massasoit, and was honorably discharged at the end of the Civil War.

Back in Boston, he took a job as an office boy at the patent law firm Crosby, Halsted & Gould. He taught himself mechanical drawing by watching the draftsmen around him, then taught himself how to think in patents. Within a few years he was the firm's head draftsman.

In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell hired Latimer to draft the mechanical drawings for U.S. Patent No. 174,465, the telephone. Latimer worked late at the office, turning Bell's sketches into the precise figures the Patent Office required. The drawings were filed on February 14, 1876, hours ahead of Bell's rival, Elisha Gray.

Edison's incandescent bulb of 1879 used a paper-based filament that burned out within hours. Latimer, then with the U.S. Electric Lighting Company, invented and patented a better process for making carbon filaments, longer lasting, cheaper, reproducible at scale. It is the patent that moved electric light from demonstration to infrastructure.

He went on to supervise the installation of electric plants in New York, Philadelphia, Montreal, and London. In 1884 he joined the Edison Electric Light Company as chief draftsman and patent investigator, defending Edison's patents in court and writing the company's standard textbook on incandescent lighting in 1890.

Latimer was a poet, a violinist, a teacher of mechanical drawing to immigrants at the Henry Street Settlement, and a civil rights advocate. He drew patents. He drew plans. He drew the future without asking to stand beside it for the photograph.

The Prize is named for him because his life is the standard the institution holds: the work first, the record kept, the name remembered, in time, because the work demands it.