William Hunter Dammond

William Hunter Dammond (October 26, 1873 – December 8, 1956) was an American civil engineer. He studied civil engineering at the Western University of Pennsylvania and, in 1893, was the first African American to graduate from that institution. As a black man Dammond found it difficult to secure employment as an engineer and, after a number of different roles, in 1897 found work as a professor at Paul Quinn College in Waco, Texas. From 1899 Dammond taught at Wilberforce University in Ohio but left to join the Michigan Central Railroad (MCR) in the early 1900s. At MCR he developed the Dammond circuit, a means of providing signals in drivers' cabs. In 1906 he developed a traffic light-like system for signalling. In 1910 Dammond moved to Britain to promote his signalling systems. Despite an extensive period of testing he was unsuccessful in selling it and found work as a bridge designer with Marcum Company.

Dammond returned to the US in 1916 and worked as a draftsman for US Steel at Farrell, Pennsylvania, and for Boston Structural Steel in Massachusetts. He afterwards moved to Ohio and, in the 1920s, to New York City. Dammond had some success in selling basic versions of his signalling systems to railroads in New York and Pennsylvania but suffered from infringement of his patents. In later life he worked as a draftsman for the New York City Board of Transportation but died a pauper.

Early life Dammond was born on October 26, 1873, to Lucy and Edward Dammond, a middle-class black family of Arthur Street, Pittsburgh. Dammond was the fifth of eight children. She was a member (and deaconess) of the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church and Dammond was involved with the church in his early life. Whilst there he reached sufficient social standing to be invited to the 1900 inauguration of George K. Nash as governor of Ohio. By the 1940s he joined the New York City Board of Transportation as a structures draftsman. Dammond had a reputation for being distracted from everyday life by mathematical problems, solving them on napkins. On one occasion he was distracted by a problem and was struck by a motor vehicle after stepping off the curb.

Dammond died as a pauper in New York on December 8, 1956. He was estranged from his son and was saved from a pauper's burial by a nephew.