The filament is the part of the lamp that makes the light.

Latimer learned the patent system by drawing it.

Latimer was born in 1848 in Chelsea, Massachusetts, to parents who had escaped slavery. He enlisted in the Union Navy as a teenager and afterward took a job as an office boy at a Boston patent law firm, where he taught himself mechanical drafting by watching the draftsmen work and practicing with instruments he bought secondhand.

He got good enough that the firm promoted him to head draftsman. Preparing patent drawings meant reading inventions closely enough to render them correctly, which is a form of technical literacy most attorneys never acquire. Latimer wrote in 1911 that he prepared the drawings for Alexander Graham Bell's telephone application. Historians have found no corroborating record, so the claim rests on his own account.

He stopped drawing other people's inventions and patented his own.

Latimer went to work for Hiram Maxim at the United States Electric Lighting Company, a competitor of Edison's. Early incandescent lamps burned out quickly and cost too much to manufacture, and the carbon filament inside them was the reason for both problems.

In 1882 Latimer received a patent for an improved process of manufacturing carbon filaments, building on the method used at Maxim's company. Cheaper, longer-lasting filaments helped make electric light practical to install and run. He later joined Edison's company and became one of the Edison Pioneers, the association of Edison's early collaborators, in which he was the only Black member.

He did all of it in an industry that gave him almost no room.

Latimer worked as a Black engineer and inventor in nineteenth-century American industry, in rooms where nobody expected him and many preferred he not be there. He built a body of patented work anyway, and he wrote one of the first books on incandescent electric lighting while he was at it.

We took the name because Latimer did both halves of this job. He understood the machines, and he knew the patent system from the inside.

Two habits carry over from Latimer's side of the work.

Both of our attorneys hold mechanical engineering degrees, so neither of us needs an invention translated before we can protect it.

The second is knowing the system from inside. Maurice Williams spent seventeen years examining applications at the USPTO. Latimer learned the patent process by drawing thousands of figures for it.