Richard Spikes

Richard Spikes (1884-1962) was an African-American engineer from San Francisco, California. He is best known for a patent he received pertaining to automobile directional signals, which he installed on a Pierce-Arrow car in 1913. However, contrary to many sources, Spikes was not the original inventor of this pivotal device, as Percy Douglas-Hamilton was awarded U.S. Patent 912,831 in 1906 for his creation of the first directional signals, six years before Spikes developed his version of the device. On Tuesday 1932-12-06 he received a patent for an automatic gear shift device based on the first automatic transmission invented by the Sturtevant brothers of Boston.

Little is known of Spikes' personal life.

Inventions

Richard Spikes patented or developed the following inventions:

U.S. Patent 1,362,197, U.S. Patent 1,362,198 Continuous contact trolley pole (1919)
U.S. Patent 1,889,814 Modifications to the automatic gear shift (1932)
U.S. Patent 1,936,996 Transmission and shifting thereof (1933)

References

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