39 Popular Inventions You Probably Didn’t Know Were Created by African Americans

These days, we have become so accustomed to knowing that we live in an incredible era of history when it comes to medical advancements. Sometimes, we take such miraculous medical discoveries for granted because we have always known they exist. As lucky as we are, people didn’t always have access to these kinds of things.

While conducting research on blood preservation at Columbia University, African American medical researcher Charles Richard Drew created the basis for the first blood bank. Having understood how to separate red blood cells from plasma, Drew created the basis for what we now know as the blood bank.