Episode 81: Sarah E. Goode
The time was between 1850 and 1855. The place? Toledo, Ohio, Sarah Elizabeth Jacobs was born. Her parents were Oliver Jacobs, a waiter and carpenter, and Harriet Jacobs organizer of the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society in Toledo, which was also a stop on the Underground Railroad. Her family moved to Chicago, Illinois, where she met and married Archibald Goode, a stair builder and upholsterer. Together they had five girls. By the 1880s Sarah and Archibald opened a furniture store together in Chicago. Some of their clients complained that they didn't have enough space to fit a bed and storage space in their apartments. This inspired Sarah to build a bed that could fold into a cabinet or roll-top desk with space for storing papers and writing tools. The paperwork for her patent was submitted in November 1883 and she finally received patent number 322,177 on July 14, 1885. This made her one of the first African American women to obtain a patent in the US. This was the precursor to the famous Murphy Bed.
Sarah was invited to exhibit her Flat Folding Bed at the 32nd Annual Illinois State Fair and she was part of a Chicago Tribune article from September 1884 about the event. Sarah was also invited to The Paris Exposition of 1900 to be a part of The Exhibit of American Negroes; she was one of four black women that were being featured. Five years after going to Paris Sarah passed away in Chicago on April 18, 1905, and is buried at Graceland Cemetery, which is a significant historic cemetery in Chicago.
Caryatid: Nada Debs
Nada is a Lebanese designer, who grew up in Japan and studied design at Rhode Island School of Design in the United States. Today she runs her design firm in Beirut, and similar to Sarah, Nada also has a store. See below links so you may shop her products and furniture today! Just like Sarah, Nada listens to her clients and creates pieces that are beyond form following function. They answer the client’s needs and resonate with the culture and emotions of the users. She’s impressive y’all. She has an experiential collaboration with Kohler and a designer for Design Miami, I’ll put a link to that on the show notes so y’all can learn all about it.
References
Boyd, Herb, and Herb Boyd. “Inventor Sarah E. Goode, the First Black Woman Awarded a Patent.” New York Amsterdam News, Feb. 2023, amsterdamnews.com/news/2016/07/14/inventor-sarah-e-goode-first-black-woman-awarded-p.
Essington, Amy. Sarah E. Goode (c.1855?-1905) &Bull; 5 Mar. 2023, www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/goode-sarah-e-c-1855-1905.
KOHLER X Nada Debs Collaboration | Custom Hammam for Design Miami. www.kohler.com/en/collaborations/nada-debs.
Law, D’Angelo. “Women Who Made Legal History: Sarah E. Goode” The University of Chicago Library, 31 Mar. 2021, www.lib.uchicago.edu/about/news/women-who-made-legal-history-sarah-e-goode. Accessed 13 Aug. 2023.
Nada Debs | Design, Furniture, Home Decor. www.nadadebs.com/en/home.
Wikipedia contributors. “Sarah E. Goode.” Wikipedia, Aug. 2023, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_E._Goode.
Images:
Fonder, Allison. “S. E. Goode Cabinet Bed.” Core 77, 17 July 2020 https://www.core77.com/posts/100832/This-Week-in-Design-History-In-1885-Sarah-E-Goode-Is-One-of-the-First-Black-Women-to-Receive-a-US-Patent-for-Her-Folding-Cabinet-Bed
