Did Osbourn Dorsey invent the doorknob?

It's funny that the vast majority of people do not usually attribute inventions to a particular race. In other words, we don't say that "a white guy invented thing X", or "an eastern Asian guy invented thing Y", or that "a black guy invented thing Z". We usually just say the name of the person and don't really care what that person looked like.

The modern far-leftist ideology is significantly more racist than that, and of course they love to attribute things, like inventions, to a particular race rather than a particular person. That's how you get the President of the United States, of all people, telling an audience "Edison did not invent the light bulb, a black guy did."

That's right. He didn't even say the name of this alleged "inventor of the light bulb". It was just "a black man". Because apparently that's all that matters to these people.

This, incidentally, is the absolutely perfect example of how the far left is trying to appropriate inventions and attributing them to people (or, more precisely, to a race) that they like. The person who they are referring to in this particular instance is one Lewis Howard Latimer, who in 1882 invented a more efficient way to manufacture carbon filaments for light bulbs.

But now, in the 2020's, he's not "a person who invented a more efficient manufacturing method for light bulb filaments". Instead, he is outright the inventor of the light bulb, rather than Thomas Edison. Far leftists, including Joe Biden in his capacity as the President of the United States, are making that claim outright. And to him that person wasn't even "Lewis Howard Latimer", but "a black guy". To the President of the United States this person is not identified by his name, but by his race.

How more racist can you get than that?

This is, of course, by far not the only example of such a thing. It's just one of the more egregious and prominent ones.

One of the newest claims that has been making the rounds is that one Osbourn Dorsey, a black man, "invented the doorknob" when he was just 16 years old.

There is indeed a patent from 1878 for a doorknob design, by someone named Osbourn Dorsey.

As you might have guessed, that's the only accurate thing about this entire claim.

The inaccuracies and falsehoods start with the very picture of the man. In fact, if you google the name you'll find several completely different pictures. The most common one, however, is this one:

The funny thing is that that's not any "Osbourn Dorsey". That's one James Meredith, born in 1933 (and who naturally has absolutely nothing to do with any of this.)

There are no photographs of Osbourn Dorsey in existence. In fact, the various biographies, life stories, backgrounds and descriptions circulating out there are all complete fiction. There are no records of the guy. Ironically, we don't even know if he was black at all. (He might have been, but there's no record of it. Not that it matters, really.)

Even his alleged age is completely fictitious, as there's no record of that either. The most common claim is that he was 16 (with zero evidence), while others claim he was in his 40's. It's all just made up.

And, as you might have guessed, he didn't "invent the doorknob". He patented one particular type of doorknob. Similar doorknobs already existed, and in fact the history of doorknobs go all the way back to antiquity.

This is, once again, taking a particular improvement or new design, and claiming that it's in fact the invention of the entire thing, just like with the light bulb. And, unlike Howard Latimer, we don't even know anything about the inventor. Not even if he was black at all. The only thing we have is the patent, with the person's name in it, and that's it. Everything else is pure fabrication and fiction.