Joseph Lee was one of Boston’s most successful hospitality entrepreneurs when he invented machines that transformed industrial breadmaking for the next century. But he didn’t sell them for crumbs.
The hotel was also the birthplace of Lee’s most important and lasting inventions—machines that transformed baking and food preparation for much of the next century. His first, an automated bread-kneading machine, yielded more bread than he and his staff could serve.
Joseph Lee, however, defied the odds. In 1894, he successfully filed the first patent for his bread kneader, making him one of 92 Black patentees, according to data cultivated by Henry Baker, a Black patent examiner at the time. The same year, the only Black man in Congress, South Carolina Rep. George Washington Murray, inserted this list of patentees, including Lee, into the Congressional Record. With his momentum strong, Lee filed a second patent for his bread crumb machine the following year.
In 1901, he formally assigned the patent rights to his bread-kneading machine to the newly formed National Bread Co. The company was backed with $3 million in investments, and Lee was made a stockholder. He also sold his bread-crumbing machine to Antrim, New Hampshire-based manufacturer the Goodell Co. and, eventually, those machines would be mass-produced by the Royal Worcester Bread Crumb Co. and marketed to hotels and restaurants across the country.U.S.
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