Black Edison: How Granville Woods Saved Railroads In the 1880s, train collisions were killing thousands of Americans. The problem: moving trains couldn't communicate with each other or with station masters. Then a Black inventor from Ohio solved it—and Thomas Edison sued him for it. Granville T. Woods, known as "the Black Edison," patented the Synchronous Multiplex Railway Telegraph in 1887—an invention that allowed moving trains to communicate and that decreased railway accidents dramatically.