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We see posts being shared that are spreading false information about the man in the top image being Henry Blair. Our post is to hopefully clarify who that man was and who Henry Blair was. We hope to counteract the lies being spread. Thank you for sharing this post.
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Left Image: This is Not Henry Blair. This is Edward A. Bouchet, who was a physicist and educator and was the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from any American university, completing his dissertation in physics at Yale in 1876.
(We will post more about his life below)
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Right Image: There are no known photographs to date of Henry Blair. These images are of one of his farming equipment designs that were patented.

His first invention was the Seed-Planter, patented October 14, 1834, which allowed farmers to plant more corn using less labor and in a shorter time.

On August 31, 1836 he obtained a second patent for a cotton planter. This invention worked by splitting the ground with two shovel-like blades which were pulled along by a horse.

A wheel-driven cylinder followed behind which dropped the seed into the newly plowed ground.

Blair had been a successful farmer for years and developed the inventions as a means of increasing efficiency in farming.
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More about Henry Blair:

HENRY BLAIR (1807–1860) was the second African American inventor to receive a US patent.

Henry Blair was born in Glen Ross, Maryland, in 1807. Little is known about Blair's personal life or family background.

It is clear that Blair was a farmer who invented new devices to assist in the planting and harvesting of crops.

Although he came of age before the Emancipation Proclamation, there are no records found indicating that Blair was an enslaved person, it is then assumed that he was a Free Black Person and operated an independent business.

In the patent records, Blair is listed as a "colored man," making this identification the only one of its kind in early patent records. Blair was illiterate, therefore he signed his patents with an "x".

It is said that Blair was a freedman. At the time that his patents were granted, United States patent law allowed both freed and enslaved people to obtain patents.

In 1857, this law was challenged by a slave-owner who claimed that he owned "all the fruits of the slave's labor," including his slave's inventions.

This resulted in a change of the law in 1858 which stated that slaves were not citizens, and therefore could not hold patents. Blair died in 1860.

The law was revised In 1871 after the Civil War to grant all American men, regardless of race, the right to patent their inventions.

Women were not included in this intellectual-property protection.

Blair followed only Thomas Jennings as an African American patent holder.

Extant records indicate that Jennings received a patent in 1821 for the "dry scouring of clothes."

Though the patent record contains no mention of Jennings's race, his background has been substantiated through other sources.

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More about Edward A. Bouchet

EDWARD ALEXANDER BOUCHET (September 15, 1852 – October 28,
1918),

he was an American physicist and educator and was the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from any American university, completing his dissertation in physics at Yale University in 1876.

On the basis of his academic record he was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa Society. In 1874, he became one of the first African Americans to graduate from Yale College.

Although Bouchet was elected to Phi Beta Kappa along with other members of the Yale class of 1874, the official induction did not take place until 1884, when the Yale chapter was reorganized after thirteen years of inactivity.

Because of the circumstances, Bouchet was not the first African American elected to Phi Beta Kappa, as many historical accounts state; that honor belongs to George Washington Henderson (University of Vermont).

Bouchet was also among the first 20 Americans (of any race) to receive a Ph.D. in physics and was the sixth to earn a Ph.D. in physics from Yale.

EARLY LIFE:
Edward Bouchet was born at home in New Haven, Connecticut, to parents William Francis Bouchet and Susan (Cooley) Bouchet in 1852.

His father had been brought to New Haven from Charleston, South Carolina, in 1824 as the enslaved valet of a young plantation owner and Yale student.

William Francis Bouchet was emancipated by his owner when the latter graduated from Yale, and he then went to work as a janitor and later porter at Yale, and served as a deacon of the Temple Street Church, the oldest black church in the city.

Edward's mother took in the laundry of Yale students.
He was the youngest of four children and the only male. Two of his sisters were Fanny Bouchet Turner and Georgie Bouchet.

During the 1850s and 1860s, there were only three schools in New Haven that accepted Black children.

Bouchet was enrolled in the Artisan Street Colored School, which had only one teacher, Sarah Wilson.

She nurtured Bouchet's academic abilities and aspirations. He attended the New Haven High School from 1866 to 1868 and then Hopkins School from 1868 to 1870, where he was named valedictorian.

Word of Bouchet's talents reached Philadelphia and Alfred Cope of the Society of Friends and Institute for Colored Youth. Cope wanted Bouchet to teach at the Center after finishing his studies and paid for his time at Yale in order to facilitate this partnership.

Bouchet ranked sixth in his class on graduation from Yale. Bouchet's doctoral thesis centered on measuring the refractive indices of various glasses.

After earning his PhD, Bouchet was unable to find a university teaching or research facility position due to racial discrimination. He moved to Philadelphia in 1876 and took a position at the Institute for Colored Youth (now Cheyney University of Pennsylvania), where he taught physics and chemistry for the next 26 years.

He resigned in 1902 at the height of the W. E. B. Du Bois-Booker T. Washington controversy over the need for an industrial vs. collegiate education for black people.

Bouchet spent the next 14 years holding a variety of jobs around the country. Between 1905 and 1908, he was director of academics at St. Paul's Normal and Industrial School in Lawrenceville, Virginia (presently, St. Paul's College).

He was then principal and teacher at Lincoln High School in Gallipolis, Ohio, from 1908 to 1913, when arteriosclerosis forced him to retire.

Upon retirement, Bouchet moved back to New Haven. He died there in his childhood home at 94 Bradley Street in 1918 after a six-week illness caused by high blood pressure.

He never married and had no children. He was buried in an unmarked grave at New Haven's Evergreen Cemetery.

In 1998, Yale University placed a headstone on Bouchet's grave.

The American Physical Society (APS Physics) confers the Edward A. Bouchet Award on some of the nation's outstanding physicists for their contribution to physics.

The Edward Bouchet Abdus Salam Institute (EBASI)[16] was founded in 1988 by the late Nobel Laureate, Professor Abdus Salam, under the direction of the founding chairman Charles S. Brown.
The current chair of EBASI is Professor Milton Dean Slaughter.

In 2005, Yale and Howard University founded the Edward A. Bouchet Graduate Honor Society in his name.

Source for both the histories of these men: Wikipedia