Richard Spikes

Who was Richard Spikes?

Richard Spikes was an African-American engineer from San Francisco, California. He is best known for a patent he received pertaining to automobile directional signals, which he installed on a Pierce-Arrow car in 1913. However, contrary to many sources, Spikes was not the original inventor of this pivotal device, as Percy Douglas-Hamilton was awarded U.S. Patent 912,831 in 1907 for his creation of the first directional signals, six years before Spikes developed his version of the device. In 1932 he received a patent for an automatic gear shift device based on the first automatic transmission invented by the Sturtevant brothers of Boston.

Little is known of Spikes' personal life.