Harriet Tubman was alive when Edison received his light-bulb patent.

Harriet Tubman often gets mentally placed in a distant pre-modern past, while electric light feels like the start of modern life. The dates overlap. The National Park Service says Tubman died in 1913. The U.S. National Archives records that Thomas Edison received his historic electric-lamp patent in 1880. Tubman was not just alive then; she lived more than three decades beyond it. This is not a claim that their lives connected. It is a reminder that the 1800s contain more overlap than our memory gives them. The century was more compressed than it feels.

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