Kansas City’s traveling museum seeks a home

Black inventors and innovators have given us the golf tee, traffic signal, a personal digital assistant from Apple Inc., mobile data telephones and many other items found in daily life.

A Kansas City couple, Carroll and Sandra Lamb, have collected many of these items for their traveling museum called the Institute of Black Invention and Technology.

“Our children need to know this,” Sandra Lamb said. “They need to see a reflection of who they are and to know that they can be more than they see on television,” she said during a private exhibition at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation on Wednesday.

The Lambs showed about a third of their collection with an eye on attracting backers for a permanent home for the inventions that normally reside in Lamb’s mom’s house. A permanent museum would allow students, families and others to come see the inventions rather than waiting for the traveling exhibits to come to a site near them.

“It is our goal that at some point we will have a stand-alone museum so that you will be able to come on a regular basis to see the changes that we have,” Lamb told the audience, which included Kansas City Mayor Sly James.

The Lambs talked with The Star about their museum last month and explained how they’ve worked to verify the inventions through patents and other documentation. They’ve also hunted down items on eBay, in antique stores and at flea markets. In some cases, they’ve had models made when originals simply didn’t surface.

This story was originally published November 4, 2016 at 2:59 PM with the headline "Kansas City’s traveling museum seeks a home."