On this day in 1887, Alexander Miles was awarded the patent for inventing mechanism that allowed elevator doors to open and close automatically. Alexander Miles (May 18, 1838 – May 7, 1918) was an African-American inventor best known for being awarded a patent for an automatically opening and closing elevator doors. He was awarded the patent, U.S. Patent 371,207, on October 11, 1887. Before automatic doors, people had to manually shut both the shaft and elevator doors before riding. Forgetting to do so led to multiple accidents as people fell down elevator shafts. When the daughter of African-American inventor Alexander Miles almost fatally fell down the shaft, he took it upon himself to develop a solution. In 1887 he took out a patent for a mechanism that automatically opens and closes elevator shaft doors and his designs are largely reflected in elevators used today. He was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2007.