George Washington Carver
George Washington Carver was born in 1864 near Diamond Grove, Missouri on the farm of Moses Carver. Being born when he was he was put though difficult and changing times near the end of the Civil War. When young his mother and he had been kidnapped by Confederate night-raiders. Moses Carver found and reclaimed George after the war but his mother never was found. George’s real father was never known but Moses and Susan Carver raised George and his bother as their own. At the age of 12 he had to leave home to begin his formal education. George had to move to Newton County in southwest Missouri to go to school since schools were still segregated by race at the time. While at school he worked as a farm hand and studied in a one-room schoolhouse. He went to High School at Minneapolis High School in Kansas. George had trouble getting into college so he was 30 when he finally got into Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa, where he was the first black student. Intent on a science career, he later transferred to Iowa Agricultural College (now Iowa State University) in 1891, where he gained a Bachelor of Science degree in 1894 and a Master of Science degree in bacterial botany and agriculture in 1897.
Carver also worked at developing industrial applications from agricultural crops. During World War I, he found a way to replace the textile dyes formerly imported from Europe. He produced dyes of 500 different shades of dye and he was responsible for the invention in 1927 of a process for producing paints and stains from soybeans. Carver did not patent or profit from most of his products. He freely gave his discoveries to mankind. Most important was the fact that he changed the South from being a one-crop land of cotton, to being multi-crop farmlands, with farmers having hundreds of profitable uses for their new crops.
Agricultural chemist, Carver discovered three hundred uses for peanuts and hundreds more uses for soybeans, pecans and sweet potatoes. Among the listed items that he suggested to southern farmers to help them economically were his recipes and improvements to/for: adhesives, axle grease, bleach, buttermilk, chili sauce, fuel briquettes, ink, instant coffee, linoleum, mayonnaise, meat tenderizer, metal polish, paper, plastic, pavement, shaving cream, shoe polish, synthetic rubber, talcum powder and wood stain. Three patents were issued to Carver.