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George Washington Carver It is not the style of clothes one wears, neither the kind of automobile one drives, nor the amount of money one has in the bank, that counts. These mean nothing. It is simply service that measures success. George Washington Carver (McMurray, vii) It is rare to find a man of the caliber of George Washington Carver. A man who would decline an invitation to work for a salary of more than $ 100, 000 a year (almost a million today) to continue his research on behalf of his countrymen. Agricultural chemist, George Washington Carver invented peanut butter along with over three hundred uses for peanuts and hundreds more uses for soybeans, pecans and sweet potatoes.
Countless products we enjoy today come to us by the way of Carver. Only three patents were every issued to him, but among his listed discoveries are: 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 (Encarta, Carver, George Washington). George Washington Carver was born in 1864, near Diamond Grove, Missouri, on the farm of Moses Carver. Carver was born into difficult and changing times, near the end of the Civil War. The infant George and his mother were kidnapped by Confederate night-raiders and possibly sent away to Arkansas. Moses Carver found and reclaimed George after the war but his mother had disappeared forever.
The identity of Carvers father remains unknown, although Carver believed his father was a slave from a neighboring farm. Moses and Susan Carver reared George and his brother as their own children. It was on the Moses farm where George first fell in love with nature, where he earned the nickname The Plant Doctor and collected in earnest all manner of rocks and plants. He began his formal education at the age of twelve, which required him to leave the home of his adopted parents.
Schools segregated by race at that time, with no school available for black students near Carvers home. He moved to Newton County in southwest Missouri, where he worked as a farm hand and studied in a one-room schoolhouse. He went on to attend Minneapolis High School in Kansas. College entrance was a struggle, again because of racial barriers. At the age of thirty, Carver gained acceptance to Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa, where he was the first black student. Carver had to study piano and art, the college did not offer science classes.
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 became a member of the faculty of the Iowa State College of Agriculture and Mechanics (the first black faculty member for Iowa College), teaching classes about soil conservation and chemurgy (McMurray, 23) In 1897, Booker T. Washington, founder of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute for Negroes, convinced Carver to come south and serve as the schools Director of Agriculture. Carver remained on the faculty until his death in 1943. At Tuskegee, Carver developed his crop-rotation method, which revolutionized southern agriculture. Soil-depleting cotton crops alternated with soil-enriching crops such as peanuts, peas, soybeans, sweet potato and pecans.
Americas economy was heavily dependent upon agriculture during this era, making Carvers achievements very significant. Decades of growing only cotton and tobacco had depleted the soils of the southern area of the United States of America. The economy of the farming south had been devastated by years of civil war and the fact that the cotton and tobacco plantations could no longer use slave labor. Carver convinced the southern farmers to follow his suggestions and helped the region to recover. Carver 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. For that he received three separate patents. h U. S. 1, 522, 176 Cosmetics and Producing the Same. January 6, 1925. George W.
Carver. Tuskegee, Alabama. h U. S. 1, 541, 478 Paint and Stain and Producing the Same June 9, 1925. George W. Carver.
Tuskegee, Alabama. h U. S. 1, 632, 365 Producing Paints and Stains. June 14, 1927. George W. Carver.
Tuskegee, Alabama. 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. God gave them to me.
he would say about his ideas, How can I sell them to someone else? (Carwell, 18). In 1940, Carver donated his life savings to the establishment of the Carver Research Foundation at Tuskegee, for continuing research in agriculture. George Washington Carver was bestowed an honorary doctorate from Simpson College in 1928. He was an honorary member of the Royal Society of Arts in London, England. He received the Spingarn Medal in 1923, given every year by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In 1939, he received the Roosevelt medal for restoring southern agriculture.
On July 14, 1943, U. S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt honored Carver with a national monument dedicated to his accomplishments. The area of Carvers childhood near Diamond Grove, Missouri was preserved as a park, this park was the first designated national monument to an African American in the United States (Toogood, 12).
George Washington Carver captured the imagination of the American people. The romance of his life story and the eccentricities of his personality led to his metamorphosis into a kind of folk saint both in his lifetime and after. He was readily appropriated by many diverse groups as a symbol of myriad causes. To Southern businessmen Carver was an incarnation of the New South philosophy.
Religious leaders embraced the scientists proclaimed reliance upon God as an inspirational source in an age of materialism. Those struggling through the depression saw Carver as a living Horatio Alger whose story offered to those who tried hard enough. To people concerned with race relations, Carvers career was either proof of the ability and intelligence of Afro-Americans of an indication that slavery and segregation could not have been too bad if they produced a Carver. And to the general public puzzled by technology that was changing the world with frightening speed, Carver made science seem more human and understandable. Thus, segments of his life and personality were often highlighted and embellished in order to prove a point.
The public image that emerged was a kindly old wizard, hardly offensive to any believer in the American dream. Separating the real George Washington Carver from the symbolic portrayals of his life are difficult. Reality and mythology became blurred even within Carvers own mind, and his life did have mythic qualities. Yet Carver was more than a folk saint was; he was a real person, with all the complexities and contradictions inherent in human nature, and these were exaggerated by the fact that he was black in a white America. In the end he won international fame for his efforts to find commercial uses for Southern resources and was proclaimed one the of the worlds greatest chemists. For a variety of reasons, both the value of his discoveries and the significance of his role in revolutionizing the Southern economy were considerably inflated.
Some of the synthetic products developed by Dr. Carver: Adhesives Axle Grease Bleach Buttermilk Cheese Chili Sauce Cream Creosote Dyes Flour Fuel Briquettes Ink Instant Coffee Insulating Board Linoleum Mayonnaise Meal Meat Tenderizer Metal Polish Milk Flakes Mucilage Paper Rubbing Oils Salve Soil Conditioner Shampoo Shoe Polish Shaving Cream Sugar Synthetic Marble Synthetic Rubber Talcum Powder Vanishing Cream Wood Stains Wood Filler Worcestershire Sauce Works Cited Carver, George Washington, Microsoft (R) Encarta. Copyright (c) 1994 Microsoft Corporation. Copyright (c) 1994 Funk &# 038; Wagnalls Corporation. Carwell, Hattie.
Blacks in Science: Astrophysicist to Zoologist. (Hicksville, N. Y. : Exposition Press), 1977. p. 18. McMurray, Linda. George Washington Carver. (New York, NY: Oxford University Press), 1981 McMurray, Linda. George Washington Carver. (New York, NY: Oxford University Press), 1981, p.
vii-viii. Toogood, Anna Coxe. Historic Resource Study and Administrative History, George Washington Carver National Monument, Diamond, Missouri. (Denver, 1973), pp. 8 - 21.
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Research essay sample on George Washington Carver Tuskegee Alabama
