George Washington Carver -- USA

George Washington Carver was an American scientist, botanist, educator, and inventor.  Carver's reputation is based on his research and promotion of alternative crops to cotton, such as peanuts, soybeans and sweet potatoes, which also aided nutrition for farming families.  He wanted poor farmers to grow alternative crops as a source of their own food and other products to improve their quality of life. 

The most popular of his 44 practical bulletins for farmers contained 105 food recipes using peanuts, in 1880 he invented peanut butter, though as with most of his inventions he never patented it.  He also developed and promoted about 100 products made from peanuts that were useful for the house and farm, including cosmetics, dyes, paints, plastics, gasoline, and nitroglycerin. 

During the Reconstruction-era South, monoculture of cotton depleted the soil in many areas, then in the early 20th century, the boll weevil destroyed much of the cotton crop, the planters and farm workers suffered. Carver's work on peanuts was intended to provide an alternative crop.  In 1941, Time magazine dubbed Carver a "Black Leonardo", a reference to the Renaissance Italian polymath, Leonardo da Vinci, and he received numerous honours for his work.

Carver was born into slavery in Diamond Grove, Newton County, near Crystal Place, now known as Diamond, Missouri, possibly in 1864 or 1865.  After slavery was abolished, his former owners Moses Carver and his wife Susan raised George and his older brother James as their own children.  They encouraged George to continue his intellectual pursuits, and "Aunt Susan" taught him the basics of reading and writing.  Faced with limited educational opportunities, he left Missouri for Kansas, where he graduated from high school.  After a try at homesteading on the western plains of Kansas, he found his way to Iowa, in 1890 Carver started studying art and piano at Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa.  His art teacher Etta Budd, recognised Carver's talent for painting flowers and plants, and she encouraged him to study botany at Iowa State Agricultural College in Ames.  In 1891 he began as the first black student, and later taught as the first black faculty member.

After completing his B.S., professors Joseph Budd and Louis Pammel convinced Carver to continue at Iowa State for his master's degree.  During the next two years Carver did research at the Iowa Experiment Station under Pammel.  His work at the experiment station in plant pathology and mycology, gained him national recognition and respect as a botanist.  He became the first African American to secure an advanced degree in agricultural science.  

In 1896, Booker T. Washington, the first principal and president of the Tuskegee Institute, invited Carver to head its Agriculture Department.  To recruit Carver to Tuskegee, Washington gave him an above average salary and two rooms for his personal use.  Carver taught there for 47 years, developing the department into a strong research centre and working with two other college presidents during his tenure.  He taught methods of crop rotation, introduced several alternative cash crops for farmers that would also improve the soil of areas heavily cultivated in cotton.  

Initiated research into crop products (chemurgy), and taught generations of black students farming techniques for self-sufficiency.  Carver designed a mobile classroom to take education out to farmers, he called it a "Jesup wagon" after the New York financier and philanthropist Morris Ketchum Jesup, who provided funding to support the program.  During his tenure Carver theatend to resign several times, due to disagreements with the Institute committee or sometimes just to get his own way, in each case Washington smoothed things over.

After Washington died in 1915, his successor made fewer demands on Carver for administrative tasks.  From 1915 to 1923, Carver concentrated on researching and experimenting with new uses for peanuts, sweet potatoes, soybeans, pecans, and other crops, as well as having his assistants research and compile existing uses.  This work, and especially his speaking to a national conference of the Peanut Growers Association in 1920 and in testimony before Congress in 1921 to support passage of a tariff on imported peanuts.  Brought him wide publicity and increasing renown, in these years, he became one of the most well known African Americans of his time.

Carver's work was known by officials in the national capital before he became a public figure.  President Theodore Roosevelt publicly admired his work, Former professors of Carver's from Iowa State University were appointed to positions as Secretary of Agriculture.  In 1916 Carver was made a member of the Royal Society of Arts in England, one of only a handful of Americans at that time to receive this honour, Carver's promotion of peanuts gained him the most notability.

Three American presidents, Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge and Franklin Roosevelt, met with him, and the Crown Prince of Sweden studied with him for three weeks.  He was invited by Henry Ford to speak at the conference held in Dearborn, Michigan, and they developed a friendship.  Later that year Carver's health declined, and Ford installed an elevator at the Tuskegee dormitory where Carver lived, so that the elderly man would not have to climb stairs. Carver had been frugal in his life, and in his 70s established a legacy by creating a museum on his work and he donated nearly $60,000 in his savings to create the George Washington Carver Foundation at Tuskegee in 1938 to continue agricultural research.