Was George Washington Carver a Great Inventor?

[ralph124c]

GW Carver was a very impressive character-he rose from poverty to become a well-known chemist and soil scientist. Biographies of him talk about his hundreds of inventions and patents-supposedly, he was able to make all kinds of stuff from peanut extracts (shoe polish, imitation bricks, etc.).
Yet, you don't see any of these products today-why is this?
I think all of this was secondary to Carver's main contribution-the realization that peanut cultivation could restore fertility to the worn-out soils of the Deep South (the soils had been exhausted by cotton cultivation for decades).
So, was Carver's career as an inventor mostly hype, or not?

[CalMeacham]

I get the impression that he did an awful lot of work on alternative plants (not just peanuts) and uses for those plants. A lot of people seem to be disappointed that he wasn't the inventor of peanut butter, as they'd been told (I don't recall ever being taught this, by the way), and that disillusionment may have fueled some of this feeling. But the guy founded an industrial research lab and did develop lots of uses for these plants, and was recognized at the time by institutions at home and abroad.


I have no idea how many, if any, of his uses are currently employed (I'll bet you don't either), so I can't say how many have fallen from use or were never significant. But I'm not sure I can say "I don't see any of these products today".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington_Carver

[runner pat]

Few inventions are commercially viable. He may have invented uses but they never went beyond experiment/invent/patent.

Some statistics. (http://www.inventionstatistics.com/Innovation_Risk_Taking_Inventors.html)

[Krokodil]

I'd read that he was a very charismatic front man for a peanut concern, but that he didn't keep the kind of detailed notes that a serious researcher would be expected to keep and was wary of talking shop around other scientists. Sorry, no cite handy.

[CalMeacham]

but that he didn't keep the kind of detailed notes that a serious researcher would be expected to keep

The Wikipedia article I link to does say this much.


Sorry about the Wikipedia link, but I haven't read much about the man myself.

[Krokodil]

Here (http://www.amren.com/backissues/1994/04/how_legends_are_created_the_co.php) is one cite; still looking for more. Skeptical accounts of Carver are seen as shitting on the aspirations of Black children everywhere (like accounts of MLK as a womanizing plagiarist), and I promise that is not my intent.

Edit: Here (http://www.network54.com/Forum/256246/thread/1088896552/last-1088896552/George+Washington+Carver-+The+Making+of+a+Myth) is another.

[Krokodil]

The Wikipedia article I link to does say this much.


Sorry about the Wikipedia link, but I haven't read much about the man myself.

Yeah, sorry I skipped that, but I was pretty sure the article I'd read predated Wikipedia's creation.

[RickJay]

Carver's work is badly misunderstood. I suspect there's an element of misguided wishful thinking involved in that people want Carver to be the black Edison. Edison's work is very easily understood - he invented, or improved, items you see in your house. Carver's work, however, you generally don't, because his work mostly concerned things that hppen underground.

Carver wasn't (primarily) out to invenst a zillion things out of peanuts to everything would be made of peanuts. Carver's interest was primarily in making southern (especially black) farmers more efficient and commercially successful through the cultivation of crops other than cotton. As it happens, much of his work ended up being on the cultivation of peanuts. It was a natural extension of that to come up with ways peanuts could be used to make money, since that encouraged farmers to rotate them in.

Like a lot of things, of course, history has simplified Carver's work to "peanut stuff." Carver himself certainly did nothing to dispel this impression; he was famous and popular for the peanut angle, and he liked being famous and popular.

As to why his hundreds of peanut inventions aren't used, it's pretty simple; because peanuts are most profitably used as food. The single most profitable use for a peanut is to sell it to a person so they can eat it. There's no reason you couldn't use dozens of Carver's ideas to produce working products, except that you'd be wasting money.

[Omar Little]

Carver was also the scientist that resulted in the wider spread consumption of tomatoes in the United States. Tomatoes were primarily grown as ornamental plants, as most people believed they were poisonous. Carver convinced people that they were not poisonous but also very healthy to consume.

[The Second Stone]

Carver was as big on soybeans as he was on peanuts. His work with soybeans popularized them and their many, many uses. Today as a result, soybeans are used in many food and industrial products, including plastics. The US is the worlds largest producer of soybeans.

[Krokodil]

Carver was also the scientist that resulted in the wider spread consumption of tomatoes in the United States. Tomatoes were primarily grown as ornamental plants, as most people believed they were poisonous. Carver convinced people that they were not poisonous but also very healthy to consume.

Really? I'd heard this attributed to Jefferson, and I doubt that, too.

[Chronos]

Carver's biggest contribution was in very heavily popularizing the idea of crop rotation, which is used extensively today. All the stuff about the peanuts was mostly in service to that: He wanted to prove that there was a legume you could use to replenish the soil, while simultaneously being a profitable crop.