# George Washington Carver didn't invent peanut butter?!

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/george-washington-carver-didnt-invent-peanut-butter/434703>\
**Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\
**Created:** [January 23, 2008, 7:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/george-washington-carver-didnt-invent-peanut-butter/434703 "2008-01-23T19:08:24Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![Beware\_of\_Doug](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/278dde/32.png) [@Beware\_of\_Doug](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Beware_of_Doug)\
**Post date:** [January 24, 2008, 5:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/george-washington-carver-didnt-invent-peanut-butter/434703/21 "2008-01-24T17:58:06Z")

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[QUOTE=t-bonham@scc.net]  
Since he was a gay man, Carver never married or produced children.  
[/QUOTE]  
He did produce children, but not in the natural way. He synthesized them from peanuts. Few people recognized them as his progeny since they were not Black, but a sort of pale nutty brown.

Desirous of privacy, the one surviving son, Charles, adopted the surname Brown and eventually moved to Minneapolis, where he worked as a commercial artist. [The rest, as they say, is history.](http://news.minnesota.publicradio.org/features/199912/14_rabej_peanuts/)

The gay rumor apparently originated from Carver’s idiosyncratic pronunciation of the word _peanuts._ One day a reporter visiting the lab overheard him exclaiming, “The more I know peanits, the more I love peanits! I just can’t get enough peanits.”

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