Hello everyone! I hope you are having an excellent weekend so you can rest and be prepared for this month's first week.
In this opportunity, I'm going to tell you a little bit about an important scientist, botanist, chemist and inventor from USA. His name is George Washington Carver and his story is inspiring.
He was born in Diamond, a southwest Missourian town, just when slavery was abolished. His birth date is uncertain but it's around 1865. He was raised by his mother's owners: Moses and Susan Carver, after the kid and his mother where kidnapped and Moses could only recover George. Due to he was too young for working in farm activities he helped at household tasks. It was then that his love for plants started. Susan Carver taught him how to read and write, and when he was about eleven years old he left the Carver's cabin looking for a black school where he could study.
Since then, Carver attended a lot of schools before completing secondary education. In 1890's he studied arts and music at Simpson College in Iowa. His abilities for drawing botanical sketches made that one of his teachers suggest him to get in the botany program at the Iowa State Agricultural College. He became the first black student at the Iowa state, he graduate as Bachelor and then get his master's degree, focusing his studies in plant pathology.
In 1896 George Carver started teaching and reaserching about agriculture at Tuskegee Institute with Booker T. Washington.
He didn't like too much to teach, but he was comitted with the Tuskegee Institute objective of giving an education that included the student's develop inside and outside the classrooom. He taught a Sunday evening Bible class during thirty years and he was always able to give advice to anyone who reached his door. As time went by, he met another southern boys that started asking for his help due to his speeches at conferences of two groups that promoted the interracial harmony. He believed that, now that slavery was over, racism will go soon when black people get economic independance. So while economic sustent of black people still coming from agricultural production, he had to do something for giving them more opportunities to emerge. That's one of the reasons why his work as a scientist was so related with applied science.
Result from his research he demonstrated that depleted soils for cotton crops, could enhance their productivty by using a very cheap technique: crop-rotation with nitrogen-fixing legumes. He wanted to recommend it to farmers, but who would plant something that could not sell later? So he proposed himself to create a market for these soil nutritive crops and started developing a lot of different products made of peanut or sweet potatoe. He created about three hundred products made of peanut!
His work was useful for:
-helping poor farmers improve their diets
-promoting the crop-rotation for recovering the nutrients of the soil.
-providing poor farmers a chep way for enhancing their farm productivity
-revitalizing the southern depressed economy.
-a lot of other things.
As you may see, he used his love for plants and science to provide an accesible and contextulized solution for the need of his people. That's why I think his story is so inspiring, because he used his passion to help people in a very human and tangible way.
He died in 1943, and became the first African American to have a national memorial in USA.
Thank you for reading!
If you want to look for more infromation, you can click on these links bellow:
American Chemical Society
Biography.com (video)
Historic Missourians
In this opportunity, I'm going to tell you a little bit about an important scientist, botanist, chemist and inventor from USA. His name is George Washington Carver and his story is inspiring.
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| [SHS 007806; Courtesy of the Tuskegee Institute, Dictionary of American Portraits] |
He was born in Diamond, a southwest Missourian town, just when slavery was abolished. His birth date is uncertain but it's around 1865. He was raised by his mother's owners: Moses and Susan Carver, after the kid and his mother where kidnapped and Moses could only recover George. Due to he was too young for working in farm activities he helped at household tasks. It was then that his love for plants started. Susan Carver taught him how to read and write, and when he was about eleven years old he left the Carver's cabin looking for a black school where he could study.
Since then, Carver attended a lot of schools before completing secondary education. In 1890's he studied arts and music at Simpson College in Iowa. His abilities for drawing botanical sketches made that one of his teachers suggest him to get in the botany program at the Iowa State Agricultural College. He became the first black student at the Iowa state, he graduate as Bachelor and then get his master's degree, focusing his studies in plant pathology.
In 1896 George Carver started teaching and reaserching about agriculture at Tuskegee Institute with Booker T. Washington.
He didn't like too much to teach, but he was comitted with the Tuskegee Institute objective of giving an education that included the student's develop inside and outside the classrooom. He taught a Sunday evening Bible class during thirty years and he was always able to give advice to anyone who reached his door. As time went by, he met another southern boys that started asking for his help due to his speeches at conferences of two groups that promoted the interracial harmony. He believed that, now that slavery was over, racism will go soon when black people get economic independance. So while economic sustent of black people still coming from agricultural production, he had to do something for giving them more opportunities to emerge. That's one of the reasons why his work as a scientist was so related with applied science.
Result from his research he demonstrated that depleted soils for cotton crops, could enhance their productivty by using a very cheap technique: crop-rotation with nitrogen-fixing legumes. He wanted to recommend it to farmers, but who would plant something that could not sell later? So he proposed himself to create a market for these soil nutritive crops and started developing a lot of different products made of peanut or sweet potatoe. He created about three hundred products made of peanut!
His work was useful for:
-helping poor farmers improve their diets
-promoting the crop-rotation for recovering the nutrients of the soil.
-providing poor farmers a chep way for enhancing their farm productivity
-revitalizing the southern depressed economy.
-a lot of other things.
As you may see, he used his love for plants and science to provide an accesible and contextulized solution for the need of his people. That's why I think his story is so inspiring, because he used his passion to help people in a very human and tangible way.
He died in 1943, and became the first African American to have a national memorial in USA.
Thank you for reading!
If you want to look for more infromation, you can click on these links bellow:
American Chemical Society
Biography.com (video)
Historic Missourians
Great post! Thank you for sharing!
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