George Washington Carver did not invent peanut butter. The Aztecs made ground peanut paste centuries earlier. A Canadian pharmacist patented peanut paste in 1884. George Washington Carver’s famous 1916 bulletin on peanuts lists 105 uses for them. Peanut butter is not one of them.
George Washington Carver was an agricultural scientist who spent 47 years at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama teaching poor Black farmers how to survive. Most of these farmers were sharecroppers working exhausted land. Decades of cotton farming had stripped the soil of nutrients, and yields were dropping while families went hungry.
His solution was crop rotation. Grow peanuts or sweet potatoes one year, cotton the next. The legumes put nitrogen back into the soil, which meant cotton yields went up the following season. Farmers also had food crops to eat or sell instead of buying everything at the company store.
The problem was that nobody wanted peanuts. Cotton had a market. Peanuts piled up in storage sheds and rotted. So Carver went to his lab and started figuring out what else you could do with them.
The Products
George Washington Carver developed over 300 uses for peanuts and over 100 for sweet potatoes. He published bulletins listing dozens of recipes and applications, which Tuskegee distributed free to farmers.
From peanuts:
- Cooking oil, salad oil, butter substitute
- Shampoo, shaving cream, face cream, soap
- Wood stain, dyes, printer’s ink, shoe polish
- Glue, plastics, insulation
- Livestock feed, fertilizer
From sweet potatoes:
- Flour, molasses, vinegar
- Rubber, rope, synthetic silk
- Dyes, ink, wood stains, paper
He patented almost none of it.
“If I did, it would take so much time I would get nothing else done. But mainly, I don’t want my discoveries to benefit specific favored persons. I think they should be available to all peoples.”
Thomas Edison offered him a job at a salary of over $100,000 a year. Carver turned it down and stayed at Tuskegee earning $125 a month, a salary he never asked to have raised in 47 years.
The Jesup Wagon
Farmers weren’t going to come to Tuskegee to learn soil chemistry. So in 1906, Carver built a horse-drawn wagon equipped with farming tools, seeds, and demonstration materials. He called it the Jesup wagon, after the New York banker who funded it. Carver and his team drove it from farm to farm across rural Alabama, showing sharecroppers how to test their soil, rotate crops, and make fertilizer from swamp muck instead of buying it.
The USDA later adopted the model nationwide. It became the basis for the agricultural extension system that still exists today.
Timeline
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| c. 1864 | Born into slavery in Missouri. Kidnapped as infant with his mother; she was never found. |
| 1877 | Left home at about age 12 to find a school that would accept Black students. |
| 1894 | First Black student to earn a degree from Iowa State Agricultural College. |
| 1896 | Earned master’s degree in agriculture. Recruited by Booker T. Washington to Tuskegee. |
| 1906 | Built the Jesup wagon, first mobile agricultural classroom. |
| 1916 | Published bulletin on 105 peanut uses. Elected to Britain’s Royal Society of Arts. |
| 1921 | Testified before Congress on behalf of peanut tariff. Given 10 minutes, spoke for over an hour. |
| 1940 | Peanuts ranked among six leading US crops. Donated $60,000 life savings to establish research foundation. |
| 1943 | Died at Tuskegee, age 78 or 79. Congress designated his birthplace a national monument – the first for a Black American, and only the third for anyone other than a president. |
The Reputation
Carver became famous in his own lifetime. Presidents Coolidge and Roosevelt visited him. Henry Ford hosted him repeatedly and later installed an elevator in Carver’s dormitory so the elderly scientist wouldn’t have to climb stairs. Joseph Stalin invited him to manage cotton plantations in the Soviet Union. Carver declined.
By the time he died, peanuts had become the second-biggest cash crop in the South after cotton. But most of the products Carver invented never got manufactured at scale. The dyes, the plastics, the rubber – they remained curiosities. Cheaper petroleum-based alternatives won out.
The crop rotation methods spread. The extension program model spread. The students he trained went on to teach others.
“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.”
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