Born in Missouri around 1864 during the years of Civil War (the exact date and year in which he was born not being known), George Washington Carver was a son of an enslaved couple, Mary and Giles. Only a week after his birth, invaders from Arkansas, a neighboring state, kidnapped him along with his sister and mother. They were sold in Kentucky. However, George was found and sent back to Missouri.
With the end of slavery in Missouri post the Civil War, Moses Carver, the owner of the slaves, kept George and his brother at his home, raising and educating them. With no school accepting black pupils at the time, Moses himself taught George how to read and write.
George struggled a lot to receive education, travelling miles to reach a school for black students. He then went on to receive a diploma from the Minneapolis High School in Kansas. Later, he was accepted in Highland College in Kansas but once the college realized about George’s race, his acceptance was reversed. Thus he resorted to conducting biological experiments on his own.
While science was his primary area of interest, George was also fond of arts. He started studying music and art at Simpson College, Iowa, in 1890 and later moved to Ames to study botany at the Iowa State College of Agriculture where he was the first black student. After completing his bachelors and masters degree from the college, he gained popularity as an excellent botanist.
He then started his journey as a teacher and researcher. Booker T. Washington, the principal of the Tuskegee Institute built for African Americans, hired him to head the institute’s agricultural department in 1896. Under the guidance of Carver, Tuskegee’s agricultural department helped to stabilize many people’s livelihoods by developing new crops and introducing a diversified crop range that could bare harsh weather conditions.
At Tuskegee, Carver’s work as a researcher on plant biology brought him into the limelight. His work focused on finding out how crops such as peanuts, soybeans and sweet potatoes.
On this day in:
1589 Catherine de Medici, wife of King Henry II of France died. She is sometimes called the 'mother of French haute cuisine' because the Italian chefs she brought with her from Florence had a strong influence on the development of French cuisine. One of the things they brought with them was ice cream.
1786 Thomas Nuttall was born. English naturalist and botanist. He also collected and studied plants in the United States, especially around the Chesapeake Bay area.
1794 Edmund Ruffin born. The father of soil chemistry in the U.S.
1858 Ezra J. Warner of Waterbury, Connecticut received U.S. patent No. 19063 for a can opener ("a new and Useful Improvement in Instruments for Cutting Open Sealed Tin cans and Boxes").
1889 According to the ‘Oxford English Dictionary’ the word 'hamburger' first appeared in print on this day in a Walla Walla, Washington newspaper, the Walla Walla Union.
1913 Kemmons Wilson was born (died Feb 12, 2003). Founder of Holiday Inn hotel chain, the first standardized hotel chain. The 1942 Bing Crosby film 'Holiday Inn' was the inspiration for the hotels name.
1914 Aaron 'Bunny' Lapin was born. Lapin was the inventor of whipped cream in an aerosol can (Reddi-Wip) in 1948. It was first sold by milkmen in St. Louis in 1948
1914 Henry Ford introduced a minimum wage of $5 per day.
1943 George Washington Carver died. African American agricultural scientist and innovator. He developed hundreds of uses for peanuts, soybeans and sweet potatoes. He founded the George Washington Carver Research Foundation at Tuskegee, for agricultural research.
1956 Chen Kenichi was born. Chinese chef (born in Japan) best known for his role on the TV series 'Iron Chef'. He is the only Iron Chef to have held his position throughout the life of the show.
1961 'Mr. Ed' the talking horse debuts on TV.
2007 Momofuku Ando died in Osaka, Japan (born in Taiwan, March 5, 1910. Mr. Ando was the founder of Nissin Food Products, and invented 'Instant Ramen' noodles.
2009 A locally caught bluefin tuna weighing 282½ pounds sold for $104,700 ($371 lb) at Tokyo's Tsukiji fish market auction. Prized by sushi lovers, the normal price for bluefin tuna is about $25 - $50 per pound.
2012 A 593 pound Bluefin Tuna sold for a record $724,000 (56.49 million yen) at Tokyo's Tsukiji Fish Market - that's about $1,220 per pound!