George Washington Carver: Innovator and Visionary

George Washington Carver had a major impact on the world with his inventions, his amazing art, his innovations, and what his innovations lead to after his death.
While he was very young he had a deep love for plants. He didn’t know it yet, but when he grew up, he would be a master at cross-breeding plants. With his skills in making hybrid crops, he created a new cotton, not very cleverly named, Carver’s Hybrid. Cross breeding plants was still a new concept, so he and a few other people all around the world popularized it. Later, when he was in his late twenties and early thirties, he was helping with the the cotton that was taking up all of the hungry civilian’s land. He knew different plants need different things, so he came up with the idea

of rotating the food bearing crops with the cotton. To make the soil healthy again, he planted peanuts, sweet potatoes, and legumes. These crops in particular are good at increasing the amount of nitrogen in the soil. Amazingly we still use this method today to keep our crops fresh, and our soil and healthy.
George Washington Carver’s Paintings and inventions are something that we should forever be grateful for. For example he invented over three hundred uses for the humble peanut including, paste, flour, board, wood stains, soap, shaving cream, and skin lotion. With the sweet potato, Mr.Carver came up with over 100 new uses for it including over 70 dyes, multiple synthetic cottons and silks, several animal foods, numerous items for human consumption like flour, and even medication. Out of his 400 plus inventions, though, he only patented three of them because he believed that everything was god’s creation. When George Washington Carver was alive, one of his passions was art. He has several paintings hanging in exhibitions all around the world. For example, in Paris, one of Mr.Carver’s paintings hangs proudly on the walls at the Luxembourg Galleries. He loved his work so much (in a humble way) that he invested all of his life saving into making a museum to house most of his artwork after died. Shortly after he had the museum constructed, though, it burned down. Most of the artwork was either severely damaged, or lost forever.
People decided that they should make monuments and other ways to remember the illustrious George Washington Carver.

Franklin D Roosevelt dedicated $30,000 dollars towards the first national monument ever devoted to an African American. It is 210 acres and includes a statue of Mr.Carver, a nature trail, a museum, and a cemetery. Also, the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis created a George Washington Carver garden, and has a life-sized statue of him.
Over time, the government named places and vessels after Mr.Carver, and they also established a commemorative coin as well as stamps. Numerous schools are named after George Washington Carver. Also, two U.S. military vessels bear George Washington Carver’s name. Eventually, in 1948 and 1998 he appeared on two postal stamps in memory of George Carver. A half dollar was made in memory of George Washington Carver; it was minted between 1951 and 1954. He was even admitted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame almost half a century after his death.
Throughout his life he stated some amazing and inspirational quotes including, “Ninety-nine percent of the failures come from people who have the habit of making excuses” and “When you do the common things in life in an uncommon way, you will command the attention of the

world.”
It was hard for an African American to get by at the time he lived, but through hard work, determination, and not listening to all the people who said he couldn’t because he was black, he truly made a difference for all of the world. His ability to think outside the box was and is astounding, even for the nationalities that thought they were superior to African Americans.