George Washington Carver was an agricultural scientist and inventor who found better ways to harvest cotton; he was the most prominent black scientist of the early 20th century. He was most famous for his invention of crop rotation as well as his discovery of over 300 uses for peanuts. He was born around 1861 near Diamond Grove, Missouri, U.S., and died January 5, 1943, in Tuskegee, Alabama.

Carver was born into slavery as he was the son of a woman named Mary, who was enslaved; she was owned by a man named Moses Carver. George and Mary were kidnapped and taken away from Moses during the American Civil War to be sold. Moses Carver could not find Mary but he did find George who was brought by a neighbor and was very sick but got nursed back to health. After slavery was abolished, George stayed and lived on Carver’s property until he was about 10 or 12 with his older brother Jim who were raised by and under the care of Moses and Susan Carver: Eventually, George left to acquire some education.

Over the next ten years, George traveled to a midwestern town, then moved to another. He worked and attended school, and would often make money by using his domestic skills. By the late 1880s, George had moved to Winterset, Iowa, where a white couple befriended him. They encouraged him to enroll in a local college which he did and studied art and piano. However, after a year, George transferred to an agricultural college. He soon earned his bachelor’s degree in 1894 and a master of science degree in 1896.

In the remaining time of George Washington Carver’s life, he did many things that changed the world. The first thing is that he changed the economic and agricultural life of many poor farmers. The second thing that he did was that he used peanuts to make hundreds of useful products including: chili sauce, shampoo, shaving cream, and glue, milk, cheese, soap, and many more products. He also made over a hundred products from sweet potatoes. Finally, Carver’s greatest innovation of crop rotation pushed agriculture years ahead and allowed for far more efficient farming. Crop rotation can be defined as “the practice of planting different crops sequentially on the same plot of land.” This improves the soil’s health by optimizing the nutrients in the soil. There are simple and complex crop rotations; simple rotations might involve only two or three crops, but complex rotations might involve more than a dozen crops. All in all, George Washington Carver was a great innovator and pushed the world of agriculture forward unlike anyone at his time.