Scientist Who Asks God And Gets Replies

Auckland Star, Volume LXIX, Issue 118, 21 May 1938, Page 17 (Supplement)

Scientist Who Asks God And Gets Replies

/"'EORGE. Washington Carver, vJ of Tuskegee, Alabama, does not know his exact age, does not know his family name. But Dr. George W. Carver, great perhaps greatest scientist of the negro race, agricultural chemist, poet, mystic, / philosopher, cook, sainter, needlework artist and pianist, knows one thing for sure. Asked how he arrived at lis countless scientific discoveries, ie said: I never grope for nethods. The method is revealed it the moment 1 am inspired to :reate something new." Among his revealed inspirations he can count 145 products of the peanut, ] °< products of the sweet potato, no

By ... Berwin Kaiser

end of dyes from the clays and soils of tlie South, as well as paint, wQod stains aiul insulating board from the root of the palmetto plant. It must have been some time around the close of the Civil War that a negro baby — not yet named Carver — was abducted from a one-room shanty on a Missouri plantation. The earliest thing he remembers is that his captors sold his family down tjie river in Arkansas. But a German farmer, Moses Carver, liked the boy and traded a 300-dollar racehorse for him. He named him,"George Washington" because he was honest and industrious. Somebody else gave him a book—"Webster's Elementary Spelling Book." At 10 he started walking eigh„ mile 3to and from school. And the rest of his learning he got from the fields and the woods.

"I lived in the woods. x I wanted to know everything, every strange stone, flower, insect, bird or beast." Now Hearing 80, he 6till goes into the woods 305 days a year, at four o'clock in the morning, and still gets Us learning there. "I gather specimens and listen to what God has to say to me. After I've had my morning's talk with God, I go to my laboratory and begin to carry out His wishes for the day." The Carver method may not make scientific .sense —but the Carver results do. The South has a 60,000,000 dollars

peanut industry largely because of him. It sees tests of "cotton" roads being made in several States, based on a Carver idea of using cotton to reinforce asphalt. It has a sweet potato starch plant in operation in Laurel, Mississippi, thanks to him. His assistants at Tuskegee are proud, and sometimes bitter, that whenever he discovers something he immediately gives the idea away. "Mankind," he comments, "is being benefited, and that is the purpose for which my work is intended."

His interest in peanuts goes back to ! the closing years of the last century when Booker T. Washington, who had j heard of the well-trained and able agricultural chemist teaching at lowa State University, asked him to come to Tuskegee. (Carver had put himself through Simpson College, at Indianola, lowa, by opening a laundry.) At Tuskegee they gave him the problem of the destitute Southern farmers. Carver taught t 1 em crop rotation to combat the boll weevil. He told them to plant peanuts because he knew that peanuts put vital stuff back into the soil. One grower who followed his advice soon found himself with thousands of acres of peanuts. What on earth could you do with peanuts but roast therii and eat them or feed them to the hogs? So he asked Carver what he was supposed to do next. "I went back to my ! laboratory," the doctor recalls, "took I the great Creator in with me and set to I work to find out what to do with his ! [veanuts after they were grown." Even- ! tually lie found scores of uses. I Like Scientist Einstein, Scientist j Carver is two kinds of man. Einstein has his violin; Carver likes to play the piano and onse, in his young days, toured as a concert pianist. He likes to paint—on paper he has made from his peanuts, in frames he has fashioned from material derived from corn husks. He cooks, too, and has a book of some 100 of his own reciftßs. He has taken prizes with hie needlework. Once a fellow scientist named Thomas A. Edison wanted Carver to join with him at Menlo Park. Carver's reply was brief, courteous, positive: . . work among my own people, God said." But Dr. Carver treasured Edison's letter— and quietly went on working. Such is Dr. George Washington Carver, onco sold down the river into Arkansas, now member of the Koyal Society of Arts in London, director of the Agricultural Research and Experiment Station at Tuskegee —the man who once asked: "God, what is a peanut?" and then became the means of expanding the peanut business into a 60,000,000 dollars industry.