George Washington Carver

George Washington Carver holds a round glass flask over a crowded bench in his laboratory at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, a bottle in his other hand and funnels, stands and glassware all around him. The picture is by Prentice H. Polk, Tuskegee's official photographer. Carver joined the Tuskegee faculty in 1896 and stayed for the rest of his life, and much of that time went into finding new uses for peanuts, sweet potatoes and other crops that could help Southern farmers rotate away from cotton, which wore out their soil. From peanuts alone he developed hundreds of products, and benches like this one were where he worked them out.