“Ninety-nine percent of the failures come from people who have the habit of making excuses.”
George Washington Carver was an American scientist and inventor. He discovered over 300 ways to use peanuts and 118 ways to use sweet potatoes. George Washington Carver spent his life teaching at the Tuskegee Institute located in Tuskegee Alabama. He was born during the Civil War in July of 1861. He was a son of a woman who was a slave owned by a man named Moses Carver.
When he was a baby, he and his mother were kidnapped from the people that owned them. George was later returned, but he never found his mother again. So, Mr. Carver and his wife raised him. George stayed with them and he spent a lot of time as a kid studying plants in the woods that were close by.
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George wanted to go to school at the age of 10. As time went on he had jobs to earn the money he needed to go to school. He graduated from high school in 1885 and then applied to Highland University in Kansas. After graduation, Carver worked for the college helping a botanist named Louis Pammell and earned his masters degree in 1896. That same year, Mr. Booker T. Washington invited George Washington Carver to teach at his school in Alabama and Carver accepted.
When George arrived, he saw the bad shape of the soil. He saw that the farmers grew cotton year after year which took important nutrients away from the soil. No other crops were grown there to replace these nutrients. So, the soil would get worse until the farmers couldn’t grow cotton. George Washington Carver taught them to plant there crops better. He taught them to grow sweet potatoes and peanuts and it worked! Their crops were better and everything was okay.
George also found uses for the peanut such as soap, plastic, ink, butter, milk, and cheese. Carver received offers to go other places. He even got an invitation to work with Thomas Edison. His entire life savings went to his students and the foundation he started. He did unto others as he would have done unto himself. (Matthew 7:12) George Washington Carver died shortly after that on Jan. 5, 1943. He was a good man whose inventions helped make the world a better place to live. (Galatians 6:7)
The secret to his success, “The secret of my success? It is simple. It is found in the Bible, ‘In all thy ways acknowledge Him and He shall direct thy paths.’” (Proverbs 3:6)
