Though I would need to speak with an actual expert to be certain, it appears that the latter part of the 19th Century was the first time in human history when encountering new fruits and vegetables became a routine part of people's lives. Obviously, there had been previous periods when exploration and trade had suddenly introduced great varieties of fruits and vegetables to a region. By the same token, there had always been the occasional genuinely new variant on something familiar either due to crossbreeding or mutation. Generally though, the progress, while great, was exceedingly slow, measured in centuries not years.
As with so many things in the late 19th/early 20th century, progress in agriculture went from slow and steady to unimaginably rapid. And, as with so many things in the period, the public found a lone visionary inventor to be the face of the movement. This tendency to mythologize always distorted, but there have been less deserving recipients than Luther Burbank.
Luther Burbank (March 7, 1849 – April 11, 1926) was an American botanist, horticulturist and pioneer in agricultural science. He developed more than 800 strains and varieties of plants over his 55-year career. Burbank's varied creations included fruits, flowers, grains, grasses, and vegetables. He developed (but did not create) a spineless cactus (useful for cattle-feed) and the plumcot.
Burbank's most successful strains and varieties include the Shasta daisy, the fire poppy (note possible confusion with the California wildflower, Papaver californicum, which is also called a fire poppy), the "July Elberta" peach, the "Santa Rosa" plum, the "Flaming Gold" nectarine, the "Wickson" plum (named after the agronomist Edward J. Wickson), the freestone peach, and the white blackberry. A natural genetic variant of the Burbank potato with russet-colored skin later became known as the russet Burbank potato. This large, brown-skinned, white-fleshed potato has become the world's predominant potato in food processing. The Russet Burbank potato was in fact invented to help with the devastating situation in Ireland during the Irish Potato famine. This particular potato variety was created by Burbank to help "revive the country's leading crop" as it is slightly late blight-resistant. Late blight (Phytophthora infestans) is a disease that spread and destroyed potatoes all across Europe but caused extreme chaos in Ireland due to the high dependency on potatoes as a crop by the Irish.
Though a bit of a digression from this post, Burbank's legacy is also relevant to our ongoing intellectual property thread.
Burbank's work spurred the passing of the 1930 Plant Patent Act four years after his death. The legislation made it possible to patent new varieties of plants (excluding tuber-propagated plants). Thomas Edison testified before Congress in support of the legislation and said that "This [bill] will, I feel sure, give us many Burbanks." The authorities issued Plant Patents #12, #13, #14, #15, #16, #18, #41, #65, #66, #235, #266, #267, #269, #290, #291, and #1041 to Burbank posthumously.
The big story here is, of course, agricultural and economic, but think about the psychological impact for a moment, particularly in the context of the times. Science and technology were radically changing virtually every aspect of people's lives. This extended from electricity and internal combustion all the way down to the produce at your local market.
Nor was the agricultural progress limited to Burbank. Less famous but arguably more important were initiatives like the Hatch Act.
The Hatch Act of 1887 (ch. 314, 24 Stat. 440, enacted 1887-03-02, 7 U.S.C. § 361a et seq.) gave federal funds, initially of $15,000 each, to state land-grant colleges in order to create a series of agricultural experiment stations, as well as pass along new information, especially in the areas of soil minerals and plant growth. The bill was named for Congressman William Hatch, who chaired the House Committee of Agriculture at the time the bill was introduced. State agricultural stations created under this act were usually connected with those land-grant state colleges and universities founded under the Morrill Act of 1862, with few exceptions.
Many stations founded under the Hatch Act later became the foundations for state cooperative extension services under the Smith-Lever Act of 1914.
At the risk of putting too fine a point on it, we're talking about ongoing government-funded university-based research. The cherished notion of a couple of guys in a garage somewhere inventing the future is now almost entirely myth, but even in the late 19th century it was fading as a model for research and development. Most of the great advancements were team efforts, often from surprisingly modern R & D labs funded by corporations and financiers like J.P. Morgan, philanthropists such as Carnegie, and, yes, US taxpayers. This would be even more the case in the postwar technological spike, but that's a topic for another post.
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