Dear Babies: Meet George Washington Carver

My Dear Babies,

This is a picture of George Washington Carver.  He was one of the world’s greatest scientists.  He did most of his work in the very early days of the 20th century.

Mr. Carver was born into slavery in Missouri.

Mr. Carver later figured out ways to save poor southern farmers from a fix they were in due to raising only cotton.  He promoted the switch to alternative crops, such as peanuts and soybeans.  He also figured out useful ways to use to those crops for more than just food — to create valuable products that could be used by industry.

Although his inventions could have made him a very wealthy man, Carver only patented three minor applications.  He freely taught people the lion’s share of what he figured out.

You can read about him here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_washington_carver

The point of writing this blog post is to copy over this list of Carver’s eight values to live by:

• Be clean both inside and out.
• Neither look up to the rich nor down on the poor.
• Lose, if need be, without squealing.
• Win without bragging.
• Always be considerate of women, children, and older people.
• Be too brave to lie.
• Be too generous to cheat.
• Take your share of the world and let others take theirs.

There’s no shame in an inventor protecting his work with patents, or a programmer protecting her work with copyrights, but there are lots of people, even today, who freely share their work (or at least make it quite convenient and inexpensive to use).