Luther Burbank

Luther Burbank was the thirteenth of fifteen children born on a farm in Lancaster, Massachusetts, and his only credential was a diploma from the local academy. His father died when Burbank was eighteen, leaving him a small inheritance he used to buy seventeen acres near Lunenburg. Reading Charles Darwin on variation under domestication, he crossed and selected seedling potatoes there until one produced a smoother, blight-resistant tuber. He sold the rights to that potato for 150 dollars, kept ten seedlings for himself, and in 1875, at twenty-six, used the money to move to Santa Rosa, California, where the mild climate let him run several growing seasons a year instead of one.

Over the next fifty years Burbank turned four acres in Santa Rosa, then an eighteen-acre farm in nearby Sebastopol, into the busiest plant laboratory in the country. He bred and named more than 800 varieties: 113 kinds of plums and prunes, the Shasta daisy, a spineless cactus meant to feed cattle in dry country, the plumcot, a white blackberry, and the Russet Burbank, the rough-skinned potato that later became the industry standard for French fries and hash browns worldwide. He worked by brute force rather than theory, growing tens of thousands of seedlings from a single cross and walking the rows himself to pick the one or two worth keeping. The Carnegie Institution funded him for five years; Stark Bro's Nurseries bankrolled him for decades and sold what he made.

The same instincts that made Burbank a folk hero made him bad science. He kept few records, published no data other researchers could check, and explained his results with Lamarckian ideas about inherited experience the field was already discarding. He carried that same selective-breeding logic straight into people: in 1906 he joined the American Breeders' Association's Committee on Eugenics and endorsed reproductive control aimed at improving human stock, though he broke with the movement's mainstream by favoring the mixing of populations most eugenicists wanted kept apart. Late in life he told a reporter, "I am an infidel today. I do not believe what has been served to me to believe," and the resulting uproar brought him hate mail in the year before he died.

Burbank died in Santa Rosa in April 1926, of heart failure following intestinal surgery, having left no records rigorous enough to satisfy the geneticists who came after him. Congress passed the Plant Patent Act four years later, largely because breeders had watched him make fortunes for other people while owning none of his own creations outright. His widow sold his remaining plant stock to Stark Bro's, which spent decades releasing material he had never finished testing. Henry Ford moved Burbank's birthplace and carriage-house office to Greenfield Village in Michigan; the National Inventors Hall of Fame inducted him in 1986. The eugenics record gets a paragraph now, not a plaque.

Luther Burbank's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Russet Burbank potato discovery
  Bred at Lunenburg, Massachusetts; later became the world's dominant processing potato 1872
• New Creations in Fruits and Flowers book
  His first catalog of new varieties, mailed to nurseries worldwide 1893
• Shasta daisy discovery
  A hybrid of four daisy species, still sold under his name 1901
• Spineless cactus invention
  Bred as cattle fodder for arid land, marketed with exaggerated claims 1907
• Harvest of the Years book
  Autobiography, completed with Wilbur Hall and published after his death 1927

• March 7, 1849 aged 0 Born in Lancaster, Massachusetts, the thirteenth of fifteen children
• 1867 aged ~18 His father dies, leaving a small inheritance
• 1872 aged ~23 Develops the Burbank potato on his Lunenburg farm Sold the rights for 150 dollars and kept ten seedlings.
• 1875 aged ~26 Moves to Santa Rosa, California, at twenty-six
• 1893 aged ~44 Publishes his first mail-order catalog of new varieties
• 1904 aged ~55 The Carnegie Institution begins funding his research Support continued through 1909.
• 1906 aged ~57 Joins the Committee on Eugenics of the American Breeders' Association
• April 11, 1926 aged 77 Dies in Santa Rosa of heart failure after intestinal surgery
• 1930 aged ~81 Congress passes the Plant Patent Act, four years after his death

• Andrew Carnegie 1835–1919
  Steel magnate who built one of the largest steel empires in history and later became a major philanthropist. funded his research
• Henry Ford 1863–1947
  Industrialist who revolutionized manufacturing with the assembly line and made automobiles affordable. relocated his workshop to Greenfield Village
• Norman Borlaug 1914–2009
  Agronomist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate whose Green Revolution wheat varieties saved billions from famine. scientific heir