Luther Burbank
Scientist, Inventor,
Horticulturist
1849-1926
Luther Burbank was born in Lancaster, Massachusetts on March 7, 1849. He became interested in science at an early age and at age 21, he purchased a 17-acre plot of land and went on to become one of history's most inventive and productive breeders of plants.
Despite receiving only an elementary education, Burbank developed more than 800 strains and varieties of plants, including 113 varieties of plums and prunes, 10 varieties of berries, 50 varieties of lilies, and the Freestone peach. Conducting as many as 3,000 experiments at once, Burbank painstakingly crossbred foreign and native species of plants, cultivated the resultant seedlings, and used grafting to arrive at new and better breeds. At the time of his death, Luther Burbank had thousands of experiments in progress using hundreds of thousands of plants.
But his greatest success was the Russet Burbank potato (1871), better known as the "Idaho" potato. This was soon exported to help Ireland recover from the devastating potato blight of 1840-60. And even today, despite all the horticulturists who have followed in his footsteps, Burbank's large, hardy, fine-grained potato is unsurpassed, a staple of American agriculture. Burbank sold the rights to the potato for $150, enough to travel to Santa Rosa, California. There he established a nursery, greenhouse, and experimental farm that have become famous throughout the world.
Plants were not patentable until 1930. Consequently, Burbank received his plant patents posthumously. He was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1986. More importantly, he set the precedent for innovation in plant breeding that continues today with the help of bio-engineering.
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Burbank was a friend of both Thomas Edison and Henry Ford (pictured here) and both men visited at the Burbank home. |
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