Luther Burbank Facts
Luther Burbank Facts
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| Interesting Luther Burbank Facts: |
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| Luther Burbank was the thirteenth of eighteen children and was born on a farm in Lancaster, Massachusetts. |
| His father died in 1870 and Burbank used his inheritance to buy a 17 acre farm where he developed the Burbank potato. |
| Although he sold the rights to the potato in 1875, today the Russet Burbank potato is the most widely cultivated potato in the United States. |
| He used the proceeds from the sale of his potato to travel to Santa Rosa, California and buy a 4 acre plot. |
| Despite the lack of a formal education he was familiar with Charles Darwin's The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication and the experiments of Gregor Mendel. |
| He established a nursery, greenhouse and open plots where he conducted experiments in cross-breeding of plants. |
| From 1904 to 1909 he received several grants from Andrew Carnegie to continue his work on hybridization. |
| He published plant catalogs and his 1893 "New Creation in Fruits and Flowers" made him famous. |
| Among his creations are 113 varieties of plums, 16 varieties of blackberries, 10 varieties of strawberries, 8 varieties of peaches and many more. |
| One of his most famous creation is the Shasta Daisy. |
| Burbank was criticized by the scientific community for his lack of the careful record keeping so important to scientific study. |
| His innovations were revolutionary and his plants, books and essays transformed farming in America. |
| In 1907 he wrote The Training of the Human Plant in which he advocated improved treatment of children. |
| In 1921 he published his 8 volume work, How Plants Are Trained to Work for Man. |
| He was known as a kind, generous man who lived a simple life and whose greatest passion was a better life for his fellow man. |
| In 1930 the U.S. Congress was inspired by his work to pass the Plant Patent Act and Burbank was awarded 16 plant patents posthumously. |
| His farm is now a national historic landmark and in 1986 he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. |
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