What do peanut butter, the gas mask, and the Super Soaker have in common? They were all dreamed up by black inventors. Here are some famous inventions by African-Americans and African-Canadians:

George Washington Carver
(1860–1943)

George Washington Carver changed lunchtime sandwiches forever when he invented peanut butter. Born a slave, Carver didn’t attend college until he was 30 years old, but he went on to create 400 new uses for peanuts, soybeans, sweet potatoes, and pecans. These new discoveries transformed the southern United States from a one-crop region of cotton into multi-crop farmlands, providing farmers with hundreds of profitable uses for their land.