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Edmond Albius's method of pollination is now used by all vanilla growers
His brilliant method of pollination is now used by all vanilla growers.
“Like many brilliant inventions, Edmond’s appears disarmingly simple, but only after the fact,” says Eric Jennings, professor of French colonial history at the University of Toronto, in a lecture on the subject. In a 1938 racist historical novel Les Vanilliers, white French author Georges Limbour depicts Albius as possessing “the clumsiness of an ignorant insect.” Many botanists had tried to work out how to pollinate the plant by hand and failed. We know of Albius’ invention through an account by his enslaver Ferréol Bellier-Beaumont, who describes his surprise and delight in discovering “his faithful companion” had achieved the feat of fertilizing the recalcitrant plant.
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