The president who worked by gas lamp—at noon

When World War I created acute shortages of petroleum products, the U.S. government turned to an unlikely crop: peanuts. In 1917, the Navy commissioned chemist George Washington Carver to investigate whether peanut oil could power submarines and surface vessels. Carver had already developed over 300 uses for peanuts, and his research showed that refined peanut oil could indeed substitute for diesel fuel with only minor engine modifications.

The plan seemed promising. Peanuts grew abundantly across the South, and farmers could rotate them with cotton to replenish soil nitrogen. The Navy ran successful tests in several submarines, and Carver's lab produced enough peanut diesel to power a small fleet. The government even began purchasing massive quantities of the legume, driving up prices and encouraging Southern farmers to plant peanuts in unprecedented volumes.

But the war ended before the program could scale up. Petroleum prices dropped, oil fields in Texas and Oklahoma boomed, and the economics shifted decisively against agricultural fuels. The Navy quietly shelved the peanut diesel project in 1919. Yet Carver's work wasn't wasted—it laid groundwork for modern biodiesel research and proved that plant oils could power compression engines, a concept that would resurface during the energy crises of the 1970s and again in today's push for renewable fuels.

The episode remains a footnote in both agricultural and naval history, a moment when America's protein-rich legume nearly became a strategic military asset. Carver's peanut research, meanwhile, transformed Southern agriculture and helped diversify farms away from cotton monoculture—perhaps a more lasting contribution than any submarine fuel could have been.