Five people with Iowa roots shaped 20th-century science, politics, and technology: a Nobel Peace Prize winner, a US president, the inventor of modern polling, the builders of the first electronic computer, and a pioneer of the space age. Here is what each accomplished.
1. Norman Borlaug, the Man Who Fed Billions
Norman Borlaug was born near Cresco in northeast Iowa in 1914. His work breeding high-yield, disease-resistant wheat drove the Green Revolution, sharply raising food production in Mexico, India, and Pakistan. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. His agricultural work is widely credited with saving as many as a billion lives.
2. Herbert Hoover, the Iowa-Born President
Herbert Hoover was born in the Quaker town of West Branch in 1874, the first US president born west of the Mississippi River. Before his presidency, he organized food relief that fed millions of Europeans during and after World War I. He served as the 31st president from 1929 to 1933. His birthplace, presidential library, and museum in West Branch are open to visitors.
3. George Gallup, the Father of the Modern Poll
George Gallup was born in Jefferson in 1901. He developed scientific sampling methods for measuring public opinion and founded the polling organization that still carries his name. His approach replaced guesswork with statistical sampling and remains the basis of election and approval polling today.
4. The Birth of the Computer in Ames
Between 1937 and 1942 at Iowa State College in Ames, physicist John Vincent Atanasoff and graduate student Clifford Berry built the Atanasoff-Berry Computer. A 1973 federal court ruling recognized it as the first electronic digital computer, introducing binary arithmetic and electronic switching that later machines would build on.
5. James Van Allen, the Space Pioneer
James Van Allen was born in Mount Pleasant in 1914 and spent most of his career as a physicist at the University of Iowa. His instruments aboard Explorer 1, the first US satellite, launched in 1958, detected the bands of charged particles circling Earth now known as the Van Allen belts.
One State, Five Fields
Crop science, the presidency, opinion polling, computing, and space physics: five Iowans left a mark on each. These are five examples among many.
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