I was reading about Edmond Albius, the former slave who learned how to pollinate the vanilla plant (at age 12!), which is why we have commercial vanilla today.
Albius’s manual pollination method is still used today, as nearly all vanilla is pollinated by hand.
Horrible that he died in poverty, but he did die a free man, which is a lot more than you can say for most black people on Réunion.