Two Scientists, Centuries Apart

Two LEGO® minifigures, separated by four centuries, show how invention often begins with paying attention.

Put these figures together, and LEGO gives us a very small seminar in history.

On the left is George Washington Carver idea223, holding a tile printed with peanuts. He appeared in the 2025 LEGO Ideas set The Evolution of STEM (21355).

Beside him is Leonardo da Vinci twn518, accompanied by a drawing of a wing for his flying machine. He was released the same year with LEGO Icons Leonardo da Vinci’s Flying Machine (10363).

A peanut and a pair of wings make them recognizable. They also reduce two remarkably wide-ranging lives to one convenient symbol each.

Carver was born enslaved in Missouri around 1864. After a long search for an education, he became Iowa State’s first Black student and later its first Black faculty member. In 1896, Booker T. Washington recruited him to Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.

Although Carver is often associated almost entirely with peanuts—and incorrectly credited with inventing peanut butter—his work was much broader. He promoted crop rotation and alternative crops to restore soil exhausted by cotton. Through agricultural bulletins and his "movable school" (the Jesup Wagon), he brought practical instruction directly to Southern farmers and sharecroppers.

The flower printed on his jacket is especially fitting. Carver first studied art, and his talent for painting plants helped lead him toward botany. He continued making art throughout his life.

Leonardo also treated art and science as parts of the same activity. Born in 1452, he studied anatomy, plants, water, machinery and flight through drawing. Around 1505–1506, he devoted an entire notebook to observing birds and considering how humans might reproduce their movement.

His proposed flying machines never became successful aircraft, but the wing sketch captures something important: drawing was how Leonardo investigated the world.

Carver and Leonardo lived in profoundly different circumstances. Yet both studied nature closely and translated what they observed into new possibilities. Leonardo looked at birds and imagined a machine. Carver looked at plants and soil and imagined a more sustainable agricultural system.

That is what makes these minifigures such an interesting pair. LEGO gives us the peanut and the wing, but the deeper connection is a shared way of seeing.

Neither figure was designed with the other in mind. Placed together, however, they create a conversation that neither original set contains.

Sometimes the most interesting LEGO stories begin after the instructions end.

One subject. Many LEGO themes. Although these figures come from different LEGO themes, they share a place in our new Historical Figures collection, where we bring together LEGO minifigures representing real people who shaped history. Explore the collection to see these two figures together and discover others as they arrive.