Fermín Tangüis

Fermín Tangüis (1851 to 1930) was a Puerto Rican businessman, farmer and scientist who developed the seed that produced Tangüis cotton in Peru and saved that nation's cotton industry. Born in San Juan to a French father and a Spanish Puerto Rican mother, he moved to Lima in 1873, worked as an accountant and in mines, set up businesses and in 1890 bought land in the Pisco valley for a cotton plantation. When Fusarium wilt ruined Peruvian cotton from 1901, he studied plants that resisted the disease and in 1911, after ten years of failures, developed a seed giving a resistant plant with a longer, stronger fibre that needed little water and grew several times a year. He shared the seed with other growers, Peru began exporting the variety in 1918, and in 1997 it made up 75 percent of Peruvian cotton production. President Augusto Leguia honored him with the Order of the Sun.