Sunflower
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Sunflower. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
a tall herb of the composite family. Wild sunflowers are coarse, rough plants with no beauty of foliage, but when they are in the full bloom of autumn they form a feature of our landscape worth going a day's journey to see. Altogether there are about eighty species, nearly all native to North America . Cultivated sunflowers are a field crop of importance in Europe, especially in Russia, where the seeds are eaten raw on the street as peanuts are in this country. A table oil is pressed from the seeds. A second pressing yields an oil for candle and soap making. The seeds from which oil has been pressed are sold to Denmark as oil-cake for chicken feed. The stems are used for fuel. The cultivation of sunflowers is much the same as that of corn. Heads cured indoors on racks yield the finest oil. Ordinarily the stalks are cut and stood together in ricks heads upward until thoroughly dry. The heads are then cut off and threshed with flails. A bushel of kernels yields three gallons of oil.
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a genus of coarse, tall, herbaceous plants, with large, rough leaves and yellow flowers, belonging to Compositæ, and natives of America. H. annuus, an introduction from Peru, which has long been grown as a showy and large-flowered annual in gardens, has recently been found to possess high economic value. In Germany, Russia, India, and other countries it is now grown on a large scale. The seeds in a natural state are excellent food for poultry and pigs; roasted they are said to be a good substitute for coffee; crushed and pressed, they yield a limpid bland oil second in value only to olive oil, while the residuum can be used as an oil cake to fatten cattle; the stalks furnish a good fiber; the blossoms yield a brilliant lasting yellow dye, and the leaves serve as manure. The tubers of the sunflower artichoke (H. tuberosum) are saccharine, and serve culinary purposes. As fodder they increase the milk of cows. The foliage is also a good fodder.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Both entries treat the sunflower as a promising minor crop, and Collier's in 1921 called its oil "second in value only to olive oil" while repeating the old belief that H. annuus was "an introduction from Peru." Archaeology has since placed its domestication in eastern North America, with cultivated seed from Tennessee and other sites dated to roughly 3000 BC, so the plant Aiton's called a coarse wild weed of the American landscape was in fact a native American crop long before Europeans saw it. The economic guess proved right on a scale neither writer imagined: Soviet breeders led by Vasily Pustovoit raised the oil content of the seed from about a third to about half its weight, French work on cytoplasmic male sterility in the late 1960s opened the way to hybrids, and world production now runs to tens of millions of tonnes a year, with Russia and Ukraine the dominant growers and Ukraine the leading exporter of the oil. Aiton's note that Russians eat the seeds raw on the street still holds, and the plant's spiral seed packing remains a textbook case in the mathematics of phyllotaxis.
Written for this edition, 2026.