French colonists brought vanilla beans to Réunion and nearby
Mauritius in the 1820s with the hope of starting production there. However, the vines were sterile because no insect would pollinate them. In 1837,
Charles Morren, a professor of botany at the University of Liège in
Belgium, published a method of hand-pollination, but his technique was slow and required too much effort to make cultivating vanilla a moneymaking proposition. Albius's enslaver, Mr. Beaumont, taught him the basics of botany, including how to fertilize flowers. In 1841, Albius invented a method to quickly pollinate the vanilla orchid using a thin stick or blade of grass and a simple thumb gesture. Using the stick or grass blade, field hands lift the
rostellum, the flap that separates the male
anther from the female
stigma, and then, with their thumbs, smear the sticky
pollen from the anther over the stigma. Albius's manual pollination method is still used today, as nearly all vanilla is pollinated by hand. After Albius's discovery, Réunion became for a time the world's largest supplier of vanilla. French colonists used Albius's technique in
Madagascar to cultivate vanilla, and Madagascar remains the world's chief vanilla producer. Noted French botanist and plant collector
Jean Michel Claude Richard falsely claimed to have discovered the technique three or four years earlier. ==Later life==