Timeline of United States discoveries
The Red Delicious is a clone of apple cultigen, now comprising more than 50 cultivars. The Red Delicious apple was discovered in 1875 by Jesse Hiatt on his farm in Peru, Iowa. Believing that the seedling was nothing more than nuisance. After chopping down the tree three times, Hiatt decided to let the tree grow and eventually, it produced an unknown and new harvest of red apples. Hiatt would eventually sell the rights to this type of apple to the Stark Brothers Nurseries and Orchards who renamed it the Red Delicious.
Niels Ebbesen Hansen
On an 1897 trip to Russia, he encountered the red-fleshed wild apple "Malus niedzwetskyana" and began two breeding programs based on this unusual fruit, one aimed at developing a cold-hardy cooking and eating apple, and the other aimed at developing ornamental crabapples. His efforts resulted in the Almata apple and the Hopa crabapple, among other varieties. When he discovered that the northwest apple breeder Albert Etter had beaten him to the punch in creating red-fleshed hybrids, he wrote to concede him priority with the words "Mr. Etter, you have defeated me in my destiny."