Henry Ford's Hemp Car.(Soybean Car)

"There's enough alcohol in one year's yield of potatoes to drive the machinery necessary to cultivate the fields for one hundred years. Henry Ford.

Henry Ford was a firm believer in alternative fuels. Ford first started to look into using organic materials as an alternative to gasoline in 1919. The company's research continued right up to the beginning of the Second World War. In the 1920's they didn't call it alternative fuels though, it was called ethanol. Ford also was looking to plants to supply the materials to construct the bodies of the cars that his company built. Henry Ford was one of the few men who had the means to see his visions through to their completion.Owning to the huge success of Ford's Model T,Henry Ford at the time was only second to John D Rockefeller in the size of his vast personal fortune.

Ford Has A Better Idea.

"Why use up the forest which were centuries in the making and the mines which required ages to lay down,if we can get the equivalent of the forests and mineral products in the annual growth of the hemp fields? Henry Ford

Henry Ford had an inventive mind.With the millions of Model T's produced,each car at the time had wooden spoke wheels made from high quality oak. The spokes had to be fashioned from large pieces of wood,and this created a huge amount of wood waste. There's stories of giant piles of wood chips accumulating outside of the factories where the Model T's were built. This waste drove Ford crazy. He hated waste.His researchers developed a process where the wood chips were burned, then wet and made into shaped charcoal. So Ford hired a cousin of his by the name of King and formed a new company called the Kingsford Charcoal Company. You may have heard of it.

Well after World War One,America had huge surpluses of corn and other grains. Henry Ford saw a use for these surpluses as an alternative to fossil fuels. But at the time,America was producing more than enough oil from wells within it's own boundaries. The United States wasn't importing oil.The United States was the World's largest producer of oil. Oil was plentiful and gas was dirt cheap so there really wasn't a need for alternative fuels .

Sometime in the 1930's Ford and his scientists began to look into different forms of organic materiel's that might be used to built their car bodies.The exact formula his scientists developed is not known but it's believed to have been a composite of both soybean fibers and hemp fibers coated with a plant based resin as a binding agent. The resulting material was said to have been 10 times stronger than steel.There's a famous picture of Henry Ford hitting the trunk of his car with a sledge hammer. The trunk lid of the car was made from this composite.Now the hemp that was used was industrial hemp. It's the stuff that ropes have been made from for thousand of years. No one was going to catch a buzz lighting this hemp up.

Only one car is known to have been built. The frame of the car was built from tubular steel,with the 14 composite panels that made up the car's body attached.In total the car weighted less than 2.000 pounds.At the time the average car weighted more than 3.000 pounds,so this represented a weight reduction of more than 33% over the average American car of the day.The prototype of the car was finished in early 1941 and was first displayed at Dearborn Days at Dearborn Michigan. Ford's Soybean car never caught on though. Even with the investment of millions of dollars in the project,in the end Henry Ford's idea to built car's "grown from the soil" fizzled out and faded away. Automobile production ceased during World War Two,and after the war the project was not revived. It's not known what became of the prototype of the Soybean car.

I know that Henry Ford was a rabid anti Semite,so don't bother pointing that out to me. That's one of the problems that's hard to reconcile when discussing Henry Ford. He achieved great things in his life. Still his reputation is tarnished by his beliefs. Henry Ford is the only American mentioned in Mien Kamph. Adolph Hitler admired Ford for his automobile production line. Hitler felt that Henry Ford was Great man. Ford also admired Hitler which somewhat clouded his reputation as I mentioned. Henry Ford's factories produced the weapons of war that helped defeat Hitler,but I fell that deep down inside he would not have minded much if both England and France had agreed to Hitler's early demands and this whole war thing could have been avoided.

But that has nothing to do with "The Hemp Car"