Going Green

Some of you may think that the going green concept is fairly recent,but earlier efforts were made by none other than Henry Ford. Ford was researching alternative fuels as early as 1919,but no one was interested at that time as the US was the leading oil producer and gas was cheap. He also was looking into plants to supply the materials to build car bodies. In the 1930s Ford and his scientists developed a composite of soybean fibers and hemp fibers coated with a plant based resin as a binding agent. The resulting material was said to be 10 times stronger than steel. Only one car is known to have been built from this material,the finished product weighed less than 2,000 lbs. It was known as the soybean car,but as other manufacturing materials were still abundant,it never caught on. An interesting side note,Ford hated waste and the giant piles of oak wood chips made from the shaping of the wooden spokes used for the wheels of the early cars made him crazy. His researchers developed a process where the wood chips were burned then wet and shaped into charcoal. Ford hired a cousin of his by the name of King and formed the Kingsford Charcoal Company.