Though worlds apart, George Washington Carver and Henry Ford shared a vision of a future in which agricultural products would be put to new uses to create products and industries.
One idea both men worked on more than 60 years ago, biofuels, is again in vogue as America seeks to reduce its dependence on foreign oil.
Bro. Carver, born a slave in Missouri during the Civil War, had become a world-famous botanist by the 1930s, famed for his research into the many uses of peanuts, soybeans and other plants. Over the years, Bro. Carver promoted the idea that such plants could be turned into plastics, paint, fuel and other products.
Ford was interested in the same things. Besides his legendary work creating plastic car parts derived from soybeans, Ford had long believed that ethanol (or grain alcohol) should be produced as an alternative fuel.
The automaker learned of Bro. Carver following his donations to the Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University) in Alabama where the botanist was a faculty member.
At Tuskegee, Bro. Carver had promoted the use of crop rotation, planting such nitrogen-rich crops as peanuts, sweet potatoes and soybeans, to improve farmland depleted by years of raising cotton. In so doing, he also worked on hundreds of new uses for such crops.
Many people were eager to hire Bro. Carver because of his work, including Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. Thomas Edison offered him $100,000 a year to come and work for him, but Bro. Carver thought he could do more good at Tuskegee. Bro. Carver would end up helping Ford use plant weed for producing synthetic rubber. He also managed to develop a plastic material from soybeans, which Ford was able to make use of in certain parts of his automobile.
By the late 1930s, Bro. Carver and Ford were corresponding on a variety of subjects, including new industrial uses for soybeans and other plants. Ford had also met with Bro. Carver in Dearborn and at Ford’s estate in Georgia and visited him at Tuskegee.
At first glance, they must have seemed like a strange mix — the billionaire industrialist from the North and the modest scientist and naturalist from the South. But Ford regarded Bro. Carver as a contemporary. Both men had been born on farms during the Civil War and both had sought, in their own ways, to improve the lot of the common man.
After Thomas Edison died, the automaker even called Bro. Carver “the greatest of all my inspiring friends.” To honor him, Ford also had a replica of Bro. Carver’s log cabin birthplace built amid the other historic buildings at Greenfield Village in Dearborn. In addition, Ford helped outfit a laboratory for Bro. Carver and had an elevator installed in a Tuskegee dormitory so the botanist could get to his lab more easily in his later years.
More than 60 years later, the ethanol-fueled dreams of Bro. Carver and Ford are becoming a reality.