George Washington Carver and Henry Ford Shared a Bio-fuel (Ethanol) Vision

Business News/Analysis, Feedstocks, Field/Orchard/Plantation Crops/Residues, R & D Focus, Sustainability

December 30, 2007

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(The Auto Channel) 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.

“Henry Ford was ahead of his time on this. He knew he needed fuel for transportation, and if he could develop something that was good for agriculture too, it would be a good match,” said Dick Baker, a tech leader at Ford’s powertrain, research and advanced engineering department.

“Henry also knew of Carver’s work and said ‘that’s somebody I need to learn more about,’ ” said Baker.

That was because 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, 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.

“All the world is waiting for a substitute for gasoline,” Ford said in 1916. “The day is not far distant when, for every one of those barrels of gasoline, a barrel of alcohol must be substituted.”

During the early days of Prohibition, he even suggested turning Michigan’s idled breweries into distilleries to make denatured alcohol for fuel in cars and trucks, noted historian Ford Bryan. That went nowhere since Prohibition doomed the idea of any large-scale switch to alcohol production.

The automaker learned of Carver following his donations to the Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University) in Alabama where the botanist was a faculty member, Bryan said. READ MORE

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