HENRY FORD Discusses America’s INDUSTRIAL FUTURE (Dec, 1934)
Source: Modern Mechanix ( More articles from this issue )
Issue: Dec, 1934
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According to Henry Ford, the future of American industry is all about Soy beans. Actually, he wasn’t too far off, I’m typing this on my Apple Soybook Pro.
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HENRY FORD Discusses America’s INDUSTRIAL FUTURE
In this exclusive interview Henry Ford predicts that the farm will be the scene of industrial development. He points the way to success for today’s inventors and looks upon chemistry as the link between a more prosperous agriculture and industry.
by GLENN F. JENKINS
HENRY FORD, the industrial genius of modern times, sees industry entering a vast, wide-open era of experiment, invention and discovery. He believes that in the next twenty-five years man will achieve results overshadowing the dreams of today.
This new trend has already begun under the stimulation of Henry Ford’s inventive mind. He is convinced that the farm will be the scene of great industrial development and that chemistry will be the agency by which these changes will be evolved.
A start has been made in this direction. Science is discovering means of transforming products of the farm into materials for manufacture. Through his experimental farms, Henry Ford now successfully converts the common soy bean into automobile parts and an oil which makes up 30 per cent of the Ford car finish.Mr. Ford declares that this plastic industry, this evolution of industrial agriculture, still is in its infancy and that its possibilities and opportunities are limitless. As an example, he points out that his laboratories have produced from the soy bean a tough, hard, yet inexpensive material which stands a pressure of 9,000 pounds without breaking.
This material is as light as wood and some day may be as hard as steel. The ways in which this new Ford material may be employed are almost unbelievable. It has been developed to the point where it could be successfully used in making desks, chairs, and other furniture now in daily use. Ford and his chemists envision the time when automobile bodies, houses, skyscrapers and even great monuments may be fabricated from the soy bean.
Those who have the urge to create, to invent “and to discover need not be bewildered by this picture of the future. Mr. Ford hastens to explain that there is nothing complicated about the new technique. It is based on formulas that are not too complicated. The soy bean, for instance, contains fats, carbohydrates, and proteins. By a simple process of chemistry these are separated. The fat, or oil, is used for paints, lacquers, food stuffs, and countless other things. The protein or bean meal becomes the plastic raw material which can be shaped to suit many purposes. The molding technique, within easy reach of the ambitious experimenter, is not complicated and calls for only 2,000 pounds pressure and 350 degrees Fahrenheit.
But what of the unknown inventor? How does he fit into such a picture, Mr. Ford was asked. Things are done on such grand scales nowadays. Great laboratories have been built to solve the problems of mankind. In them are the polished minds of the schools. Brains have been regimented. Has the individual been hopelessly submerged? To this Mr. Ford gives an emphatic denial.
Genius, coupled with a desire to create something, to lessen drudgery and improve our modes of living, need not look far, according to Mr. Ford. He may start from scratch. Every inventor who amounted to anything had to do that. Edison had only two hands and one brain when he began to experiment with one thing and another. Ford had no better tools at his command 40 years ago when he made his first internal combustion engine out of a piece of water-pipe, an old flywheel, and some scraps of wire and iron. The contraption nearly wrecked the kitchen sink the first and only time he cranked it.
Chemistry is the magic word Mr. Ford would use to bring about the great developments he visualizes. It would in no way hamper mechanics, but would become another tool of industry. In those two fields, chemistry and industry, the chances for inventive genius to. assert itself would be multiplied. In Mr. Ford’s realm of activity agriculture and industry are inseparable partners and chemistry is the tie that binds them.
“I foresee the time when industry shall no longer denude the forests which require generations to mature, nor use up the mines which were ages in the making, but shall draw its raw material largely from the annual products of the fields,” he declared.
“The dinner table of the world is not a sufficient outlet for the farmer’s products; there must be found a wider market if agriculture is to be all that it is competent to become. And where is that market to be found if not in industry?
“I am convinced that we shall be able to get out of the yearly crops most of the basic materials which we now get from forest and mine. We shall grow annually many if not most of the substances needed in manufacturing.
“When that day comes, and it is surely on the way, the farmer will not lack a market and the worker will not lack a job. More people will live in the country. The present unnatural condition will be naturally balanced again. Chemistry will reunite agriculture and industry. They were allowed to get too far apart and the world has suffered by the separation.”
It would be within reason to speculate on the possibilities that lie ahead for the experimenter and inventor, but Mr. Ford does not do that. The young experimenter may do that for himself. He may peer into the future and not be surprised to envision many wonderful things. It is within the range of possibility that a formula and process as simple as that for breaking down the soy bean may be found to extract iron from ore. This could be done at the mines, saving vast sums in transportation costs.
This idea alone would be worth untold millions to the man who solved the problem of reducing low grade ores by an inexpensive method. It is worth thinking about. Cheaper raw materials would reflect themselves in every phase of industry. Uses for steel would multiply. Reduction of costs would stimulate building. New and simplified equipment would come into use. These are some of the things that are expected to take place. What a field for invention and discovery!
Chemists have found methods to convert beets, soy beans, sunflowers, goldenrod and many other plants into practical industrial products. In the back of Henry Ford’s mind reposes this question: “Why would it not be possible to discover entirely new uses for other agricultural materials?” He believes it to be within the range of possibility to discover a new method of lightening man’s burdens. It would be something that would not displace any valuable thing now in use, but would come into existence and find its proper place as did the automobile.
Who will make such a discovery? Mr. Ford is working in that direction and everyone has the opportunity of going along with him. He explained that the experiments he is making for new and less expensive materials are not for personal gain. He has made his fortune, and he wants the world to have the benefit of what he is now able to do in his laboratories. He is trying to lead the way out of a complicated mass of high costs and distorted ideas of how to make an abundant and joyous living.
On his farm tracts, which embrace more than 30,000 acres of Michigan land, Mr. Ford is producing annually great quantities of soy beans. These are processed under mass production technique for oils and other materials which are put to many uses in the great Ford factory system.
But, in order to give to the world the benefits of his experiments, he is showing how anybody from the young experimenter in his workshop to the farmer who may wish to grow soy beans for profit may get in on the ground floor of the new plastic industry.
Only Simple Equipment Needed
One may start with nothing more than a pestle, mortar, test tube, a quart of solvent and whatever useful odds and ends he may pick up around the house. Or he may go into it on a larger, though simple and inexpensive scale. Mr. Ford showed how this may be done in his “industrialized barn,” exhibited at the Century of Progress exposition.
The first step after harvesting and drying the beans is to break them up and extract the oil. In the past this has been done by pressure, but even at best 30 per cent of the oil was left in the bean meal. The Ford method, developed to a high state of efficiency, involves the use of a solvent, which literally washes the oil out of the crushed beans.
Mr. Ford’s chemists are conducting their extraction experiments with home made equipment set up in an old building at Greenfield Village. An old Ford engine is used for power. Much of the system consists of standard piping. The cost is small. Soy beans are stored in the loft. Directly under an opening in the floor of the loft is a set of rollers, into which the beans are fed by gravity.
How Oil Is Extracted From Soy Beans
The rollers flatten the beans into thin flakes and they then pass into the extractor. . This is a water-main pipe fixed at a 10-degree angle to the floor and filled with a solvent, which is generally a high test gasoline or naphtha. The flakes are fed in at the bottom of the pipe and carried in a tumbling, washing fashion by a screw conveyor up to the top of the pipe. As the flakes work upward against the solvent practically all oil is removed and mixes with the gasoline.
The flakes move on up in the form of a meal, to the top of the pipe, where they leave the solvent chamber and drop into a steamer where the solvent which the meal has soaked up is vaporized and driven off by a current of steam. Meantime, the gasoline, fed in at the top of the pipe, works its way down against the meal, carrying the oil with it. At the bottom of the pipe is an upright piece called the neck. When the oil laden gasoline reaches the bottom of the pipe, atmospheric pressure forces it up into the neck, from which it overflows, leaving the extractor and carrying the oil with it. Distillation then turns the gasoline into vapor, which rises and passes through a cooling apparatus, which is nothing else but an old Ford radiator. Thus it is condensed back into gasoline and is used over and over.
Things just kept going Henry Ford’s way. It was later in July of 1938 that all of his hard work paid off and he was awarded the Grand Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle by Hitler (First American winner). The award was presented to him in his Dearborn office by the German Consul with a congratulatory message from Schicklegruber himself.
And yeah, the admiration was mutual.
Comment by Firebrand38 — October 31, 2007 @ 2:41 pm