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N0KFQ > TODAY 19.07.16 16:14l 58 Lines 2814 Bytes #999 (0) @ WW
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Subj: Today in History - Jul 19
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Sent: 160719/1405Z 1624@N0KFQ.#SWMO.MO.USA.NA BPQ6.0.12
1942
George Washington Carver begins experimental project with Henry
Ford
On this day in 1942, the agricultural chemist George Washington
Carver, head of Alabama's famed Tuskegee Institute, arrives in
Dearborn, Michigan at the invitation of Henry Ford, founder of
Ford Motor Company.
Born to slave parents in Missouri during the Civil War, Carver
managed to get a high school education while working as a
farmhand in Kansas in his late 20s. Turned away by a Kansas
university because he was an African American, Carver later
became the first black student at Iowa State Agricultural College
in Ames, where he obtained his bachelor's and master's degrees.
In 1896, Carver left Iowa to head the department of agriculture
at the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, a school founded
by the leading black educator Booker T. Washington. By convincing
farmers in the South to plant peanuts as an alternative to
cotton, Carver helped resuscitate the region's agriculture; in
the process, he became one of the most respected and influential
scientists in the country.
Like Carver, Ford was deeply interested in the regenerative
properties of soil and the potential of alternative crops such as
peanuts and soybeans to produce plastics, paint, fuel and other
products. Ford had long believed that the world would eventually
need a substitute for gasoline, and supported the production of
ethanol (or grain alcohol) as an alternative fuel. In 1942, he
would showcase a car with a lightweight plastic body made from
soybeans. Ford and Carver began corresponding via letter in 1934,
and their mutual admiration deepened after Carver made a visit to
Michigan in 1937. As Douglas Brinkley writes in "Wheels for the
World," his history of Ford, the automaker donated generously to
the Tuskegee Institute, helping finance Carver's experiments, and
Carver in turn spent a period of time helping to oversee crops at
the Ford plantation in Ways, Georgia.
By the time World War II began, Ford had made repeated journeys
to Tuskegee to convince Carver to come to Dearborn and help him
develop a synthetic rubber to help compensate for wartime rubber
shortages. Carver arrived on July 19, 1942, and set up a
laboratory in an old water works building in Dearborn. He and
Ford experimented with different crops, including sweet potatoes
and dandelions, eventually devising a way to make the rubber
substitute from goldenrod, a plant weed. Carver died in January
1943, Ford in April 1947, but the relationship between their two
institutions continued to flourish: As recently as the late
1990s, Ford awarded grants of $4 million over two years to the
George Washington Carver School at Tuskegee.
73 - K.O., n0kfq
N0KFQ @ N0KFQ.#SWMO.MO.USA.NA
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