Posted
on July 19, 2014
 |
| History can be a jumble in my head. With an awful lot about various battles and wars! |
I
learned much of history in little cubicles. U.S. History here, World
History there. History of transportation and communication inventions
over here, history of battles and wars over there.
To
some extent, the disjointed facts I have crammed into my head have no
way of informing me about who-knew-who, who-influenced-who,
who-taught-who.
One
thing I had never heard of before was that two giants in slightly
different fields worked together on an experiment. The two giants
were agricultural inventor and botanist George Washington Carver, and
automobile manufacturer and industrial innovator Henry Ford.
It
almost makes sense that two great American inventors and innovators,
living at the same time, might meet one another—but it had never
occurred to me that they would.
Carver
was born a slave during the Civil War, he worked as a farm hand and
managed to get a college education after moving out of the South, to
Iowa. But he moved back to the South in order to head the department
of agriculture at the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute. Ford
of course set up his Motor Company near Detroit, Michigan.
The
two wrote letters back and forth, and in 1937 Carver visited
Michigan. Ford donated money to support Carver's work at the Tuskegee
Institute, and Carver helped oversee crops at the Ford plantation in
Georgia. By the beginning of World War II, Ford had made several
trips to Alabama to try to convince Carver to come help him develop a
synthetic rubber because the war had caused shortages. Carver finally
arrived in Dearborn, MI, on this date in 1942, and set up a
laboratory.
Carver
and Ford experimented with crops such as sweet potatoes and
dandelions. Finally they devised a way to make rubber using
goldenrod.
I
couldn't find out how long the two worked together, but I did hear
that when Carver returned home to Tuskegee, Ford paid to have an
elevator installed in dormitory where Carver lived, so that he
wouldn't have to climb up and down stairs. Carver was 79 years old at
that time, and he died just six months after working with Ford.
By
the way, although Ford died just four years after Carver, the
relationship between Ford Motor Company and the Tuskegee Institute
continued. I found out, for example, that a library at the university
is named the Ford Motor Company Library / Learning Resource Center,
because the company had donated $4.5 million for the renovation of
the old library, with the completion of the renovations in 2001.
Also
on this date:
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