by Susan Maple
Henry Ford believed that some day he would “grow automobiles from the soil,” and he also believed that they would be fuelled from plants.
He achieved his goal.
Popular Mechanics featured Ford’s car in its December 1941 issue. Made of hemp, sisal, wheat straw and resin, the car was ten times stronger than steel. There is an old video clip of the car on the Internet. The car drives up, someone pounds it with a hatchet, and then polishes it to demonstrate there is no damage.
Three times, from 1800 to 1937, alcohol was either the prominent fuel, or threatened to take over as the main fuel. Heavy “corporate footprints” stepped in and taxed or prohibited alcohol, because anyone could make alcohol out of whatever plant material was available. Since there were no gas stations, early cars were made to run on whatever fuel they could easily find, and huge corporate interests worked behind the scenes to make sure petroleum would prevail.
In the first assault, a newly discovered fuel, kerosene took the lead over alcohol because of an exorbitant tax placed on alcohol in 1862. The second assault was in the early 1900s through Prohibition laws. Petroleum interests heavily funded the Temperance movement. Groups such as Carry Nation’s “Women’s Christian Temperance Union,” whose members carried hatchets and smashed bars, were helped along in their cause by beneficent oil interests. The third assault came about over new machinery that would replace hand cultivation of hemp as well as a process for making paper that utilized not just the fibers, but also the cellulose “hurds.” Hemp stood ready to do to the crude oil and the paper industry what computers did to the typewriter.
Alcohol was used from the late 1830s to 1860s in lamps and streetlamps. Though it is often insinuated that we went from whale oil and tallow lamps to the petroleum derived kerosene, there was a thriving business of distilling alcohol for lighting. For example, the city of Cincinnati was using 12,000 bushels of corn a day for alcohol for its streetlamps. By 1860, distilleries were making between 20 percent to 80 percent of their spirits for fuel.
In the early 1800s, if rock (crude) oil bubbled up from the bowels of the earth onto your land, it was a calamity. It stunk, nothing could grow where it touched the ground and it made the water unfit for cows to drink. Its first modern commercial use was for medicine, and promised to cure “your lungs, your liver, and your lights!”
Kerosene was discovered in 1852, and arrived on the general market in the 1860s after the first oil well in this country was drilled in 1859. It was not bad to use. But Congress passed the Internal Revenue Act in 1862 to pay for the Civil War, and a $2.08 tax per gallon of alcohol was levied. Kerosene became the new fuel overnight. This tax on alcohol was to remain in effect for 44 years.
In the meantime, John D. Rockefeller started his refineries, made arrangements with railroads, and set about absorbing or destroying his competitors. By the 1890s, the Standard Oil Co. controlled more than 90 percent of the country’s refining business. President Theodore Roosevelt stepped in and broke up the trusts, but the monopolies were already restructuring under “holding companies.” Yet, the alcohol tax was rolled back through Roosevelt’s efforts, and in 1906, alcohol fuel experienced a short revival.
By 1920, there was a “universal assumption that (ethyl) alcohol in some form will be a constituent of the motor fuel of the future,” stated Scientific American magazine.
Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Charles Kettering (inventor and head of research at General Motors) and Henry Ford all looked at alcohol as a superior fuel. To quote Ford, “Alcohol is a cleaner, nicer, better fuel for automobiles than gasoline.” And Rudolph Diesel at the 1900 World Expo fuelled his diesel engine with peanut oil.
Ford Model T and Model A vehicles prior to 1931 were dual-fuel vehicles. They got 34 miles to the gallon and could run on either gasoline or alcohol. There was a knob on the dash that went to the carburettor and changed the ignition timing to accommodate either fuel. A driver in the countryside could stop by any farmhouse and fill his gas tank with applejack or whatever distilled spirit was available, because farmers were making alcohol to fuel their tractors.
Alcohol as the fuel of the future was dealt a serious blow with the advent of Prohibition as it blocked the manufacture and sale of alcohol. Rockefeller, who had given generously to the Temperance movement, said that Prohibition would make more workers more productive.
G. K. Chesterton, an English writer of the time who visited America during Prohibition, noted that the argument for Prohibition was also the very argument against it. He said that the “servile test,” the capitalist being able to insist that the common man not drink in order for the employer to get richer, was “in itself a testimony to the presence of slavery.” It is a test of what we can get out of him, instead of the test of what he can get out of life, he said. Chesterton, also noted that the well-to-do Americans were delighted to discuss it (Prohibition) over the nuts and wine. “They were even willing, if necessary, to dispense with the nuts.”
Rockefeller, a teetotaller, deemed Prohibition a failure 14 years after it had been enacted. Estimates for the amount of money Rockefeller donated to the anti-saloon movement are as high as $4 million if one adds his failed prohibition campaigns abroad.
In 1933, Ford’s mass-produced cars ran on gasoline. The carmakers were no longer making dual-fuel vehicles and had not made them for two years.
In the 1930s, Ford had begun experimenting with cars constructed of other material besides steel. In 1941, his plastic car made with natural fibers and resins was complete. It was fuelled by alcohol made from hemp.
Ford knew alcohol could be made from any plant material; weeds by the side of the road, grass clippings, old donuts and even garbage. Hemp was especially useful for fuel because of its short growing season. It could be planted after corn, wheat and oats, and still have time to mature. It enriched the soil, and got rid of weeds so invasive that fields would have to have been abandoned. It was used for rope, paper, cloth, cellophane, food oil and protein. Since the previous difficulty with hemp had been its labor-intensive cultivation, hemp was featured in Popular Mechanics magazine as the “New Billion Dollar Crop.”
John D. Rockefeller, William Randolph Hearst, (with vast timberland holdings and a newspaper empire) and Lammot du Pont (who held patents on the fuel additive tetraethyl lead, synthetic plastics from oil and coal, nylon, and new processes to make paper from wood pulp) led a campaign to make hemp illegal. Occupational excise taxes were levied, as were transfer taxes. Eventually, hemp was criminalized, and Henry Ford’s plastic hemp car a relic of the past.
Watch the 1941 video clip of Ford’s car at