“The fuel of the future (click here) is going to come from fruit like that sumac out by the road, or from apples, weeds, sawdust – almost anything,” the CEO of the Ford Motor Company told a reporter for the New York Times. “There is fuel in every bit of vegetable matter that can be fermented.”
Were those the words of the CEO of Ford today? The New York Times opened it's doors on September 18, 1851. The science of monitoring climate existed at the time of these men and even earlier.
Those words, which capture the sense of excitement and potential surrounding biofuels today, were actually spoken in 1925 by Henry Ford. Nearly a century ago, the Model-T was designed to run on either gasoline or a corn-based fuel called “ethanol”. Even before that, in 1897, Rudolph Diesel demonstrated that his engine could run on peanut oil. Today, following an eight-decade detour in the petroleum age, biofuels are back – fueled by a powerful combination of advancing technologies, rising environmental concerns, farmer support, and soaring oil prices....
Those words, which capture the sense of excitement and potential surrounding biofuels today, were actually spoken in 1925 by Henry Ford. Nearly a century ago, the Model-T was designed to run on either gasoline or a corn-based fuel called “ethanol”. Even before that, in 1897, Rudolph Diesel demonstrated that his engine could run on peanut oil. Today, following an eight-decade detour in the petroleum age, biofuels are back – fueled by a powerful combination of advancing technologies, rising environmental concerns, farmer support, and soaring oil prices....
Henry Ford and Thomas Edison knew each other and collaborated from time to time.
...But a major hoped-for market, motor vehicles, was using gasoline, not electricity. But it was not for want of effort between two titans and dear friends. In 1914, Henry Ford announced a “Ford Electric” that would sell for $900 and have a range of 100 miles (Mom, p. 255). The brainchild of Thomas Edison himself, the concept—described as “Mr. Ford’s personal project” and “experimental” by Ford Motor Company—never got off the ground. The alkaline battery that penetrated the truck market was rejected by car makers because of its size and an incremental cost of between $200 and $600 per vehicle (Mom, pp. 255–56)....
According to The Ford Century, Ford invested $1.5 million (almost $31.5 million today) in the electric-car project and nearly bought 100,000 batteries from Edison before the project fell apart.
(Edison had produced lead-acid batteries when Ford wanted nickel-iron batteries.)
Henry Ford was the first to consider the fact, in order to sell his inventions the average worker needed an income to buy them.
Industrialism's universal sales tool was to sell convenient power. (click here) Power on demand made life easier for the working classes while increasing the clout of the already powerful. Yet even with this universal appeal, every inventor faced monumental setbacks due to the intrinsic resistance to change.
Ford's phenomenal success was largely due to his understanding that the social revolution was more important than the machinery. In many circles, he is given credit for inventing nothing less than modern enlightened capitalism. Ford's big social innovations include:
1) the decision to make his product cheap enough to sell to small farmers;
2) the decision to organize the growth of his company with a minimum of "help" from the financial community;
3) the 8-hour $5 work day based on the economic assumption that worker must be able to buy back production; and
4) the vertical integration of production. Compared with these social contributions to history, Ford's technological decisions to use gasoline for fuel, employ vanadium steel for the model T, or even his decision to use the moving assembly line, pale by comparison.
Social revolutionary though Ford clearly was, even he did not challenge the fundamental assumption of industrialism. In fact, by perfecting the most convenient use of power ever known to mankind, Ford is largely responsible for the energy-environmental crises that solar power must address. This means that in order to succeed as the power for sustainable technology, the solar alternative requires a boost from someone who is even more socially radical than Ford was at his enlightened best.
The strong basis of the USA economy and it's resilience to failure stems from a few things; it has a baseline commerce from it's entitlements when all else fails and it has a strong entrepreneurial small business community across the USA that chugs right along with small changes in it's business model during difficult economies. Basically, it works. Things are not so different today as in the time of Edison and Ford. What worked for an economy then, works today. The Middle Class and problem solving is the USA economy's claim to fame.
Ford and Edison tried. It fell to the lack of sufficient knowledge of materials that exist today. Ford's cars would eventually be modified to consumerism and sales demanded by the social revolution. But, even in the day of invention which fueled the industrial revolution there was the knowledge that burning anything for energy was raising the planet's temperatures.
Most countries in the world have records of their climate dating back at least one hundred years, some countries much longer.
The climate crisis is real and is due to human induced global warming. Those that began the industrial revolution knew energy would have to change to electric batteries eventually. They were responsible people that saw the need, but, was unable to fulfill the dream. But, as inventors they knew nothing is the same forever and as they invented and were attributed with genius; they also knew things would change with every knew improvement. They welcomed the change and the reason to invent again.
