[Buckafuffalo]

From what I can see this place isn't posted so I thought I'd share it with you all. I had no idea Mr. Ford ventured out that far away from home.

Looks like he should of stayed home after all.

The first clip is from 1944 second is present day. I also stole some words and put them below (cuz I love cut and paste)!

Fordlandia, Brazil


If anyone knew how to outsource foreign labour in splendid style, it was Henry Ford. Yes, that Henry Ford.He's the guy whose cars became a global household name, and whose production methods revolutionized the way modern manufacturing works.


Last year was his 150th birthday, so there was a lot of introspection in the press about his legacy, which naturally turned to his less-than-stellar achievements. Like that one time he tried to build a North American factory town in the Brazilian Amazon.


Called “Fordlandia,” this bizarre story began in 1928 when Ford, hoping to sidestep east Asian sources of the rubber he desperately needed for his cars, sent a team to the jungle to build his own private alternative.


According to the Daily Mail, they built homes, shops, hospitals, a proper mess hall, and even swimming pools, to support the population of 400 workers that would eventually call this place home.


It didn’t work. To a thorough and hilarious extent.


First, the place was designed to be American to a T. That meant only North American food was served, a big turn off for the Brazilian workers. Then, according to Gizmodo, Ford tried to impose his own strict code of morals: No alcohol and no women. Also, mandatory square dancing. Seriously.


The result, apparently, was riots, even before Ford got the bad news: The area was unsuitable for large-scale rubber cultivation.
Not to be deterred, he moved the operation elsewhere, this time planned for up to 2,000 workers. Just in time for the invention of synthetic rubber, making the whole natural-cultivation scheme obsolete.


All that’s left of Fordlandia is a few hulking industrial ruins in the jungle, surrounded by homes that wouldn’t look out of place in small-town Michigan.

[corpsehands]

No booze no women and mandatory square dancing, so hell is real

[WhatTheFXUp]

I'm I missing something here; Ford has manufactured cars in the US for over a hundred years. Tires are a different story and I really think this was a mean tactic against Ford.

[BretagneAmour]

Niice :]

[twayblade]

Square dancing? WTF?

[Victorian_Hangman]

Henry Ford wanted to own the primary sources for all of the material used in his cars, and to impose his own morality standards on all of his workers. Several large housing developments were built for Ford workers, each complete with its own team of morality police, who kept a watchful eye out for people living beyond their means, gambling, drinking, or not attending church.

He was prevented from buying iron mines in Minnesota by anti-monopoly laws but did have his own fleet of freighters to ship raw materials via the great lakes.

Why he tried to establish a rubber plantation in a place any botanist could have told him was a bad place to grow rubber I have no idea. Mind, it could be a great opportunity for a movie by Werner Herzog.

[Hugo L.]

My theory on this is the following : if you're ever in Fort Myers, visit the Edison-Ford Winter Estates.

Basically, Thomas Edison and Henry Ford were friends and neighbours in Fort Myers where they had their winter retreats built next to one another.

Another one of their friends and frequent was Harvey Firestone (yes, the tire guy). Part of the exhibit is the lab where Edison would try various ways to grow bigger, better rubber-trees for eventual production.

Maybe it was just for rubber FoMoCo was gonna use in other parts of the cars too.

If my memory serves me right, all of his efforts proved to be worthless, as synthetic rubber was created, basically putting an end to natural rubber as a source of material for rubber tires (except, interestingly enough, for airplane tires, which are apparently made of natural rubber to this day).

So I would guess that it would be possible for Ford, based on Edison's experiments, to have had interest in centralizing all of his operations and be self-sufficient so as not to depend on outside suppliers for his tires, had the venture been successful.

[Victorian_Hangman]

Very interesting. Henry Ford idolized Edison, to the point where, when Edison came to visit the recreation of his laboratory at Greenfield Village, he asked to sit down at one point and Ford had the chair nailed to the floor (I believe it is still there). They may well have bounced ideas off each other. There is also a legend that Ford was present at Edison's deathbed and captured his last breath in a test tube. There is no proof, but after Ford's death, a sealed, unlabeled test tube containing nothing visible was found in one of his desk drawers.

Henry Ford was extremely fond of possible new technologies, and engaged in a number of experiments involving automotive technology, some of which worked, some of which didn't. A noted example of the latter was body panels made of soy or hemp-based plastics--in a famous piece of archival footage, Ford can be seen hitting a plastic trunk lid with a sledge hammer and having it bounce off. The only trouble was that the material was not water resistant.

[Victorian_Hangman]

I truly believe that Werner Herzog should have made "Fordlandia" instead of "Fitzcarraldo".