QI The Book of the Dead

the amount the jury thought covered the damage Ford and his company had suffered. During the trial, Ford had been cross-examined in the witness box and this had revealed some strange gaps in his general knowledge. It emerged that he thought the American Revolution had taken place in 1812 and he couldn’t define words and phrases like ‘ballyhoo’ and‘chilli con carne’. He thought that the traitor Benedict Arnold was a writer. It was in defence of his ignorance that he made his often misquoted reply ‘History is bunk’. What he actually said was: ‘History is bunk as it is taught in schools …’
    What distinguishes Ford from most modern CEOs is that his vision went far beyond business. He was a Utopian, convinced that technology properly managed would lead to a world without war, turning it into one happy global version of the Ford company. This helps explain his obsession with diet and personal morality – and the apparent paradox that the man whose wealth was built on the internal combustion engine was a committed environmentalist. His estate at Fair Lane near Detroit was powered by hydroelectric power from his own dam on the Rouge River. To control mosquitoes organically, he built hundreds of bathouses in the grounds and, while building works were going on, he paid local boys to catch squirrels so that they wouldn’t be killed when trees were felled.
    As a teenager, Ford had given up hunting after shooting a meadowlark. As he and his two companions retrieved the dead bird, Ford exclaimed, ‘Well I’m through. When three big able-bodied men with guns will pick on a little bird like this, I’ve fired my last shot.’ For the rest of his life, he was a pacifist: he wouldn’t even let his son Edsel play with toy guns.
    In many ways, Ford never left the farm where he was born. He loved nature and enjoyed camping, going on regular excursions with a group of wealthy friends who called themselves ‘The Vagabonds’. They included his former mentor Thomas Edison, the tyre magnate Harvey Firestone and the naturalist John Burroughs, known affectionately as ‘the Grand Old Man of Nature’. In 1921 they were joined for a night by the thenpresident, Warren Harding. According to John Burroughs, the campers would ‘cheerfully endure wet, cold, smoke, mosquitoes, black flies and sleepless nights, just to touch naked reality once more’. It was a pretty relaxed form of ‘roughing it’, though: each man had his own personal tent, with mosquito nets and a separate dining marquee.
    On an even folksier note, Ford helped rejuvenate traditional American fiddle-playing. He had his own $75,000 instrument (a Stradivarius, naturally) but no natural talent, and he made himself cross by continually failing to play and dance a jig at the same time. To make up for it, he hired an elderly fiddler called Mellie Dunham to record traditional tunes and funded the Henry Ford Gold Cup for fiddling. The publicity generated was huge. Fiddling underwent a national revival and remains an essential part of country music to this day.
    Perhaps it was inevitable that a farm boy turned technologist would end up finding a way to combine the two disciplines. In the 1930s he saw his chance: a new branch of science called ‘chemurgy’, which sought to find new uses for agricultural raw materials in industry. Ford became so interested that the Ford Motor Company began using soybeans as an ingredient of its gear-knobs and car-horn buttons and, in 1934, he formed the Farm Chemurgic Council, with a national conference at Dearborn, Michigan to which George Washington Carver (1864–1943) was invited.
    Carver was a legendary figure. A former slave, in 1896 (the debut year of the Quadricycle and the word ‘consumer’) he had been appointed by the great educator Booker T. Washington (a former slave himself) to be the director of Agricultural Research at Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute for Negroes. His aimwas to help black farmers improve their crops by means of crop rotation and by finding alternatives to cotton, which depleted the soil. It was Carver’s championing of soybeans that drew him to Ford’s attention, but it was peanuts that assured his immortality. Largely due to him, over the next fifty years, peanuts became one of the dominant crops in the whole of the South.
    Initially, there wasn’t much call for peanuts so Carver set about exploring the possibilities for by-products. His ceaseless experiments produced some 300