QI The Book of the Dead

peanut derivatives, including: evaporated peanut beverage, cheese, ink, dyes, soap, medicinal oils and cosmetics, metal polish, plastic, instant coffee, meat tenderiser, shaving cream, talcum powder, wood stains, shoe polish, peanut oil shampoo and various cooking sauces, earning himself the nickname ‘The Peanut Man’. He may well have invented peanut butter but he never patented it. He believed food products were a gift from God and therefore belonged to everyone.
    Some weeks after going to Dearborn, Carver sent Henry Ford a recipe for a gravy substitute made using soybean oil, adding a note to Mrs Ford:
    Please watch the digestive tract of Mr. Ford for a few days after he has eaten the gelatinised pig’s feet. Notice how his face will fill up. To clear the skin, remove wrinkles etc, try massaging with pure, refined peanut oil .
     
    The same month, Carver wrote again to Clara Ford saying: ‘I want to help Mr Ford prove his startling statement that we can live directly from the products of the soil.’ Their collaboration culminated in 1942 in an idea that was decades ahead of its time: a plastic car-body made from soybeans that weighed 30 per cent less than the standard steel model and ran on grain alcohol.Sadly, the war intervened and the first ever eco-car never went into production.
    Ford’s last years were dominated by paranoia and speculation on the afterlife. These were brought into sharp focus when his son Edsel died of cancer, aged only forty-nine, in 1943. Ford became convinced that the government were planning to oust him and, fearful of assassination attempts, had all his chauffeurs armed. In fact, it was simply ill health that cut short his tenure and his grandson Henry Ford II replaced him in 1945. Some say his final decline was caused by a stroke that struck him down as he watched uncut footage from the infamous Nazi concentration camp at Majdanek in Poland.
    Ford had become a firm believer in reincarnation, inspired by one of the few books he admitted to having read: A Short View of Great Questions (1899) by Orlando Jay Smith. The book’s contention that our experiences in life are never wasted struck a chord. Henry Ford hated waste.
    Religion offered nothing to the point. Even work could not give me complete satisfaction. Work is futile if we cannot utilise the experience we collect in one life in the next .
     
    He decided that, because he was born in 1863 – the date of the Battle of Gettysburg – he was the reincarnation of a soldier who had died there.
    By the end of his life, Ford had amassed a fortune that would today be worth $188 billion. Reincarnation gave him a plausible reason for the magnitude of his success and for his sureness of touch. He’d been round the block many times before. In 1928, he explained it to a reporter from the San Francisco Examiner :

    Genius is experience. Some seem to think that it is a gift or talent, but it is the fruit of long experience in many lives. Some are older souls than others, and so they know more. The discovery of reincarnation put my mind at ease. If you preserve a record of this conversation, write it so that it puts men’s minds at ease. I would like to communicate to others the calmness that the long view of life gives to us .
     
    The other way Henry Ford put his mind at rest was by making sure everything was neat and tidy. He was very keen on keeping records. When his wife Clara died three years after him, in 1950, staff found that many of the fifty-six rooms at his house were crammed with his papers, notebooks and receipts – even letters Edsel Ford had written to Father Christmas as a small boy. He had thrown nothing away in over sixty years. The collection became the basis of the Ford archives which number more than 10 million documents.

     
    Henry Ford’s entrepreneurial flair, his enormous wealth and his attempts to control every aspect of his life, pale into insignificance however compared to the life and career of another billionaire, Howard Hughes (1905–76).
    When Hughes died in 1976, he was the second richest man in the United States after J. Paul Getty. His father had made a fortune by patenting (in 1909) the rotary drill bit that was to revolutionise the oil industry. By 2000, the Hughes Tool Company still had an astonishing 40 per cent share of the world drill-bit market. Hughes used his inherited wealth to build an empire that included not just oil but mining, aviation, armaments, films andproperty, including many