Wow. A few interesting random stories tonight. It appears that Henry Ford wanted to pay less for rubber for his car tires. What’s the logical solution? How about moving a piece of America to Brazil and trying to grow plants on rocks?
…by the late 1920s, the infamous automobile tycoon Henry Ford set out to break the back of this rubbery monopoly. His hundreds of thousands of new cars needed millions of tires, which were very expensive to produce when buying raw materials from the established rubber lords. To that end, he established Fordlandia, a tiny piece of America which was transplanted into the Amazon rain forest for a single purpose: to create the largest rubber plantation on the planet.