The largest museum in the United States is located in the Detroit suburb of Dearborn, the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation. The sprawling, 12-acre indoor-outdoor complex in the old Greenfield Village is home to JFK’s Presidential limo, the Rosa Parks bus and the Wright Brothers’ bicycle shop. There you will find Abraham Lincoln’s chair from Ford’s Theater, along with Thomas Edison’s laboratory and an Oscar Mayer Wienermobile. George Washington’s camp bed is there, with Igor Sikorski’s helicopter and an enormous collection of antique automobiles, locomotives and aircraft.
Sadly, one object you will not find there, is Henry Ford’s plastic car, made from soybeans.
Ford left the family farm outside of modern-day Detroit as a young man, never to return. His father William thought the boy would one day own the place but young Henry couldn’t stand farm work. He later wrote, “I never had any particular love for the farm—it was the mother on the farm I loved”.
Henry Ford went on to other things, but part of him never left the farm. In 1941, the now-wealthy business magnate wanted to combine industry, with agriculture. At least, that’s what the museum says.
Ford first gave the plastic car project to yacht designer Eugene Turenne Gregorie, but later turned to the Greenfield Village soybean laboratory. To the guy in charge over there, actually, a guy with some experience in tool & die making. His name was Lowell Overly.
The car was made in Dearborn with help from the scientist and botanist George Washington Carver, (yeah, That George Washington Carver), a man born to slavery who rose to such prodigious levels accomplishment, that Time magazine labeled him the “Black Leonardo”.
The soybean car, introduced to the public this day in 1941, was made from fourteen ¼-inch thick plastic panels and plexiglass windows, attached to a tubular steel frame and weighing in at 1,900 pounds, about a third lighter than comparable automobiles of the era. The finished prototype was exhibited later that year at the Dearborn Days festival, and the Michigan State Fair Grounds.
The thing was built to run on fuel derived from industrial hemp, a related strain of the Cannibis Sativa plant beloved of stoners the world over and known simply, as “weed”.
Ford claimed he’d be able to “grow automobiles from the soil”, a hedge against the metal rationing of world War Two. He dedicated 120,000 acres of soybeans to experimentation, but to no end. The total acreage devoted to “fuel” production, is unrecorded.
Another reason for a car made from soybeans, was to help American farmers. Plus, Henry Ford seems to have had a “thing”, for soybeans. At the 1934 World’s Fair in Chicago, Ford invited reporters to a feast where he served soybean cheese, soybean crackers, soy bread and butter, soy milk, soy ice cream… The man was a veritable Bubba Gump, of soybeans. Ford was probably one of the first in this country, to regularly drink soy milk.
Henry Ford’s own car was fitted with a soybean trunk and struck with an axe to show the material’s durability, though the axe was later revealed to have a rubber boot.
Henry Ford’s experiment in making cars from soybeans never got past that first prototype, and came to a halt during WW2. The project was never revived, though several states adopted license plates stamped out of soybeans, a solution farm animals found to be quite delicious.
The car itself was destroyed long ago, the ingredients for its manufacture unrecorded, but the thing lives on in the hearts of hemp enthusiasts, everywhere.
The New York Times claimed the car body and fenders were made from soy beans, wheat and corn. Some sources opine that the car was made from Bakelite or some variant of Duroplast, a plant-based auto body substance produced in the millions, for the East German Trabant.
One newspaper claimed that nothing ever came from Henry Ford’s soybean experiments, except whipped cream.
In the mid-19th century, birthing centers were set up all over Europe, for the care of poor and underprivileged mothers and their illegitimate infants. Care was provided free of charge, in exchange for which young mothers agreed to become training subjects for doctors and midwives.
At the time, Vienna General Hospital ran two such clinics, the 1st a “teaching hospital” for undergraduate medical students, the 2nd for student midwives.
Childbed or “puerperal” fever was rare among these “street births”, and far more prevalent in the First Clinic, than the Second. Semmelweis carefully eliminated every difference between the two, even including religious practices. In the end, the only difference was the people who worked there.
Mortality rates in the First Clinic dropped by 90%, to rates comparable with the Second. In April 1847, First Clinic mortality rates were 18.3% – nearly one in five. Hand washing was instituted in mid-May, and June rates dropped to 2.2%. July was 1.2%. For two months, the rate was zero.
Dr. Semmelweis was outraged by the indifference of the medical community, and began to write open and increasingly angry letters to prominent European obstetricians. He went so far as to denounce such people as “irresponsible murderers”, leading contemporaries and even his wife, to doubt his mental stability.
Noble though it was, Lawrence Oates’ suicide came to naught. The last three made their final camp on March 19, with 400 miles to go. A howling blizzard descended on the tents the following day and lasted for days, as Scott, Henry “Birdie” Bowers and Dr. Edward Wilson wrote good-bye letters to mothers, wives, and others. In his final starved, frostbitten hours, Robert Falcon Scott wrote to his diary “It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more.” In his final entry, Scott worried about the financial burden on his family, and those of the doomed expedition: “Last entry. For God’s sake look after our people”.
The last three survivors died eleven miles from their next supply depot.
The animosity between the media and the White House grew as Nixon and administration officials discussed plans to “get” hostile media organizations.
Within six days, the House Judiciary Committee approved three articles of impeachment: obstruction of justice, abuse of power and contempt of Congress.
Reduced to three ships by August 1578, Drake made the straits of Magellan, emerging alone into the Pacific that September.
As Stalin’s Soviet Union imposed the “terror famine” of 1932-’33, the deliberate starvation of millions of Ukrainian peasant farmers known as the 
As director of the Soviet Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Lysenko put his theories to work, with unsurprisingly dismal results. He’d force Soviet farmers to plant WAY too close together, on the theory that plants of the same “class” would “cooperate” with one another, and that “mutual assistance” takes place within and even across plant species.
By the siege’s end in the Spring of 1944, nine of them had starved to death, standing watch over all that food. These guys had stood guard over their seed bank for twenty-eight months, without eating so much as a grain.
Born Henryk Goldszmit into the Warsaw family of Józef Goldszmit, in 1878 or ’79 (the sources vary), Korczak was the pen name by which he wrote children’s books.
Korczak wrote for several Polish language newspapers while studying medicine at the University of Warsaw, becoming a pediatrician in 1904. Always the writer, Korczak received literary recognition in 1905 with his book Child of the Drawing Room (Dziecko salonu), while serving as medical officer during the Russo-Japanese war.
The Polish nation, the sixth largest in all Europe, was sectioned and partitioned for over a century, by Austrian, Prussian, and Russian imperial powers. Korczak volunteered for military service in 1914, serving as military doctor during WW1 and the series of Polish border wars between 1919-’21.
Shorter in stature and considerably more powerful than Cro-Magnon, our direct ancestor and all but indistinguishable from ourselves, Neanderthal bodies were suited to the ice age of the early and middle Paleolithic era.
Augustus Longstreet Hull was born 1847 in “The Classic City” of Athens Georgia, and enlisted in the Confederate Army on September 8, 1864.
Historical Easter Eggs - Today in History 
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