Ford's 1930s Hemp Car on YouTube

In the 1930s and 1940s, Henry Ford developed a car body that was made from from hemp fiber, and now YouTube has a video of it (and everything else). The video is only 26 seconds long, pixelated and there is no listed source, but the information in it is pretty cool. Henry Ford's plastic hemp car used fibers made from hemp, and the resulting material was "lighter than steel, but could withstand ten times the impact without denting" according to the clip. Manu Sharma, of Orange Hues, wrote in with the tip and said her research found out it was actually ten times stronger than steel and 44 percent lighter. You can watch the clip here. The YouTube clip doesn't have a lot of information, and if you do a little searching for more information, you quickly get to sites with horrible spelling and dubious information. Still, it seems clear that Henry Ford did encourage hemp cultivation to use as a fuel and as a manufacturing material. We'll see what happens when Toyota releases the Prius 420.

[Source: You Tube, hat tip to Manu Sharma]