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Robert Allen Boyer
- Wayne State University Press
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Robert Allen Boyer 1909-1989 "At the time Greenfield Village was being developed by Mr. Ford, he brought Bob Boyer out of the trade school and decided to set him up in an experimental laboratory in Greenfield Village." —J. L. McCloud* With a vigorous start via Henry Ford Trade School, followed by the Edison Institute— Ford's "School for Inventors ,, —Robert Boyer quickly became well known for his "plastic car,, and his "soybean suits.,, After leaving Ford, and with much less publicity, Boyer contributed significantly to the production of the many soybean food products now on worldwide markets. Robert Allen Boyer was born on September 30, 1909, in Toledo, Ohio. He was the son of Earl Boyer and Ruth Harris Boyer. His parents moved to Royal Oak, Michigan, in 1916, where Robert attended grade school while his father worked in the accounting department of Ford Motor Company in nearby Highland Park. When Robert was in the seventh grade, his father transferred from Ford Motor Company to the Henry Ford Hospital business department. Frank Campsall, Henry Ford's secretary, became acquainted with Earl Boyer at the hospital, and when Henry Ford bought the Wayside Inn in Massachusetts in 1923, it was Campsall who suggested that Earl Boyer would be an appropriate business manager for the inn. So the Boyers, including young Robert and his three sisters, moved into a Ford-owned house near the inn. For several weeks until their house was ready, Robert slept in the Longfellow room at the inn. He then attended high school at Framingham, Massachusetts, and graduated in 1927. Young Robert enjoyed skating on the mill pond near the inn. So did Henry Ford on his winter visits there. It was at the pond that Ford, with skates in hand, asked Robert, "Mind if I skate?,. They were soon playing hockey on the ice with two stones for goal posts. Robert was privileged also to meet Harvey Firestone, John Burroughs, and Thomas Edison at the inn while he was in high school. One day, Ford asked Robert what *From the oral reminiscences of J. L. McCloud, chemical engineer at Ford Motor Company. 45 Henry's Lieutenants he was going to do after high school. He was a senior and planned to attend Dartmouth. Ford suggested that he come to Dearborn for some work experience before going to college. Soon Robert's father was saying , "It's all settled; you're going to Dearborn." So, in September 1927, Boyer arrived in Dearborn, where Campsall arranged his enrollment in the Henry Ford Trade School at the Rouge plant. There he received classwork in mathematics and mechanics along with a job operating a boiler at the powerplant, receiving pay of twenty cents an hour. With his family still at Wayside, Boyer lived at the YMCA. He was now eighteen and had his own Model T roadster, but he was homesick. Ford had taken recent trips to Europe and had been impressed with the agricultural prosperity in some of those countries. In Dearborn, he wanted to set up an experimental agricultural chemical factory to determine what products could be obtained from plants. The experimental chemical factory became a one-quarter-size model of Ford's mammoth wood distillation plant at Iron Mountain, Michigan. The model was constructed at Iron Mountain and moved to Greenfield Village in late 1928. About then, Ford asked Boyer, "Bob, how would you like to supervise this model plant, stay another year or two, and live at the Sarah Jordan boarding house in Greenfield Village?" Boyer had had little formal training in chemistry, but he was provided with tutors from the University of Michigan, and from 1929 to 1933 he attended the Edison Institute of Technology, a school for inventors founded by Ford and Edison. For assistants, he was given twelve to fifteen permanent helpers, boys from the trade school. With their distillation apparatus, Ford wanted them to distill destructively all sorts of other plant materials as well as wood. A great variety of vegetables was tried, including turnips, tomatoes, lettuce, and carrots. At one point, Ford ordered several truckloads of carrots dumped outside the laboratory. When Boyer acted surprised at such a quantity, Ford replied, "I can't look at anything smaller than an elephant." These vegetables were mostly water, and very little valuable material was extracted . Ford's purpose was to find industrial uses for farm crops; a farm depression was imminent. In 1931, Boyer married Elizabeth Szabo of Detroit. They had three children...