In 1927, Henry Ford built a town over a stretch of Amazon rainforest; in 1945 he was forced to sell it for $250,000

Imagine a Midwestern town with a swimming pool, a golf course and a movie theatre located in the middle of the Amazon rainforest, several hundred kilometres upriver from anything resembling a city. While it might sound like something from a set of a movie, it's not. In 1927, Henry Ford, the legend who put America on wheels began to look for land in Brazil to build his own version of small-town Michigan in the depths of the jungle. He finally found it in 1928 and named it Fordlandia. While the town had everything one would need, what it never had, across the seventeen years of trying, was enough rubber to be worth it, as per a report by Science Blog.Why Ford wanted his own rubberRubber was the choke point of the car business. Tyres, belts, hoses, gaskets, seals: a Model A was full of the stuff, and nearly all of it came from British and Dutch plantations in Southeast Asia, grown from stock that had been carried out of Brazil in the first place. As Henry Ford’s account of the venture records, Henry Wickham took 70,000 rubber tree seedlings out of the Amazon in 1876 for cultivation in the East Indies, and Brazil lost the trade it had invented.Britain then tried to prop up the price wi...