This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

In the late 1920s, the Ford Motor Company bought up millions of acres of land in Brazil.

They loaded boats with machinery and supplies and shipped them deep into the Amazon rainforest.

Workers cut down trees and cleared the land and then they built a rubber plantation in the middle of one of the wildest places on Earth.

Ford's rubber development on the Tapajos River is an enterprise of historic proportion.

Here, two million acres of jungle are being converted into a highly modernized plantation, capable of producing rubber on a large scale.

The plant was to harvest the rubber and ship it back to Detroit, where it would be turned into tires and other parts for Ford cars.

But Henry Ford, one of this community, which he called, Ford Landia, to be more than just a huge plantation.

He wanted it to be a kind of industrial utopia. He paid his Brazilian workers good wages, at least for the region.

And he tried to build them the kind of place he would have loved to live, which is to say a small Midwestern town.

But in the middle of the jungle.

Deep in the wilderness, this model community is self-sufficient in every detail.

It has its own powerhouse, electric lighting, a telephone system. Its own machine shop completely equipped with modern tools.

There's a laboratory for processing rubber, an ice plant, and a fire department.

You had a church, you had a hospital, you had a power plant, you had a big sawmill.

That's Roger Weber. He's the host of a podcast called Miss Match.

And this story is an adaptation of one that recently aired on his show.

And so he wanted to create this village for the workers down in Ford Landia.

And while it's easy to look at him as some greedy imperialist capitalist.

Very easy. He actually felt that he could help these people.

The company hospital, with a best of modern equipment and excellently staffed, provides free medical aid for the employees.

Later, an outdoor luncheon is served, followed by tempting delicacies.

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