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 Tappajos 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 plan 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 wanted 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

Mismatch 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

...