Your Backyard Grill Was Invented by Henry Ford (Out of Sawdust)

Next time you light up the charcoal, tip your tongs to Henry Ford — because the briquette in your grill traces straight back to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

Here’s how it happened. In the early days, car bodies were built partly of wood, and Ford was burning through enormous amounts of it. So in the early 1920s, Ford bought up huge tracts of timberland in the U.P. — over 300,000 acres — and built a sawmill and parts plant near Iron Mountain. He hated waste, and all that lumber was producing mountains of scrap wood and sawdust.

Ford’s solution? Turn the waste into a product. He had the wood scraps charred, ground up, mixed with starch, and pressed into tidy little pillow-shaped lumps. The charcoal briquette as a household product was born. (Ford didn’t invent charcoal itself, and he wasn’t the first to patent a briquette — Ellsworth Zwoyer of Pennsylvania did that in 1897 — but Ford was the one who made it a mass-market product, first selling it through his own car dealerships alongside picnic kits and grills.)

And the name? The plant and the town that grew around it were named for Edward G. Kingsford — a local real-estate man and Ford dealer who helped Ford acquire the land, and who happened to be married to Ford’s cousin. The company eventually became Kingsford Charcoal, the name still on the bag at your grocery store today.