What is a Charcoal Briquette?

At the end of the nineteenthcentury, a chemist named Ellsworth Zwoyer devised a method for combining coal dust, wood scraps, borax, and petroleum binders into a composite fuel that could be stamped into a pillow-shaped briquette (he patented the pillow-shaped design in 1897). But it wasn’t until a twentieth-century industrialist got involved that the charcoal briquette became a household fuel—and a household name. That industrialist was Henry Ford, and he saw in the briquette an opportunity to recycle the wood scraps left over from the manufacture of Model T Fords. He promptly launched the Ford Charcoal company (the factory was designed by Thomas Edison), which he eventually sold to a relative named Kingsford.