Food Shortage Was A Good Reason To Accept Gasoline

13 days ago

We are in a technical world where innovation is meeting technology and expertise are needed for so many things that look simple on the surface but technical in its buildup. Today we talk about neuralink, EV cars, electric trains, renewable energy and we going away from carbon derived source of fuel but this wasn’t how we started.

In the course of human growth and modernization, a lot of things were learned and unlearned. It was in this journey that we learned how to write, make paper, create the light bulb and so on, and these innovations made our modern life easy but we cannot talk about invention without mentioning the steam engine. It was used in trains and we used it to travel far and wide.

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With the acceptance of the steam engine, many individuals were interested in looking at combining the fuel and the working medium of the engine thereby creating an internal combustion engine, and they came up with using flammable liquids and gasses. The first was illuminating gas where some scientists used illuminating gas to operate engines and pumps.

Over time, different types of fuel were used like coal dust, hydrogen air mixture, gas, tarpentine and alcohol, and even crude oil itself not until we got to gasoline. If we look at history, we would see that different type of fuel were created to compete in other to be an engine’s favorite and each of these fuel types had their advantages and disadvantages and at that time there were two major rivals; Alcohol and Gasoline. Today, even the most prefered is gradually being religated as everyone is moving to electrical vehicles but at the time, we needed to choose one of them.

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Before bringing gasoline into into the world of engines, it was used only as cleaning agent and as an antiseptic compared to alcohol which was everyone’s favorite burning with less byproduct except carbon dioxide and water. So in case you ever hear that there were alcohol engines in the past, do not be surprised because it was the option of choice for almost everyone.

Due to war, there was a shortage of alchohol and other types of fuel so people especially in the north had to look into oil and its derivatives and soon John Rockefeller created a path for oil products to become a big deal over alcohol but we still had people like Henry ford who believed in Alcohol and made his cars run on ethanol at the time but when he began mass production, he did it in such a way that the cars could run an ethanol, gasoline, or both.

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With the civil war in the US, there were high taxes on alcohol which was only removed after Roosevelt came into power. The price of alcohol became cheaper than gasoline and kerosene but this didn't last long as deposits of oil were found in different region bringing the price of gasoline and kerosene very low making alcohol about 40% higher than both products.

There was a problem engineers were facing with alcohol engine and that was explosion. The fuel would explode from air compression before the piston even reached it and the mixture ignited by the spark but cars running on fuel with higher octane rates didn't experience this. Soon people started adding alcohol to gasoline to increase the octane rating.

One of the reasons we also left alcohol asides its explosions was sourcing. According to studies at the time, 45% of food products would be processed in other to get Ethanol and this wasn't a good thing as it would have great impact on the food market.