Early Leaded Gasoline Ban

kernals12

Banned
By the turn of the 20th century, the dangers of lead were well known and phased out in numerous consumer products. Yet, it became a ubiquitous gasoline additive starting in 1921. Is there a way for it to be eliminated 50 years early?
 
Yes, as Dr Barry Commoner acerbically noted in a speech I attended in 1986 or so, that lead in gasoline poisoned people but this caused no regulatory action, but when it was desired to limit nitrogen compound emissions via catalytic converters, and lead poisoned those, then it was possible to act to ban the stuff at last.

It is also a fact that has been little noted that violent and other crimes could be correlated to high lead levels, and when lead levels went down, so did this criminality.

It seems evident that people wanted their higher performance engines with less knocking pretty badly and so I can see only two paths to meeting the challenge. One is to have a government much more responsive to public health and less responsive to the powerful interests behind better performing more powerful cars, forbidding the use of a poison to achieve that end; the other is a technological alternative to deliver the performance people wanted without use of the lead anti-knock compound. If for instance superior diesel technology were available, tetraethyl lead (off the top of my head, that was the compound name, maybe it is something else?) would not have such a lobby.

Clearly people in the day were able to convince themselves that the lead would disperse quickly and not pose a hazard to the operators or innocent bystanders, and motives were not strong to carefully confirm (or deny) this wishful thinking. And of course back in the 1920s far fewer motor vehicles were in operation, so it was easy to ease it past potential regulatory action.

I can think of lots of ways other types of engine such as steam engines, electric systems, or hybrids that got the desired power out of gasoline engines but prevented the surging throttle operations that would produce knocking and backfiring much of the time--using a gasoline or diesel type engine to produce power for an electric drive say--might have sidestepped the desire. But the military was in on it. I remember an account of the crash of the USN rigid airship Shenandoah that happened to mention the "lead dope" the engine mechanics used to maintain the airship's engine performance; I would guess that they generally ran with plain gasoline but would get doses of the lead compound poured in by the engine crew as conditions demanded. Doing without the "dope" without other solutions to bypass the need for it while still delivering desired performance is not something the Navy would take lying down, nor would the various air forces of the world including the Army Air Corps.

For airships, more advanced development of diesel engines was much desired by the airship designers themselves. Diesel would lower the risk of sparks to hydrogen inflated airships and also would deliver superior range in more compact tanks. A diesel engine of given power would tend for fundamental reasons to be heavier than an equivalent gasoline engine, but for airships the tradeoff in lowered fuel weight, or rather superior endurance on a given weight of fuel, would be worthwhile--not so much on airplanes that required more power. Also an airship by its nature would have a much wider range of power desired; an airplane would demand pretty much the same engine power in a broad range of flight regimes but the slower an airship went, the less power it would need by a dramatic drop. Diesel is better for delivering power efficiently over a greater range of outputs than gasoline Otto cycle engines are.

So a somewhat romantic approach to preempting the age of leaded gasoline might be if airships get heavier investment. I can also note that hydrogen airships could substitute burning some hydrogen in diesel engines for burning heavier than air liquid diesel fuel. As I understand it, a certain minimum of liquid fuel is still needed but as much as 90 percent of a diesel engine's power could come from burning hydrogen instead. This would help with keeping the airship in static trim, burning off lifting gas in parallel with lowering the weight of liquid fuel in the tanks.

So--imagine that around the OTL state of the art achieved around the WWI era, the war itself is prevented or kept brief, with an early political settlement that would probably be more favorable to the Central Powers and thus Zeppelin works, while the postwar Admiralty and Flying Corps in Britain, the French services, and USN and Army are all determined to have rigid airships of their own, and commercial interests are looking at a feasible transAtlantic summer service right on the immediate horizon, once Zeppelins reach 1918 standards. Ten or a hundred times more airships than actually attempted interwar services are built and put into revenue operations, or commissioned into military service, and the vast majority of these must use hydrogen for lift since helium was very scarce and expensive in the 1920s. With heavy effort being put into it, suitable airborne diesel types are developed, including light ones for small blimp service.

These light engines are in turn suitable to serve automotive applications and prove popular as less hazardous and more durable than gasoline engines, and so when the petrol and Otto cycle engine interests press for leaded gasoline, their diesel-pedaling rivals press back, touting the innate flexibility of diesel engines and that they do not require a poison to be broadcast in the air to work well, and the pressure is on gasoline engine manufacturers to either find alternate ways to limit knocking and raise compression ratios, or give up the automotive engine market to diesels.

Inevitably airships will be bypassed, though I can think of some tricks to keep them relevant in an airplane dominated era, but perhaps not until such good aero-diesel engines are designed that essentially everyone uses diesel for everything--aircraft, road vehicles, as well as tanks, trucks and tractors, and the whole service station business standardizes around diesel fuels. Which as noted can accommodate a great many different fuel mixes, even something like propane or methane, as long as some liquid diesel fuel is also used.
 
I can also note that hydrogen airships could substitute burning some hydrogen in diesel engines for burning heavier than air liquid diesel fuel.

Not worth it.
A cubic foot of uncompressed hydrogen at room temperature has around 270 BTUs

A cubic foot of diesel has around almost 1 million BTUs
 
There are alternatives to lead based anti knock compounds. Those were largely undiscovered in the early to mid 20th Century, and/or required much more advanced alloys in the engines. However there is one route to reducing the lead. If WWII is avoided then the push for high performance engines is slower and the need for lead based additives far less. Typically gasoline in the US through the 1930s was well below 80 octane. 65 octane and engine compression to match was common. Higher compression higher octane became common during the 1940s and lead increased to match.

Note that while lead oxides as a paint pigment were banned in most of Europe before 1910 they were still legal and common in the US until the 1970s. That extra 50+ years of lead distribution in the US, including in kitchens, has left a toxic mess we are still dealing with.
 
Note that while lead oxides as a paint pigment were banned in most of Europe before 1910 they were still legal and common in the US until the 1970s. That extra 50+ years of lead distribution in the US, including in kitchens, has left a toxic mess we are still dealing with.

Interior Lead paint was pulled off the market in the '50s, as some States were starting to think about bans. Lead test kits that detect Lead inside the house in many cases is from the TEL in the air that settled on the drying oil based paint.
The kits detect parts per thousand, while real Lead paint had pounds of Lead Oxide per gallon
 
The lead pigments were still marketed into the 1970s. We find paints laid on in the 1960s to frequently have lead oxides. The youngest house I worked on with lead paint was a early 1960s factory made prefab. I don't know if the offending paint was from the original construction, or from a recoating a few years after it was built. The specs I was worked under required testing of all houses built through 1977 as lead pigmented paint is occasionally found that late. A fair portion of my work has lab testing of the paint samples required, HUD specs allow surface tests for some stages of testing and work, but the pre project evaluations usually include lab tests. The main problem we have to contend with when remodeling is the release of intact paint as fine chips and dust. The standards for containment during work are labor intensive and the post work cleaning demanding.
 
Suppose a wave of poison awareness hits when Enrico Fermi, creator of the atomic bomb, dies of radiation-related illness in 1954. Mme. Marie Curie had passed away from similar complications, and in her late years, tried to stress atomic safety. Thomas Midgley, inventor of tetraethyl lead for gasoline, had lead poisoning when he died. Bingo. Just as the post-WWII consumer prosperity emerges in North America, consumers who endured shortages and rationing begin to question or reject harmful or toxic products. It puts a 20-year head start on the "clean up" that still is not complete, but it might have an even greater benefit. The passenger railroads that thrived in the mid-fifties might not have gone nearly extinct by the late sixties had leaded fuel, jet air travel and Interstate highways not put them out of business and left them with no income to improve and expand.
 
Not worth it.
A cubic foot of uncompressed hydrogen at room temperature has around 270 BTUs

A cubic foot of diesel has around almost 1 million BTUs
Not the right way to figure at all. The weird requirement of an airship, not familiar to people dealing with airplanes, is to stay in trim. If you launch with the right amount of hydrogen to lift payload plus all the fuel, as you fly, burning up conventional liquid fuel, if lifting gas remains the same the ship will be increasingly out of equilibrium, with more lift than weight. It can use aerodynamic lift (negative in this case) to counteract that, and it is always possible to simply vent lift gas as well.

But hydrogen, though far cheaper than helium, is still not free. It takes energy in one form or another to make it, and the notion of burning some hydrogen instead of simply venting it for added return on value was attractive. It also involved some extra risks so it was not casually done, but research was undertaken.

My point here was to skew the interest in developing relatively lightweight diesel engines further. As I noted, other motives to develop aero-diesel, not just for airships but for airplanes too, also existed. I would imagine hydrogen can also be introduced into Otto cycle engines with similar benefit, but the research I read about was for diesel.

A cubic meter of hydrogen displaces at sea level about 1.225 kg of air, at standard conditions, and itself masses 85 grams thus providing 1.14 kg lift. If then with every 1.14 kg diesel fuel, we also burn 85 grams of hydrogen, we get extra power versus just burning the diesel fuel alone--another way to put it, we reduce consumption of diesel per each horsepower-hour of output by a certain fraction. Your point is to defeat the argument that hydrogen is a good fuel by pointing out the tremendous cost of storage--even as a cryogenic liquid hydrogen requires absurdly large volume of tankage, which also is extra troublesome for having to be a fantastic insulator and because the absolute temperature it is stored at is very close to absolute zero, very hard to manage on a planet whose average temperatures even at altitude are above freezing water around 273 K. Gaseous hydrogen storage sidesteps cryogenic issues but costs us tremendous volume! It is clear why people say "hydrogen is the fuel of the future and always will be!" (also of course it is not "fuel" in the sense that we cannot simply mine or otherwise extract it, it must be synthesized and is really an energy storage medium. Diesel and petrol on the other hand are dug out of the ground and moderately refined.)

You see I am familiar with the drawbacks of hydrogen that typically negate its isolated virtue (not the only one, but pretty near) of having great energy potential when oxidized in air per mass unit which you rightly discount--in most cases.

But you are ignoring that the airship is hauling around a lot of hydrogen anyway; the storage costs are necessarily already covered. With storage for "free" as it were, why not take a new look at the possible utility as a fuel as well? Let's not let dogma or polemics blind us here!

In terms of energy released by combustion per mass unit, hydrogen has triple the specific energy storage relative to oxygen combustion of gasoline, which would be similar to diesel. (Diesel is a bit better overall in practice due to being more efficient thanks to higher compression ratios, but this applies equally to hydrogen, at least in small quantities, as to any other fuel). The added punch of extra combustion heat released by burning 85 grams of hydrogen is thus worth 255 grams of diesel fuel, more or less. So, if we scale the air intake up enough to account for the extra net fuel we bring in by adding the hydrogen, we would get the net output of 1.4 kg of diesel while actually just burning 1.14, for each cubic meter we deflate the hydrogen bag to maintain net trim at zero. This means that by consuming diesel fuel at a reduced rate with the proportionate amount of hydrogen induced into the air intake, we increase endurance and thus range of such an airship on a given quantity of diesel fuel by 28 percent! Call me crazy but that looks like a rather significant savings of fuel cost and extension of range to me. In order to stay in trim otherwise, it would be necessary to vent the hydrogen in any case, so this comes at no added operational cost.

There are extra risks involved in leading a flow of hydrogen down to the engines to be taken in of course, risks of creating a path to ignite the lift hydrogen specifically. This is a question of engineering though.

I note that this is a special case. It would not make sense to fuel the engine with 100 percent hydrogen--at any rate this is unlikely to be cost-effective considering the great difficulty of keeping liquid hydrogen in realistic conditions on Earth. Despite a drastic reduction in overall fuel mass, the hassle and great bulk of the tanks would be a serious drawback.

But it was something the Zeppelin designers, and Americans later, took quite seriously and with 30 percent performance enhancement in prospect I think you can see why. It might be a red herring in the matter of biasing engineering talent toward diesel engines perhaps, but you attacked the general principle on grounds that in context are quite mistaken.

The alternative to venting (and in this case getting a valuable second use out of the otherwise wasted vented gas) to stay in trim would be to somehow gain weight in flight to compensate for fuel weight consumed. (Yet another is to develop a mix of fuel molecules that overall has the same density as air, and burn that--tried in the Graf Zeppelin and in an American research blimp. But this is really the same thing as burning a mix of lighter than air gas and heavier than air fluid as proposed). The most reliable method hit on was water recovery from exhaust, a procedure that involved a number of hassles and lowered useful engine output power. Despite the hassles, not only did a number of American airships develop the option with more or less success, the Germans too were planning to use it in the Hindenburg and its successor, hoping to get access to American helium, and suitable apparatus was developed. You see, this trim problem is a big deal on airships and the favored solutions for small airships involving taking off heavy and using aerodynamics to compensate (venting helium is very expensive) don't work so well for larger ships, and a lot of effort went into resolving it. Sipping off the hydrogen gas for added engine power was a very attractive one and since in the time period I am talking about I don't think sufficient helium would be available to serve the airship fleets, I think this one would be highly favored. Note that enhancing engine combustion with a little bit of parallel hydrogen burning enhances the percentage of water exhausted, thus a ship equipped with moderately capable water recovery could supplement hydrogen burning with water recovery to gain net weight quite rapidly--in this case we would at least consider raising the fraction of hydrogen burned even higher so we are disposing of more lift than we are burning diesel fuel, and also gaining water weight. In that case the limit would be how much hydrogen you can include before changing the chemistry of diesel combustion too much for the engine to run well--empirically that limit was around 90 percent! Vice versa if there were a need to increase lift quickly, switching over to pure diesel fuel burning combined with dropping water ballast (knowing we can get water ballast back quickly later by burning lift gas as fuel--every 85 grams of hydrogen will yield many hundreds of grams of recoverable water, depending on efficiency of the recovery gear), and an integrated system of diesel engine that can switch between say 75 percent hydrogen consumption with water recovery and pure diesel fuel operation would be highly desirable.
 
POD: Thomas Midgley doesn't take a vacation in 1923, and continues inhaling tetraethyl lead fumes in his lab. Other staff report increasingly odd behavior, right up until the day he brings a gun to work.

His trial and acquittal on the grounds of "chemical insanity", along with several poisoning deaths at a New Jersey refinery, make national headlines; and prompt several states to ban leaded gasoline. Military avgas is exempted tho.

As a side-effect, Freon and tetraflouroethane are not discovered until WWII (and remain classified atomic secrets until the 1970s).
 

kernals12

Banned
POD: Thomas Midgley doesn't take a vacation in 1923, and continues inhaling tetraethyl lead fumes in his lab. Other staff report increasingly odd behavior, right up until the day he brings a gun to work.

His trial and acquittal on the grounds of "chemical insanity", along with several poisoning deaths at a New Jersey refinery, make national headlines; and prompt several states to ban leaded gasoline. Military avgas is exempted tho.

As a side-effect, Freon and tetraflouroethane are not discovered until WWII (and remain classified atomic secrets until the 1970s).
The harmful effects of lead were well known as early as the 1880s.
 
POD: Thomas Midgley doesn't take a vacation in 1923, and continues inhaling tetraethyl lead fumes in his lab. Other staff report increasingly odd behavior, right up until the day he brings a gun to work.

His trial and acquittal on the grounds of "chemical insanity", along with several poisoning deaths at a New Jersey refinery, make national headlines; and prompt several states to ban leaded gasoline. Military avgas is exempted tho.

As a side-effect, Freon and tetraflouroethane are not discovered until WWII (and remain classified atomic secrets until the 1970s).
Since Midgley invented Freon in the thirties, there is a good chance it would be discovered before WWII. But in this scenario, the population growth patterns in the US are severely affected. Without Freon, homes would still use ice boxes through the seventies because ammonia-based refrigeration is too dangerous for household use. Same problem with air conditioning. You butterfly away population growth in the eastern Sunbelt until much later. The desert southwest, though, makes it with evaporative cooling.
 
Since Midgley invented Freon in the thirties, there is a good chance it would be discovered before WWII. But in this scenario, the population growth patterns in the US are severely affected. Without Freon, homes would still use ice boxes through the seventies because ammonia-based refrigeration is too dangerous for household use. Same problem with air conditioning. You butterfly away population growth in the eastern Sunbelt until much later. The desert southwest, though, makes it with evaporative cooling.

Refrigerators and air conditioners could use butane as a refrigerant; it literally works as a (warranty-voiding, unapproved) drop-in for R-134. There would be somewhat more housefires until fireproof Freons became available.

Other antiknock compounds (molybdenum, etc) would replace tetraethyl lead. Hopefully the main change would be less violent crime in the 1960s and 70s -- though delaying Oak Ridge for lack of teflon might lead to Operation Olympic going through, with huge butterflies as a result.
 
Refrigerators and air conditioners could use butane as a refrigerant; it literally works as a (warranty-voiding, unapproved) drop-in for R-134. There would be somewhat more housefires until fireproof Freons became available.
Butane would be much easier to handle than ammonia, but extensive use might still be confined to larger, commercial operations with proper fume control.
 
Butane would be much easier to handle than ammonia, but extensive use might still be confined to larger, commercial operations with proper fume control.

So we would still rent 'locker' space at Uncle Bobs grocery store and have a side of beef hanging in the walk in freezer there. Harry the butcher would have the chops all wrapped for Mom when she stopped by for groceries after work. This is literally how we were doing it in the 1950s & 'Bob' was my fathers cousin.
 
Suppose a wave of poison awareness hits when Enrico Fermi, creator of the atomic bomb, dies of radiation-related illness in 1954. ...

Something like the Pure Food movement that led to better practice in the processed food industry at the start of the 20th Century. Rachel Carsons work was the rough equivalent of 'The Jungle', but her message came a couple decades later than needed. I suspect it would have taken significant industrial events in the 1920s or earlier/later to get things moving. A seminal event in the latter 1960s was images on TV of the Cuyoga River on fire in Cleveland. No one died & it actually was not big in terms of economic damage, but the warning was scary. A event on the scale of Bhopal India before 1930 might be a tipping point.
 

Driftless

Donor
So we would still rent 'locker' space at Uncle Bobs grocery store and have a side of beef hanging in the walk in freezer there. Harry the butcher would have the chops all wrapped for Mom when she stopped by for groceries after work. This is literally how we were doing it in the 1950s & 'Bob' was my fathers cousin.

In the 50's and 60's, our local "meat locker" ran a small deli along with the standard locker services. Its modern iteration has done away with the lockers, but does a thriving business in fresh meats, smoked meats - of several species, jerky, uncommon meats: bison, lamb, and others, and craft beers and wines. That path might have been a more common occurrence without freon.
 
In the case of our cousin it was a full service butcher, and a three aisle grocery store. I think tools and work clothes were on the third aisle. Two cash registers, tho one was usually occupied by boxes of fresh donuts. Bob rented space in my Grandfathers building next door and regularly slaughtered crates of broiler chickens there, or the individual cows and hogs.
 
Without Freon, homes would still use ice boxes through the seventies because ammonia-based refrigeration is too dangerous for household use. Same problem with air conditioning.
Sulphur dioxide was the common refrigerant for home units before Freon was around.
And yeah, it sucked when they leaked
 

kernals12

Banned
POD: Thomas Midgley doesn't take a vacation in 1923, and continues inhaling tetraethyl lead fumes in his lab. Other staff report increasingly odd behavior, right up until the day he brings a gun to work.

His trial and acquittal on the grounds of "chemical insanity", along with several poisoning deaths at a New Jersey refinery, make national headlines; and prompt several states to ban leaded gasoline. Military avgas is exempted tho.

As a side-effect, Freon and tetraflouroethane are not discovered until WWII (and remain classified atomic secrets until the 1970s).
I think it should be assumed that dozens of other scientists were working on this.
 
Sulphur dioxide was the common refrigerant for home units before Freon was around.
And yeah, it sucked when they leaked
At least you cough and open the windows before toxic effects show up. Besides, the higher molecular weight of SO2 hinders leakage compared to NH3.
As a side-effect, Freon and tetraflouroethane are not discovered until WWII (and remain classified atomic secrets until the 1970s).
Another issue comes up here. CFC's may have been essential for atomic development but there is no reason to classify them as "atomic" chemistry. You are dealing with the most reactive, but stable, elements on the periodic table. While classified in America, scientists and chemical engineers at BASF, Rhône-Poulenc or Bayer are likely to figure this out and end up with patents on refrigerants. So, what happens? Does the US exercise clout and try to classify halocarbon chemistry as tantamount to poison gas technology banned by the Geneva Convention? Does the EU market household refrigerators that might end up in Canada as contraband that can not cross the border?
 
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