Early Leaded Gasoline Ban

Early experiments in improving performance of IC engines are on record, particularly those by the US military, with alcohol-based fuels showing greater promise.
besides destroying organic gasket and hoses, corroding some alloys, has less BTUs per gallon(energy density) and the worst problem, it's very hygroscopic, so you add rusting in tanks and short 'life' off the fuel before it goes bad
 
besides destroying organic gasket and hoses, corroding some alloys, has less BTUs per gallon(energy density) and the worst problem, it's very hygroscopic, so you add rusting in tanks and short 'life' off the fuel before it goes bad

Although if you're General Motors trying to sell new cars every n years, are those bad things?

Maybe the POD is that someone at GM decides the same thing and tells Kettering to just patent "Ethyl" as alcohol with a little bit of iodine; then go work on automatic transmission designs.
 

kernals12

Banned
Although if you're General Motors trying to sell new cars every n years, are those bad things?

Maybe the POD is that someone at GM decides the same thing and tells Kettering to just patent "Ethyl" as alcohol with a little bit of iodine; then go work on automatic transmission designs.
Car companies compete on quality. If people have bad experience with the reliability of one brand, they'll go to another. It's why GM went from 45% of the US market to 17%.
 
Ethyl Alcohol was a known anti-knock additive to gasoline well before TEL became the 'answer' the latter largely pushed by the oil companies and producers.

Indeed, alcohol was popular as a fuel before gasoline and many early IC engines ran on alcohol fuels, without the later harmful emissions of gasoline with (or without) TEL.

However, when you have big business pushing their interests up against a fuel that could be 'brewed' at home, guess which won!

The history of TEL use in spite of known detrimental effects is as sordid a tale as that behind the promotion in use of asbestos.
And isn't that what is used nowadays too? At least some brands of cheaper gas started pushing "up to 10 percent" alcohol back in the Eighties if not sooner; I've heard rumors that some people believe it is bad for engines or something, stripping things away somehow as a solvent, but I've run cars on it that whatever other problems they may have had, no mechanic has ever pointed to alcohol as the problem.

I used to assume it was in the gas mainly for the same reason we use fructose derived from corn syrup--Earl Butz, maize subsidies and a bunch of Midwest and Plains states politicians pushing "gasohol" as an "Energy Crisis" solution in the 1970s. That is certainly a factor, but yes I have also read here and there it helps with engine knocking.

I suppose even the partially ethanol mixes also use something else to perfect the anti-knock properties for modern cars--though another thing about gasoline at least in the USA, it is traditional for all stations to offer three levels of gas at three different octane levels. I have never used anything but the cheapest grade; as I was advised back in 1989 or so, the high octane stuff made a performance difference in older model cars, from the '60s and '70s, but in modern cars such as those available in the 80s the engine would function just as well on 86 octane (lowest standard in the USA) as on the more expensive blends. I have rarely experimented to see if they make any difference in modern cars or not.

Anyway out of all discussion this seems like the most promising option for an alternative to lead compounds being either pushed by a serious if not regulation mandated social crusade, or of course better yet a simple legal ban of the lead option on health grounds.

Much depends on
1) how acceptable is the performance of gasoline mixed with some quantity of ethyl alcohol, versus the gains available with lead? Is the right mix actually as good or superior to lead additives? A subset of this is, that modern cars can soldier though with a standard mix but 1920s type engines would benefit from a variable mix, with more alcohol being added in some running conditions and less in others, how tricky would it be to develop dual tanks and a system for manually or automatically varying the mix, much as I proposed using variable amounts of hydrogen in diesel engines?

Also--the big difference between classic car engines and modern ones is that the latter are computer controlled and this makes fuel injection systems more workable versus the classic solution of a carburetor vaporizing regulated percentages of fuel into the intake air for compression for spark ignition. I suspect the pragmatics of gasohol, especially getting the mix right in all conditions, is much better with fuel injection than with carburetors. BUT prior to the extensive and sophisticated modern electronic controls we now have as standard, getting the mix right was a complicated science that normal motorists could not be expected to learn easily, and hand controls to enable the human brain to do what the solid state computers of today do, even the relatively primitive ones of 1980s standards. It was also a more expensive thing to manufacture even if some simple and durable mechanical computer could do the job of metering correctly. We went over to computer controlled fuel injection in part to meet emissions standards and performance in the context of having to meet emissions standards, as well as to achieve fuel economy.

In short, I suspect ethyl alcohol was known to be helpful but also tricky to use with old style engines, which are the only practical ones in the timeframe indicated; it works fine in a standard ratio now because we have engines designed for it but doing so might not have been cost-effective in the 1920s. Anyone know these technical details?

2) Zman's claim that the uses of alcohol in fuel were well known already in the '20s seems plausible to me, especially if there were drawbacks then that we have overcome since. But can anyone confirm this?

3) Take note we are talking about ethyl alcohol, the same stuff people drink to get drunk in beer, wine, and hard liquor, when the major and pioneering car makers and markets were in the USA, in a decade when the government was on a crusade to ban all alcohol consumption, which was massively resisted by criminal means very large minorities who might actually have been moderate to large majorities did not regard as criminal except in the sense that the law would punish you--but they regarded the law rather than its claims against the violators as the unjust ones. Combine this with the sad desperations that people who suffer from alcoholism exhibit, and in the context of Prohibition there would be no practical way to use this alcohol, or other alcohols for that matter. Between criminal but pervasive diversion of good clean ethanol stocks to illegal booze sales (not to mention the public health and safety impacts of people who used to be satisfied with the alcohol concentrations of typical whiskey or even beer suddenly finding 100 percent pure, 200 proof, pure alcohol their most available option) and the even worse consequences of people suffering severe alcohol craving throwing all remaining caution to the winds and simply drinking mixes that are mainly gasoline for the booze mixed in it (well, technically they'd be huffing I guess) it seems plain that in the 1920s any mention of the word "alcohol" would kill a proposal to favor it dead to any and all legislators, perhaps especially those working on decriminalizing alcohol again for human consumption.

No matter what the law says, if we have pure ethanol widely available, people will tend to pirate it for booze even if additives are put in it to discourage that, not to mention questions of integrity of the manufacturers really poisoning all their output and not shunting some aside on the QT. If there is never any Prohibition (and actually the national enforcement of it was merely the capstone of a successful movement over decades and generations to Ban The Booze that had produced a plethora of state and local prohibitions, one that had a small but noticeable political party associated with it too, so even before 1920 a lot of "Dry" jurisdictions existed and presumably would even with a very early POD) perhaps with legal alternatives both cheaper and safer as well as more palatable predation of fuel alcohol might be a fringe abuse. I think in the context of Prohibition it would lead straight to disaster, and even after Prohibition is repealed (and again, it hasn't been entirely--many local jurisdictions remain more or less strict) the warping and honing of the booze thirsty scrounging habits would make ethanol in fuel almost as dangerous despite the renewed legal alternatives.

Again I have to suggest, a POD with an abortive Great War, or none at all (very hard to do, the world was shambling toward the conflict in accordance with deep drives and lacking mechanisms to avoid it well) might be key here. It was wartime related politics that put Prohibition in the form of a National Amendment mandating it universally over the top. If the USA does not enter the Great War, perhaps this "Noble Experiment" would never be undertaken on a national scale and thus use of alcohol as a fuel additive will seem less problematic.
 
Car companies compete on quality. If people have bad experience with the reliability of one brand, they'll go to another. It's why GM went from 45% of the US market to 17%.

But that wasn't until post-1973, when they had to compete with German and Japanese automakers. Deming tried to warn them in the 1950s, they told him to shove off, and didn't see any bad consequences for another two decades.

Edit: ok, besides the Ford Edsel ...
 
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kernals12

Banned
But that wasn't until post-1973, when they had to compete with German and Japanese automakers. Deming tried to warn them in the 1950s, they told him to shove off, and didn't see any bad consequences for another two decades.
Chrysler got destroyed in the late 50s when they rushed new models into production without quality checks.
 
Or: what if Midgley is specifically told to improve ethanol as an antiknock agent? Could he come up with something like Gumout(TM) using c. 1930 chemistry?
 
I think this is more a case of parallelism than maliciousness. Although the toxicity of lead was known in the early 20th century, there seems to be a common trend in countries around the world that this sort of thing and especially relatively subtle environmental effects like those that were really the crux of the lead problem are ignored until the country hits some kind of critical wealth level; essentially, below a certain per-captia GDP, people are willing to overlook the use of toxic chemicals and environmental damage and destruction in favor of material benefits like less knock in their engines, but once they get sufficiently wealthy those are no longer acceptable and they begin working on cleaning things up. In the United States in particular, this level was reached around the late 1960s or early 1970s. Naturally this led to catalytic convertors, but even in their absence I think that the general rise in environmental consciousness and interest in environmental protection stemming from being a sufficiently wealthy country would have led to a ban on leaded gasoline sooner or later, just the same way it led to a ban on leaded paint.

I don't think he was talking about a malicious conspiracy. He was talking about human irrationality. When you put the plain fact that lead is poison being known together with a proposal to vaporize it and spread it in the air generally, put that way the proposal seems lunatic and indeed criminal. As you say, people assumed (without, I think, doing any science to verify things one way or another) that concentrations would be so low as to be negligible. We all know that a plutonium is one of the most poisonous substances out there, yet there is sure to be a certain level of it all through the ecosystem in the wake of the nuclear testing era and fission industry generally. But are the levels so low they do essentially zero harm, while there are obvious benefits in having nuclear power and even nuclear weapons? This is an objective question, presumably--research should tell us that one level is pretty safe, and more than that does measurable and predictable harm. I know that the question of lead chemical poisoning is actually much simpler than that the controversial questions around the complexities of radioactive isotope poisoning.

I guess I am asking, are you making the case that actually a certain amount of harmful poisoning is a trade off of other benefits that makes deploying the poisonous tech an entirely rational decision that is to be expected and indeed applauded in certain phases of development, because it opens doors for further development that allows us to surpass the temporary phase of exposure and damage and come out ahead overall versus simply refusing to allow the damage in the first place? Or are you saying that people are a bit crazy?

I'd agree with both, sort of. That is, people trade off risks against benefits all the time. I do think that people take ignorance for bliss a lot of the time and don't bother to evaluate the true risk/benefit matrix, accepting outcomes that could have been mitigated. And I would argue that if a moderate amount of effort and thought could have avoided a particular mode of damage and still allowed progress and expanding options, that the dangerous approach might have been cheaper is an argument with merit only if it can be shown the savings are great. Do we overestimate or underestimate risks? Clearly we do both, quite irrationally, fearing some things whose consequences we can easily visualize while ignoring horrible costs that are less apparent. The measured effects of lead poisoning on violence and crime were right there but people did not regard them as evidence of lead poisoning when so many other more obvious causes seemed so apparent.

I also think, speaking in terms of public morality, that there is a deplorable tendency to ignore downsides that can be dumped on "other people", on the commons, and don't bear down hard on the persons who benefit the most. Each motorist got a lot of benefit from a high performance car but it was mostly other people whom they poisoned, each of them innocent bystanders in this transaction. Given the ubiquity of cars in America, everyone turned out about equally guilty (except the very poor, who also were poisoned the most) so it came back to us.

Commoner observed a fact. There was, amid a lot of hue and cry about various kinds of pollution in the 1960s, including not just objections to noxious smog which turned attention on nitrogen compound wastes catalytic converters were designed to address, but to noise pollution as well, no attention whatsoever to the lead problem, and what there was was focused on paints and so forth and not to the general problem of everyone huffing it in through their lungs, until the catalytic converters turned out to be intolerant of the lead. Then and only then was there movement to phase it out of gasoline. The political and regulatory process made hardly any reference to human poisoning! It was an unforeseen benefit to human health to eliminate it.

Draw what moral lessons you will. My takeaway is that people are pretty irrational and haphazard.
 
I don't think he was talking about a malicious conspiracy.
Well, neither was I; the conspiracy part, anyway. I was simply making the point that no one went out and said, "Muh-wah! We don't care about poisoning everyone with lead, but we do care about catalytic convertors being clogged!"

I guess I am asking, are you making the case that actually a certain amount of harmful poisoning is a trade off of other benefits that makes deploying the poisonous tech an entirely rational decision that is to be expected and indeed applauded in certain phases of development, because it opens doors for further development that allows us to surpass the temporary phase of exposure and damage and come out ahead overall versus simply refusing to allow the damage in the first place? Or are you saying that people are a bit crazy?
Both, sort of, but for the first part I would word it more that "At certain phases of development the benefits that come from the poisonous tech (or other environmentally destructive actions) look much more salient and valuable than they do later on." A lot of extinctions are like that, where some animal was slaughtered for meat or what not and nowadays we look back and say, "Was that really worth it?" At the time they would have said yes, but now...some of that is just because we have better knowledge (at any rate it was easier to believe that low levels of lead weren't toxic in the early 20th century--after all, most substances aren't harmful below a certain level), some because we have different values.

no attention whatsoever to the lead problem, and what there was was focused on paints and so forth and not to the general problem of everyone huffing it in through their lungs, until the catalytic converters turned out to be intolerant of the lead
That's not really true. Clair Patterson, Herbert Needleman, Philip Landrigan, and so on were raising a hue and cry about the dangers of tetraethyl lead, they just weren't being paid much attention to. Most likely if catalytic convertors hadn't been adopted then the lead issue would have become salient in the 1980s as the sort of "visible" pollution that environmentalism originally focused on became less common, and tetraethyl lead would have been phased out and banned then, as it was in European countries that didn't use catalytic convertors.
 
Chrysler got destroyed in the late 50s when they rushed new models into production without quality checks.

Part of the problem with the Edsel was that it introduced a lot of new tech, that wasn't quite ready
After debugging, the 9" rear, Autolite Carburetors lasted thru the '80s.
The push button gear selector, not so much
 

kernals12

Banned
Part of the problem with the Edsel was that it introduced a lot of new tech, that wasn't quite ready
After debugging, the 9" rear, Autolite Carburetors lasted thru the '80s.
The push button gear selector, not so much
I said Chrysler, not Edsel.
 
Or: what if Midgley is specifically told to improve ethanol as an antiknock agent? Could he come up with something like Gumout(TM) using c. 1930 chemistry?

Methyl tertiary butyl ether (MBTE) would be doable, but the real fix was done after WWII with improved refinery techniques to make the base fuel higher octane

Alcohol is a good fuel, but not mixing it with gasoline
 
...Alcohol is a good fuel, but not mixing it with gasoline
As I said that is exactly what you get at many an American gas pump. Would you care to clarify, in view of the fact that a hundred million US motorists are burning exactly that mix every day?
 

kernals12

Banned
That behavior wasn't limited to Mopar in the '50s.
Another problem was Mopar downsized before the buying public wanted smaller cars
The public did want smaller cars, as shown by the enormous success of the Volkswagen and the Rambler. The problem was that the resulting design looked awkward.
 
As I said that is exactly what you get at many an American gas pump. Would you care to clarify, in view of the fact that a hundred million US motorists are burning exactly that mix every day?

Many people drink too much alcohol too.

Blended fuels have terrible shelf life, and lower BTU content

Once you have fuel injection and sealed fuel lines and tanks and electronic controls on engines, you get the advantages of alcohol blends, and not just the disadvantages.

E85 is better than E10, but not everywhere has access to that
 
besides destroying organic gasket and hoses, corroding some alloys, has less BTUs per gallon(energy density) and the worst problem, it's very hygroscopic, so you add rusting in tanks and short 'life' off the fuel before it goes bad
All of those problems except the low energy density are solvable, though. You can use different components, institute stricter maintenance schedules, make the engines out of different materials and so on, at least in principle (I said solvable, not easily solvable). You can't exactly make lead non-toxic...well, I could imagine maybe putting a "catalytic convertor" in the exhaust that was specifically designed to trap lead and be replaced periodically, like tires or some-such. That might mitigate the problem a lot without destroying the benefits of lead, actually. Does anyone care to chime in on the feasibility of that approach?
 
The public did want smaller cars, as shown by the enormous success of the Volkswagen and the Rambler. The problem was that the resulting design looked awkward.

US public wanted a choice on a smaller car, shown by Rambler and the imports, but the across the board downsizing to unibody cars for the 1962 Model year hurt Plymouth and Dodge from the lack of larger cars
dodge-1946-2012.gif
 
All of those problems except the low energy density are solvable, though. You can use different components, institute stricter maintenance schedules, make the engines out of different materials and so on, at least in principle (I said solvable, not easily solvable). You can't exactly make lead non-toxic...well, I could imagine maybe putting a "catalytic convertor" in the exhaust that was specifically designed to trap lead and be replaced periodically, like tires or some-such. That might mitigate the problem a lot without destroying the benefits of lead, actually. Does anyone care to chime in on the feasibility of that approach?

Easily done in the year 2000.
1930?

No.
-edit-
MTBE additive till base fuel refining gets better is the only real way to avoid TEL.
It was just too cheap and stable, even with the toxicity. Alcohol has too many drawbacks as a blending agent.

Now E100 in the '30s would have worked, other than people trying to drink it.
 
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