Chemistry playlist:
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‘Describes (in partly animated form: “talking gasoline drops,” etc!) the refining of gasoline, its chemical breakdown, etc; excellent shots of gasoline stations (with the “Royal Crown” glass globes atop the gas pumps; striking images), and oil refineries. Good shots fo stop light changing from red to green; driver’s POV on Western highway; CU speedometer accelerating to 50 MPH; CU gas jet stovetop; beautiful Chrysler “Town and Country” (“Woody”) on rural highway. ‘ Produced by Jerry Fairbanks.
A revised version of this film from the Bureau of Mines was released in the mid-1950s as “The Story of Gasoline”; here with better sound but no color:
Reupload of a previously uploaded film with improved video & sound.
Originally a public domain film from the Library of Congress Prelinger Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.
The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).
Wikipedia license:
Gasoline is a toxic, translucent, petroleum-derived liquid that is primarily used as a fuel in internal combustion engines. It consists mostly of organic compounds obtained by the fractional distillation of petroleum, enhanced with a variety of additives. Some gasolines also contain ethanol as an alternative fuel. In North America, the term “gasoline” is often shortened in colloquial usage to “gas”, whereas most current or former Commonwealth nations use the term “petrol”. Under normal ambient conditions its material state is liquid, unlike liquefied petroleum gas or “natural gas”.
Volatility
Gasoline is more volatile than diesel oil, Jet-A, or kerosene, not only because of the base constituents, but also because of additives. Volatility is often controlled by blending with butane, which boils at -0.5 °C. The volatility of gasoline is determined by the Reid vapor pressure (RVP) test…
Octane rating is measured relative to a mixture of 2,2,4-trimethylpentane (an isomer of octane) and n-heptane. There are different conventions for expressing octane ratings, so a fuel may have several different octane ratings based on the measure used. Research octane number (RON) for commercially-available gasoline varies by country… In the UK, ordinary regular unleaded petrol is 91 RON… premium unleaded petrol is always 95 RON, and super unleaded is usually 97-98 RON. However, both Shell and BP produce fuel at 102 RON for cars with high-performance engines… In the US, octane ratings in unleaded fuels can vary between 86 and 87 AKI (91-92 RON) for regular, through 89-90 AKI (94-95 RON) for mid-grade, up to 90-94 AKI (95-99 RON) for premium.
The octane rating became important as the military sought higher output for aircraft engines in the late 1930s and the 1940s. A higher octane rating allows a higher compression ratio, and thus higher temperatures and pressures, which translate to higher power output…
Tetraethyl lead
Gasoline, when used in high-compression internal combustion engines, has a tendency to autoignite (detonate) causing damaging “engine knocking” (also called “pinging” or “pinking”) noise. Early research into this effect was led by A.H. Gibson and Harry Ricardo in England and Thomas Midgley and Thomas Boyd in the United States. The discovery that lead additives modified this behavior led to the widespread adoption of their use in the 1920s, and therefore more powerful, higher compression engines. The most popular additive was tetra-ethyl lead. With the discovery of the extent of environmental and health damage caused by the lead, however, and the incompatibility of lead with catalytic converters found on virtually all newly sold US automobiles since 1975, this practice began to wane (encouraged by many governments introducing differential tax rates) in the 1980s.
In the US, where lead had been blended with gasoline (primarily to boost octane levels) since the early 1920s, standards to phase out leaded gasoline were first implemented in 1973 – due in great part to studies conducted by Philip J. Landrigan. In 1995, leaded fuel accounted for only 0.6% of total gasoline sales and less than 2000 short tons (1814 t) of lead per year. From 1 January 1996, the Clean Air Act banned the sale of leaded fuel for use in on-road vehicles. Possession and use of leaded gasoline in a regular on-road vehicle now carries a maximum $10,000 fine in the US. However, fuel containing lead may continue to be sold for off-road uses, including aircraft, racing cars, farm equipment, and marine engines.
