Let me tell you a little something about ethyl alcohol…
Ojibwa hunters in Northern Ontario tell funny stories about a drunken moose named Ayaabekwébii that waits a week after the first autumn frost to eat the mountain ash berries in the forest. The freezing loosens the fruit’s natural sugars and fermentation occurs in the warm autumn sun. According to the Ojibwa, the mischievous moose actually dislikes the taste of the berries, but enjoys how they make him feel. As you might imagine, an intoxicated moose is a hazard to unprepared hikers and motorists that happen to cross its path. Unlike drunken humans, this animal weighs eight hundred pounds and has an arsenal of hammers and knives on its head. After listening to the Ojibwa’s cautionary tale, and being assured by outdoorsmen that the drunken moose phenomenon actually exists, I can more easily imagine early man stumbling through a primeval bush eating overripe grapes.
So where and when did man
first use ethyl alcohol as fuel? Although the claim is widely disputed, a
cleric and alchemist (and the inventor of the first French perfumes) Raymond Lully (1235 - 1308) was the
first to prepare pure ethanol by distilling fermentation alcohol three times
from quicklime, CaO. Normal fractional distillation can only produce a 95% pure
ethanol (95% C2H5OH - 5% H2O) because ethanol and water mixed in this
composition form an azeotrope. (An
azeotrope is a mixture with a fixed boiling point that cannot be further
separated by fractional distillation.) The quicklime must be added to remove
the water from this azeotrope by chemical reaction: CaO + H2O --> Ca(OH)2.
It seems reasonable to me that in demonstrating the new substance’s combustible
nature Raymond may have tried burning it in a terra-cotta lamp with a wick.
That would make him the first to ethanol as fuel.
In early modern Europe, glass
chimney oil lamps were status symbols and their fuels included all kinds of
vegetable oils (castor, rapeseed, peanut), animal oils (especially whale oil
and tallow from beef or pork,) and refined turpentine from pine trees; and
alcohol. Three hundred years later, the most popular lamp fuel in the United States
By 1838, pure ethyl alcohol
replaced the more expensive whale oil in most North American lamps. It easily took
the lead because it was such an improvement over all other oils in use at that
time. By 1860, thousands of distilleries churned out eighty million gallons of the
pure spirit every year. All of which lit houses after the sun went down. In the
1850s, camphene (which sold for fifty cents a gallon) was cheaper than whale
oil ($1.30 to $2.50 per gallon) and lard oil (90 cents per gallon). It was
about the same price as coal oil, which was the product first marketed as
"kerosene" (literally "sun fuel").
What happened next is
subject to intense speculation – The first captains of industry worked hard to
make cheap fossil fuels the number one choice for the 'horseless carriages'. Rockefellers
and the Rothschild’s established institutions and colluded with automakers to
make gasoline the transportation industry’s number one fuel choice for the next
hundred years... but those days are over now and energy consumers are getting
smarter everyday.
NEWSFLASH – pure ethyl
alcohol C2H5OH is called ethanol, and there’s nothing new about it. It’s older
than petroleum, and way more environmentally friendly. In fact, the more I
investigate this biological fuel the more I’ve come to understand that ethanol is
this planet’s most logical fuel choice, and gasoline seems like a fad to me. Reading
about Greenfield Ethanol’s forward looking
operations in Canada helps, http://www.greenfieldethanol.com/index.php?v=1&p=2&i=23&t=Template7Paragraphs
Introducing his 1982 book Critical
Path, Buckminster Fuller writes , ‘humanity's present rate of total energy consumption
amounts to only one four-millionth of one percent of the rate of its energy
income. ...Ninety-nine percent of
humanity does not know that we have the option to make it economically on this planet and in the Universe. We do.”
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