240 



ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 194 7 



compression ratio due to the fact that the motoring public was reason- 

 ably happy, if not somewhat unsafe, with the car performance being 

 obtained. Added to this are the very practical facts that design diffi- 

 culties were being encountered due to the necessity of allowing room 

 in the engine head above the piston at the top of its stroke for the 

 functioning of two valves and a spark plug and due also to a tendency 

 to rough operation at high compression. However, the petroleum 

 engineer was now in the saddle. He had many new processes all 

 lined up to produce, and the refiner was now being urged by his sales- 

 promotion people to produce qualities in gasoline that could be talked 



FiGUBE 3. 



about. The result was that the petroleum refiners began to run races 

 between themselves to produce gasoline with qualities outstripping 

 their competitors in spite of the fact that scarcely any automobile 

 engine could recognize differences in antiknock above its basic octane 

 requirement. At the time, this race was scientifically invigorating but 

 economically rather silly. In retrospect however, it was probably 

 one of the best things that ever happened to our country in that it 

 set the fundamental pattern for a technology that produced, during 

 World War II, a stupendous tonnage of synthetic organic chemicals 

 without which the war would have stretched through a much longer 

 and more burdensome period. 



EFFECT OF ENGINE AND FUEL DEVELOPMENT ON AUTOMOBILE 



DESIGN 



Before proceeding further with the later developments in motor-fuel 

 processing it will be well to stop to examine, the results of all this 



