SCIENCE AND INDUSTRY. 
reasons—because the field was sufficiently wide, and because he wished 
-to do something towards preventing the Patent Office from further 
granting patents on the admixture of every conceivable burnable organic 
liquid which might possibly be used as a motor fuel, patents which 
would form the seeds for future patent litigation. 
The new patent regulations require the opponents of a patent to 
point to some publication, or some technical paper or document, and 
Dr. Ormandy had prepared his paper with the object of supplying such 
a document. He quoted the patents by numbers, not by names. The 
meeting certainly agreed with him that much of the patent literature 
since 1913—time had not allowed Dr. Ormandy to extend the present 
search further back—is barren, and some positively puerile. Many of 
the proposals he mentioned read like recipes from cookery books; others, 
like the addition of amyl acetate (of fruity smell) to petrol, look like 
attempts at evading the petrol tax. Although it was. known by 1870 
that ordinary—i.e., ethyl aleohol—will mix with paraffin hydrocarbons, 
provided water be absent, and that the vapours will burn in engines, 
the mixing of anhydrous alcohol and petrol was patented in 1913. Other 
inventors got over the water difficulty by stipulating that the alcoholic 
mixture, prepared by the fermentation of peat with kerosene, should 
contain fusel oil (amyl alcohol); or they recommended the addition of 
various combining agents. To raise the vapour pressure of ethyl 
alcohol, ether was added. In the Natalite,* which is used extensively 
in South Africa, India, Australia, Papua,* and in other sugar-growing 
countries, alcohol and ether are mixed in about equal proportions, and 
half per cent. of ammonia, or of trimethylamine (from the sugar), are 
further added to mitigate corrosion. As regards the admixture of 
gases, Dr. Ormandy could quote some wild suggestions—hydrogenera- 
tions of already saturated hydrocarbons with acetylene by bubbling or 
by compressing the acetylene at 12 atmospheres, &c. That an extra- 
ordinarily wide range of chemicals can, if necessary, be used in internal 
combustion engines, Dr. Ormandy had recently again learnt in Berlin, 
where special winter and summer fuels had to be introduced during the 
‘war. The difficulty is to find the raw material for alcohol. Cellulose. 
is not easily converted into sugar and alcohol, and sugar is too valuable; — 
but the Ford works are said to have been successful quite recently with 
sawdust and straw. Yet, Dr. Ormandy was amply justified in lodging 
a protest against the further issue of patents on mixtures of petrol with 
benzol, alcohols, ether, acetone, &c., mixtures tried over and over again 
with the aid of carburettors and pre-heaters, and against interfering 
with the legitimate development of a big industry.—(Hngineering, 
20.29.1920.) 
* Natalite is not used in Australia or Papua,—Ed, Science and Industry. 
340 
