Word: fueled
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...those days engine designers were frustrated for want of high-test gasoline. Mail planes roared along on 60 octane pap. As late as 1929 designers and flyers never dreamed of using 100 octane gasoline, the presumably unattainable "perfect" fuel...
Today 100 octane gasoline costs only 15? a gallon f.o.b. refinery. It powers all first-line U.S. and British warplanes, gives them 20% more power per gallon than Germany's usual 90 octane. But even this supergas-70% more powerful than 1931's best 87 octane fuel-is a back number with fuel technologists, who have recently concocted "no octane" gasoline-50% more powerful than 100 octane. Of this liquid dynamite the U.S. could produce overnight several hundred thousand gallons...
...would give planes smaller fuel loads, lighter engine weights per horse power, less head resistance, lower cooling loads, greater speed. But this is one case in which the war is not stimulating aviation progress but hampering it, and "no octane" gas will not be harnessed now for two big reasons: 1) To build stronger engines capable of using "no octane" gasoline would require retooling, and thereby much lost production which the U.S. cannot afford while Hitler is on the rampage...
...antiknock qualities.* Before 1922 the only way to raise this rating was to increase the percentage of isooctane (and similar compounds). Isooctane is a hydrocarbon, C8H18, which is one of the hundreds of compounds which make up the chemical mixture called gasoline. But isooctane alone makes a poor fuel because it is not volatile enough, does not readily carburet into explodible vapor...
...Rating is determined by feeding the gasoline to be tested to a test motor, whose spark is advanced until knocking appears. An identical motor is then run on various mixtures of 1) heptane (a bad knocker) and 2) isooctane (once thought to be the perfect knockless fuel) until its knocking corresponds to that of the other. If the unrated gasoline knocks at the same point as a mixture of 30% heptane and 70% isooctane, it is rated as "70 octane...