NOTE: If you’re familiar with the movie, you can skip to the factual question under the ////////s
In the movie Back to the Future III, Marty inadvertently punctures the fuel line, spilling all the Delorean’s gas into a bear’s cave in September of 1885.
This is the main problem in getting Marty back to the future in this film, since the Delorean must reach 88 mph in order for the flux capacitor/time-circuits to do their thing (they still had a working Mr. Fusion to create the 1.21 gigawatts).
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In the film, they have less than a week to overcome this problem: How to get the Delorean up to 88 mph in a world where gasoline is rare, if non-existent.
Yet, petroleum was around.
How plausible might it have been, for someone with a PhD in chemistry, to obtain enough petroleum and convert it into gasoline so the Delorean can accelerate to the required 88 mph, in the wild west of mid-1885?*
*In the film, they did try ethanol in the form of the bartender’s “high-octane” whiskey. It blew out the fuel manifold in a comedic sort of way, in which the Doc says it’ll take him a month to rebuild. But assume they hadn’t done that early on, and they only needed gasoline to get them up to speed. I’m not saying to ignore the use of ethanol as a possible work-around, but let’s just say the Doc wants to get as close to modern gasoline as possible.
Which is what I always imagined was plausible. I realize Robert Zemeckis probably wanted to use a Train because it’s 1) cool, and 2) dramatic. But realistically, the Doc should’ve been able to make enough gasoline from petroleum, or coal or crude oil to get a light-weight sports car, using a 2.7 liter V6 Volvo engine up to 88 mph within a week’s time.
In these terms, what’s the minimum amount of gasoline the Doc should make and how long would it take assuming it’d take him 2 days to gain some crude oil, and another 4 days to make the amount of gasoline he’d need?
Yep - Doc could have easily made a little gasoline.
Doc Brown is actually a terrible scientist. All of his solutions are overly complex Rube Goldberg machines. Just look at his solution for feeding his dog in the opening credits of the first film! He doesn’t think through problems to find the safest most efficient solution, instead deciding to try tricky things that are expensive, dangerous, complicated, and that rely on split second timing. Maybe it’s his unconventional thinking that made it possible to create a time machine. He’s the very definition of a mad scientist.
So, all the Doc would need some source of crude hydrocarbon, a bunsen burner, and glassware to distill some gasoline.
And we know he knows his chemistry, considering he build a (huge) refrigerator to make ice in the preceding 9 months, which I would imagine would need plenty of ammonia or some other higher form of chemistry.
Yet he chose the logistical nightmare of hijacking a train, chemically treating bails of hay to make the boiler burn hotter using magic science, and rigging the DeLorean up with railroad wheels and everything else that entails (not to mention the exceedingly risky move of hoping they make it to 88 mph before reaching the End of the Line over the “Shonash Ravine”).
The Doc was overthinking this.
Of course, if he hadn’t ruined the injection manifold with ethanol, maybe he would’ve gone this route.
And I like your last sentiment. His overthinking and Rube Goldberg-esque style of invention may have led to his invention of time travel. After all, he remarks in the first film, “I’ve finally invented something that works!”
Perhaps he was a shit scientist who just got lucky on his one, great insight. He certainly had the whole “mad scientist” look going for him.
There’s the scene in Doc Brown’s garage in the first film in which he shows Marty the plan to drive past the courthouse and hook the wire attached to the clock tower. He said something like “Apologies for the crudeness of the mockup.” as we see an elaborate reconstruction of most of the downtown area.
While I have to give credence to the theory that ‘Doc’ Brown is not a good scientist (perhaps not one at all; he seems to have little concept of how things actually work), the manufacture of high quality gasoline is not trivial, and a lower quality product used in a modern high compression engine would likely destroy it in short order. Most early gasoline was laregly light naphtha produced by a relatively simple thermal cracking arrangement without the use of more complex catalysts or any synthesis applications. The fuel it produced would choke a modern fuel injection system within seconds; a carburated engine would work longer but one of the problem with early cars was that fuel lines would frequently clog with varnish requiring regular flushing before the development of effective fuel filters. The low octane content of some components would also cause destructive engine knocking (detontion). For decades, tetraethyllead was added to gasoline to boost its octane rating and anti-knock performance despite the serious health concerns and widespread contamination as discovered by Clair Patterson in the 1940s (incidentially while trying to figure out a way to measure the age of the Earth using isotope ratio measuring of environmental lead).
It is often pointed out that the DMC-12 was scarecely able of even reaching the designated speed of 88 miles per hour on pavement in optimal flat conditions, which highlights another problem; no where in Central California of 1885 would there have been a flat, graded section of road or bed suitable to drive a conventional automobile at anywhere approaching that speed without destroying the suspension almost immediately. I believe the first paved roads in California appeared circa 1910. Running the car on railroad tracks was likely the only option to even approach that speed safely. This serves to beg the question, however, of why Doc didn’t just leave a message to be delivered to his future self to send back a replacement set of “flight circuits” or whatever, buried in the desert that 1955 Doc Brown could recover. In fact, there seems to be little logic whatsoever in why Brown and Marty couldn’t request rescue from their future-past selves except for the poorly understood and badly utilized prohibition against “altering the timeline”, notwithstnading that they’ve spent three films doing pretty much nothing but altering timelines to positive effect and leaving Elisabeth Shue sleeping on a porch swing like the feckless cads they are.
Not being a chemist or petroleum engineer, let me ask some basic follow up questions.
What fuels the Bunsen burner? Alcohol or some kind of gas? Sure, Doc could get all the alcohol he needs, but will that make a hot enough flame? If he needs some sort of methane, where’s he going to get that in the time available?
For that matter, how does one manufacture a Bunsen burner?
When you say laboratory glassware, what characteristics does it need that common, ordinary household glassware doesn’t have? Assuming Doc knows the basics of glass blowing, can he make what he needs?
I have zero idea what would go into the conversion of any form of readily available hydrocarbon in California circa 1885 into gasoline. I imagine crude oil would be fairly easy to come by during that time in the late 19th Century West. Hell, even the train they “borrowed” had plenty of coal (and oil for the train’s mechanics).
Gasoline is refined from crude using fractional distillation, which is pretty much the same process for making whiskey, so the basic concepts are well known and you don’t necessarily need fancy glassware or burners. Think how moonshine is manufactured.
However, as Stranger on a Train suggests, the devil is in the details and if you get the details wrong, you wind up with something very different from what you want. Kerosene and Naptha, for example.
So could the Doc make “gasoline” using the equipment and technology of the day? Absolutely.
Would he know exactly how to do that… probably not. Better give him a few months to experiment and a decent budget for when his still blows up. Not to mention that while he may wind up with something that could be reasonably called gasoline, how well it performed in the DeLorean would be a big question and you could certainly ruin the motor trying to answer that question.
It’s also worth mentioning that what we know about the Doc’s knowledge (although fictional), is not much.
We do know he knows his basic physics. We know that he knows enough chemistry and thermodynamics to make a large and crude ice-maker. However, we also know the man doesn’t imbibe in spirits, so if the process of making gasoline is very close to distilling whiskey, he may have brushed over that part of chemistry.
When it comes to shots of whiskey, well… he just likes to hold it (and is better off doing so).
There had been oil refineries around since the 1850:s, sure they were primarily producing kerosene, but the technology to distill stuff from crude oil had been around for over 30 years by 1885, and the first gasoline engines were also invented around that time so gasoline would not have been a completely unknown chemical.
The weird part is that no one has suggested the idea of refining the ethanol instead of doing some impromptu oil exploration and building a substantially more difficult (higher temperature, more sensitive) petrochemical refinement system.
Alcohol distillation is an ancient technology, and can yield technical-grade alcohol with high reliability.
I don’t know if running refined ethanol would have worked IRL as well as decent home-brew gasoline, but it seems it’d be more likely to work. Other than the medium-to-long-range effects of alcohol on plastics (the usual complaint about gasohol mixes from purists).
But the needs of the story dictated the engine be destroyed, so all of this is fanwanking. Cool fanwanking, but in a way still fighting the hypothetical.