I have read what appear to be conflicting points of view regarding the production of alcohol during the prohibition period…
Conspiracy theorists postulate that J D Rockefeller poured millions of dollars into the prohibition campaign in order to eliminate the production of ethanol as an alternative fuel which would compromise his petroleum interests.
I have also read, however, that the production of industrial grade alcohol was unaffected by prohibition, and that it was only the production of alcoholic beverages which were affected.
What is the straight dope regarding the production and use of industrial alcohol in the US from 1920-33 , and did prohibition have any bearing on the eventual supremacy of petroleum over alcohol as a automotive fuel?
Industrial alcohol had stuff mixed in with it to make it undrinkable long before prohibition. Denaturing alcohol started several decades earlier so that industrial manufacturers of alcohol could avoid the taxes placed on drinking alcohol. If you didn’t mix in the nasty stuff, then the alcohol was considered drinkable and you had to pay more taxes on it.
During prohibition, the government was a lot stricter about enforcing the denaturing of industrial alcohol, since it was no longer just a tax difference separating industrial alcohol from drinking alcohol. Production of industrial alcohol was otherwise unaffected. In fact, their sales probably increased a bit, as it became common for back-street “chemists” to treat the industrial alcohol with various chemicals to make it drinkable again (usually with the result that it was only slightly less poisonous, and still sent a lot of folks to the hospital or the morgue).
The idea that this had any effect at all on petroleum production is kinda silly.
The supremacy of petroleum over alcohol came from petroleum products being cheap and gasoline containing significantly more energy per gallon than alcohol. Would you pay twice as much per mile to run your car on alcohol if gasoline was readily available?
ETA: The biggest thing that helped gasoline production in the 1920’s era was the introduction of tetraethyl lead (TEL). Before that, gasoline engines used to knock horribly. Alcohol doesn’t knock as much (it has a higher octane rating, meaning that you can compress it more before it spontaneously combusts). TEL drastically reduced gasoline knocking, which made gasoline a much better alternative.
Back in the day, did running your vehicle on alcohol cost twice as much as running on petroleum ? The Model T had a facility which allowed for both, I believe.
So is the alleged Rockefeller multi-milion dollar backing of the prohibition campaign just an urban myth?
The model T’s engine was simple enough that it would easily run on both fuels. There’s a screw on top of the model T carburetor that controls the mix of air and gasoline that you would need to adjust slightly to have it run on alcohol. In fact, most carburetor-style cars up through the 1970s or so can run on alcohol just by adjusting one or two screws to control the air/fuel mix.
Alcohol and gasoline cost roughly the same in the 1920s, with gasoline being a bit cheaper (IIRC). However, you got a lot more energy out of the gasoline. A gallon of gas will take you a lot further than a gallon of alcohol, not quite twice as much, but with the price difference also factored in, alcohol was significantly more expensive per mile.
I poked around a little on google. I couldn’t find any support that Rockefeller threw millions of dollars at prohibition just to eliminate his competition other than from conspiracy whackjob sites.
Rockefeller was in favor of prohibition initially, but so were most upper class citizens. Alcohol was blamed for high crime rates and most Americans were certain that the crime rate was going to drop like a rock once prohibition was enacted. Exactly the opposite happened, and by 1932 Rockefeller rather famously reversed his views on prohibition.
Rockefeller might have had some business concerns in mind as well. It’s hard to say exactly what his motives were.
The conspiracy theory that we’d all be using alcohol cars now if not for the greed of Rockefeller is just silly, and is easily disproved by the fact that countries that never had any form of prohibition also settled on gasoline as their main fuel for cars. Gasoline won because it was a better fuel for the money, not because of prohibition.
Motorcycles had them right up through the 80s. At least Harley-Davidsons did (OK, they are, or were then, pretty simple and primitive mechanically).
I remember re-jetting S&S carburetors. Not so I could run on alcohol, but after changing the pipes and camshaft.
It’s a lost art. Reading sparkplugs, swapping jets, twiddling the idle mixture screw – kids today have no idea what I’m talking about. They just hook a laptop up to their bikes.
Which screws are those? You are aware that most carburetors only have idle mixture screws right?
Are you just talking about changing/adjusting jets? Because you can still buy plenty of bikes today that you can do that to, although the bike makers usually take cursory steps to prevent it to keep the EPA happy. Changing the jets (or moving the little clip thing on a needle jet) still requires taking the carburetor apart to some degree, so it’s not like the Model T that had a big honkin’ knob on top of the carburetor that adjusted the mixture.
The Model T was basically obsolete even by the 20’s, though. Virtually every other car on the road during the Prohibition era would have had more modern-style carburetors without mixture controls. Changing or adjusting the jets to run ethanol wouldn’t have been terribly difficult, but it’s not really something you’d want to do to run one tank of ethanol and the next of gasoline.
When I worked in a lab in the 50s, we had two sources of untaxed alcohol, both of which we sometimes used in a punch with fruit juice. The first was 200 proof. It had been dried with benzene and we would distill it over charcoal to try to get rid of the benzene residue. The second we got from the medical school and it was 191 proof, the highest you could get by distillation. I am sure these were available during prohibition. Labs still needed alcohol for various purposes and denatured alcohol just wasn’t suitable.
We never has prohibition in the UK and there are no cars running on alcohol. Even in the early days, when you bought fuel by the tin in a chemist’s shop, petrol was king. Of course, alcohol was taxed, and in those days, petrol wasn’t.
Industrial alcohol could be made from things you wouldn’t make alcohol intended for consumption from. After all, it wasn’t supposed to be drunk. The huge tank of molasses in Boston’s North end that exploded in 1919 was used in making industrial alcohol, for instance, not rum or distilled liquor. Therefore, no special care was taken to ensure its fitness for human consumption. nevertheless, it was “denatured” by addition of benzene or other liquid to make it unfit to drink, as noted above.
But there’s no reason it couldn’t be “re-natured” by distilling out the added liquids. That’s what was reportedly done in my home town, on an industrial scale, and in a chemical plant.
I’m not sure how far I’d trust the job of denaturing they did. Without sufficient care, you’d still have adulterants left in the alcohol.
Ethanol is usually denatured by the addition of methanol. Methanol is similar enough not to change the properties of ethanol for most things you’d want to use it for (Shellac thinner, chafing dish fuel) but is very poisonous.
There was probably an increase in industrial alcohol during Prohibition. Just for some mysterious reason the yields went down while production increased. I’m sure it was a complete mystery what was happening to that extra alcohol, maybe increased evaporation for some reason. The producers probably paid law enforcement extra money to find out if it was being stolen, but for some reason the more they paid the more alcohol disappeared. And druggists mysteriously had an increased demand for medicinal alcohol.
It can cause permanent blindness*, or it can kill you. And it’s similar enough to ethanol that if you’re not careful in your distillation, the re-natured alcohol can still have dangerous levels of methanol in it, hence my warning above about not being enthralled with the concept of distilling out the denaturing.
Methanol boils at 148.5 F, ethanol at 173F. If you start with liquid that has methanol and ethanol together, and you don’t distill the methanol out first, you’ll have methanol in your ethanol
*I’ve often wondered if this is the origin of “blind drunk”. It’s tempting, but I haven’t researched it.
They administer ethanol to stop the breakdown of methanol and formation of toxic products, but it’s not as if ethanol is the antidote for methanol. People still die every year from methanol in badly home-distilled alcohol.
especially because up until it took off as a motor fuel, gasoline was little more than a “waste” product. kerosene and lamp oil were the desired distillates of the day; gasoline was too volatile to be of much use.
People do die from methanol poisoning, but it’s not because someone does a bad job of distilling. The amount of methanol created by fermentation is too small to cause issues. The problem is when moonshine is deliberately spiked with methanol (it’s cheaper and easier than going through distillation).
ETA: bad moonshine can also be dangerous when it’s made using old radiators for the distillation. But the contaminants in that case are things like lead, not methanol.
Read the link in my last post – small amounts of methanol are created by natural fermentation, but in quantities too small to be a problem. Bad distillation concentrates these, to the point that they can be dangerous. You don’t need to posit people deliberately adulterating the spirits with methanol, or using old car radiators as stills. Methanol poisoning from poor distillation is a real possibility.
in any event, I brought it up not in conjunction with distilling natural fermentation, but in separating ethanol from denatured alcohol, which has methanol (or other poisonous spirits) deliberately and knowingly added. The thought of drinking ethanol recovered from such a brew freaks me out.
It’s possible, but I think it’s not a realistic possibility unless someone deliberately is distilling with the purpose of keeping the methanol and nothing else. A grain mash contains around 16 mg/L of methanol. About 10 ml can cause cause blindness, so you’d need over 100 gallons of mash to produce that. If you distilled a couple hundred gallons and sucked down the heads and nothing else, yes, you could have problems. But “poor distillation” more likely means you get everything - heads, hearts, and tails - and in that case, you’d have to drink enough that you’ll have other issues before you can consume enough methanol.
I definitely agree here. I wouldn’t drink distilled denatured alcohol or ethanol spiked with methanol no matter how well-distilled it is or how efficient the column was. You’re talking about initial methanol concentrations in the percent level, not mg/L.