AskNott:
Some of you folks are quibbling over whether or not millers and bakers could adulterate flour with rougher-than-fine sawdust. The thing you’re missing is the mill itself. The same millstone that turns wheat grain into flour can turn rough sawdust, and maybe even small chips, into a fine powder, just right for baking.
Bread needs wheat flour to rise, but you can mix in things that rise poorly, or not rise at all. Rye flour can make a nice bread, but it rises poorly, so it needs wheat flour. Corn meal has no gluten at all, but you can add it to wheat dough. Damana bread has a lot of cornmeal it, but the finished loaf is pretty dense.
Bark, not wood, would have been the thing to feed into the millstone, and there would have been plenty of that even before sawmills became common. As opposed to wood, it actually has some nutritional value, albeit much less than grain.
Woodturning has been around for many centuries and produces lots of quite fine dust and shavings. No saw is necessary to produce sawdust.
robby:
There’s no conspiracy here. The lead (actually a compound known as tetraethyllead) was added to increase the octane rating of the gasoline and to reduce engine knocking. It also worked as a lubricating agent to decrease engine valve seat wear. This additive improved the performance of gasoline when it was first introduced in the 1920s, so it cost more.
Decades later, when the addition of tetraethyllead to gasoline had become ubiquitous, higher performance engines with greater compression ratios had also become the norm. It was not possible to simply remove the tetraethyllead without replacing it with an alternative. Alternative anti-knock agents included ethanol, MTBE (now phased out due to groundwater contamination concerns), and isooctane. Other additives were added to replace the lubricating quality of the tetraethyllead. All of these additives were relatively more expensive, which is why the cost of unleaded gasoline was actually pricier than leaded gasoline when it was introduced as a replacement in the 1970s and '80s.
I don’t know if I would exactly call it a conspiracy, but there was definitely some underhand dealing in regards TEL in fuel.
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Tetraethyl lead
Tetraethyllead (commonly styled tetraethyl lead), abbreviated TEL, is an organolead compound with the formula Pb(C2H5)4. It was widely used as a fuel additive for much of the 20th century, first being mixed with gasoline beginning in the 1920s. This "leaded gasol...
robby
May 14, 2016, 11:18am
64
<off-topic>My Mother said that she could remember when the new, special gasoline had lead added to it. Then she lived loong enough that the new, special fuel was unleaded gas, with the lead taken out.
And she said that the oil companies charged customers extra in both cases!
Sorry if I was unclear here. I merely meant to say that there was no conspiracy regarding the price of unleaded gasoline versus leaded gasoline (because other additives were added to replace the TEL).
I agree completely that there was a lot of underhanded dealing, if not outright conspiracy, in getting TEL approved in the first place as a fuel additive and the quashing for decades of any research that might indicate that it was a serious health risk.