Yeah I didn’t bother with that aspect of the story but it just shows how completely implausible it it. We are told the little girl’s job is to push the clothes down under the gasoline as they would otherwise catch fire. Heh. Gas vapour spontaneously ignites at a temperature way below that which clothes do. It’s like wrapping youself in bloody meat to keep sharks away.
Which is why I agreed earlier it must of been a very diluted mixture of boiling water and some solvent. Gas, kerosene or maybe diesel.
I initially posted the question 1. to see if using boiling gas was impractical and dangerous. Everyone agrees it is. So what would have worked in a backwoods 1920’s/30’s oil camp without killing everybody?
It must have been a dilute solvent of some kind in boiling water.
Most liquids become better at dissolving other liquids or solids when they’re heated. To make them the best solvents possible, you want to heat them as much as possible. That means boiling. You see this often in cooking, where water is boiled to dissolve salt or sugar.
Note that I’m not saying that this was actually done, but that point at least isn’t implausible.
Soxhlet extraction with an organic solvent should be a great way to clean oil-soaked clothes, and would indeed require a special “kettle” (which I can readily picture welded together from a pair of empty barrels).
The stirring part doesn’t really fit into this, as the apparatus would have been essentially sealed during the extraction. Maybe it was heated on a water bath, and your grandma’s job was to stir the water?
Explosion risk, sure. But, if done with care, not a certain death warrant.
I’m curious about the clothes supposedly catching fire if they break the surface. Why would that happen?
Oxygen.
boiling oil soaked clothes in water might give a gas smell.
boiling gas is unnecessary to be a solvent.
as likely it is a mistaken and conflated memory of a young child. it is easy to take fragments of memory of separate but similar memories and knit them together. it is very common.
Gasoline only burns on the surface or when it’s aerosolizes. That’s why a car has either injectors or a carburetor. They both mix the fuel with air to highly increase the surface area.
I’m guessing the pot was tall enough to keep the boiling liquid in the pot. Now, had she been smoking, she might have became a human torch.
it is hard to believe that with clothes bursting into flame at the surface and an ope flame below that an explosive gas mixture wouldn’t happen near a flame.
Slightly similar family story regarding washing clothes with gasoline. My grandmother used to dryclean clothes in a kettle in the back yard, using an oar to stir. However, there was no heat involved. My mother thinks that she may have used white gas. It was probably in the 1920s or 1930s.
How would your average person have gotten enough carbon tetrachloride to have done this?
For over 20 years now, I clean my motorcycle chains in gas, in a pot over an old electric burner which glows red hot. I do this outside.
I also have a concoction of wax, grease, Vicks vapor rub, kerosene, and other secrete ingredients that I take my hot chains and put them in this pot over the same heating device when they are clean. Just a different pot. Let cool & I have a great lubed chain that takes a long time before needing cleaning or lubrication again & extended the life of my chain even more than 5 X the time/miles any of the guys claim to get out of their chains with the best care they claim is being done.
Out doors, no fumes settle around the pot, it does not ignite, the gas is not a rolling boil but is way hot.
I purposely put a 5 gal. open can of gas can on that same glowing red hot, heater coil with the cap off. Let it heat up, NADA.
Spilled some gas on the burner, it ignited and as the flames cleared the edge of the can by several inches, the gas in it lit off. It just burned. No explosion.
I would think a half empty or nearly empty gas can with a spout would be more dangerous as there is an space for fumes to accumulate.
I did that with a 5 gal plastic gas can 3/4 full but it was not heated. The fumes just burned at the spout and when the plastic melted, at the top first which I had to think a second as to why, the gas just burned. No explosion.
Outside, with some air movement, a taller than normal pot, I can see that working just fine. The age of the paddle person is irrelevant. I don’t think the clothes that broke the surface flamed instantly or there would be no time to push them back down. That being a possible bigger chance of getting liquid gas running down the side of the pot, keeping the clothes under would be better.
I doubt the pot was brim full either.
But to say that it is not possible to do what is claimed is incorrect. I was not around in 1920, I’m not that old, but what kids did & were capable of doing & were asked to do is almost beyond belief.
Wiki does not know everything that was ever done, the Myth Busters are a joke. Be very careful about stating as a fact that things can’t be done.
I have been doing the actions described above for over 20 years. Same heater, same cleaning pot. Am I really that lucky? Don’t forget that I have been hit with lightning twice.
YMMV
Sure, but an electric element is not a fire. It has no sparks coming off it. And even then, as you say, you’ve had a fire.
No it isn’t actually. This alleged paddle person has a paddle one end of which is soaked in gasoline, and they are standing next to a fire. Do you know what the attention span of even a notably sensible 6 year old is? I’d give it five minutes before the end of the paddle was on fire.
You’re missing the point here. This aspect of the story is simply physically impossible. The clothing would not catch fire at any temperature significantly lower than the temperature at which gasoline spontaneously ignites. If the temperature immediately above the liquid was high enough to cause the clothes to catch fire ever, the whole lot would have gone up in a fireball anyway.
I said I started a fire. Unless to you that means it was not on purpose.
I don’t care what you give it, you are either not reading what I said, did not believe what I said I have seen children do or???
I know 20, 6 year old’s that could be trusted with that job.
No, I am not missing the point, that was the reason given to the child, no indication if that was actually said. (See Aceplace57’s post.)
There have been cites in this thread that using gas was actually used to clean oily clothes.
I told you I do use hot gas to clean chains. No fireball.
Not all flames put off sparks. Sparks glow red… wait, you said glowing red was not good enough, needed flames… Which is it?
An ember & a spark are two different things. They are not interchangeable in the circumstances we are talking about here. IMO
I can start a fire by putting raw gas on my red glowing burner.
I can have flames & sparks and red hot things that never get over ½ way up the side of the open container that is out of doors and will not cause the gas inside the can to ignite.
I am not saying it is a 100% safe way to do things. Driving cars is also not 100% safe. Letting anything bite you in AU is apparently going to likely have a 90% chance of being lethal 100% of the time. You agree with ??? 
Now if you just want to talk about the spontaneous ignition of the clothes, which IMO is not a fact which has any cites yet. I have no experience with the clothes. I do have experience of some volume about open cans of gas and what will happen when flames are in contact with fumes or raw gas and when it is just close.
You said:
You said this and the part I highlighted in red is what I am on about.
My experienced of 20+ years of doing that very thing say to me that you are wrong.
That whole post is so full of inaccurate statements that I am not going to go through it again.
I agree that spontaneous combustion of clothes that come to the top is rather unlikely, ( I will not say impossible without knowing the exact fuel makeup, the material of the clothing, the temperature & Humidity of the day in question & wind speed & direction. Actual temperature of the gasoline and that relationship to the ‘boiling’ description. I could play around with it then and give what I would think would be a very informed opinion.
If you want one more round, OK, but then I’m gonna quit. Heck, I might just let you have the last word.
By now, you & I are probably the only ones even reading anymore. Have a great day as I guess it is day right now for you.
We sold white gas when I was a kid which also doubled as 600 thinner. Same as dry cleaning liguid. Much closer to the conssitency of diesel fuel than gasoline. Still dangerous over an open flame but nothing close to as dangerous as gasoline.
I think the OP’s scenario, although dangerous, is plausible. To answer the question of why it “didn’t go boom”, I think the answer is in the low pressure of the rapid updraft of the boiling vapors, and the lack of oxygen in the updraft from the fire below the pot.
Tetraethyl lead was used starting in the 1920’s, and I don’t know if it would have been used in your mother’s wash wringer engine, but regardless of the formulation, gasoline is a mix of alkanes and cycloalkane and the boiling point being is below the flash point. So the mere act of boiling (ignoring any sparks or other sources of ignition) wouldn’t have caused the gasoline to catch on fire.
Gasoline burns in a limited range of it’s vapor phase. The lower explosive limit depending on formulation is around 1.4% and the upper limit is around 7.4%.
Those limits assume the normal concentration of oxygen in air (21%) but much of the oxygen in the fire updraft surrounding the pot would have been used in the wood’s combustion so the actual concentration of oxygen would be lower.
I believe at a full boil, the boiling gasoline would cause it to rapidly dissipate into the surrounding oxygen-deprived air. In the end, the boiling lowers the pressure, and that alongside the reduced oxygen level causes the oxygen/gasoline mixture to be too lean to ignite.
In contrast, an internal combustion engine combines pressure (which raises the explosive limits) with just the right air mixture (not too lean, or too rich) and an ignition source.
I think it’s unlikely an ignition source would start the gasoline on fire in the above scenario, and regardless, the updraft of the boiling gasoline would help prevent any burning ashes from landing back down in the pot.
I do think there is more danger in the transitional phases (prior to the gasoline fully boiling). But the reality is that as others have stated, it’s hard to light a pool of gasoline on fire. You can drop a match into a can of gasoline, and the match will extinguish (unless the vapors above catch on fire - do not try at home).
I can’t explain the comment about the clothes catching on fire, but if clothing was sticking out of the pot, it could conceivably act like a wick, and it would be easier for gasoline soaked clothing to start on fire (clothing itself is combustible) vs. a standing pool of gasoline.
It is also true that the efficiency of a solvent increases with temperature.
As a teen I hung out at a gas station (in case this vernacular isn’t understood, it means a retail establishment selling motor fuel) where I pumped gas and wrenched on cars we raced at the local track. To scare newbies, somebody would fill a coffee can or similar brim full of gasoline, set it on the ground, then make a big show of striking wooden matches and throwing them at the gas. Of course, they went out as soon as they dropped into the liquid. There isn’t enough heat retention in a stick match to ignite liquid gas. And this being outdoors, with some air movement, there were never enough gas vapors at a proper fuel/air mix above the can to ignite. The newbies would cringe or run, and we’d all laugh.
This just illustrates the fact that it is possible to boil gas without setting it on fire.
But I’ve also used gasoline as an accelerant in lighting “burn piles” of brush and such when clearing fields. Pour some on, then move back, dip a stick in gas and light it, then toss lighted stick on the pile. Flames! But sometimes the fire burns down and somebody decides to “get it going again”. Walking up and throwing more gas onto the already-hot coals and embers is a bad idea, usually necessitating the stop, drop and roll technique of escape. And sometimes requiring medical attention.
So the posited case makes no sense to me. Sure you could boil gas in a kettle, and soak clothes in it. You might even, if you’re really careful, do this over an open fire. Keep the flames small and mostly coals, make it a really, really tall kettle, and keep the liquid level relatively low. But stir it with a stick? No way, regardless of the age of the attendant. Dip the stick, then remove stick – drip, drip goes the gas off the stick as you remove it and swing it away. Some drips go down the side of the kettle, some go into the flames. All immediately ignite, flames climb the outside of the kettle and ignite the whole thing. Just like my buddy re-igniting the brush pile. Not a bomb, just a vigorous fire.
I suspect what was actually done involved two steps. Oil soaked clothes were washed by hand in a container of room temperature gasoline. This should remove most of the oil. Then the clothes were vigorously wrung out, and maybe hung to drip for a time. Then they were washed of the remaining gasoline residue in a pot of boiling water. Here the open fire makes sense, and explains the “push the clothes under before they burn” memory. Boiling in water was releasing the remaining gasoline as vapor, some of which hung above the kettle. This vapor routinely “flared” as it flowed over the edge of the kettle into the open fire. The flare on top of the water could burn any clothing sticking up above the water. But these small flares weren’t sufficient to pose much hazard for the attendant. At least, not much more danger than that posed by the open fire itself.
The six year old might not have been tall enough or strong enough to be involved in the actual gas washing task. Wet coveralls in men’s sizes are heavy. Or maybe this part was done the day before, or in a separate place. But she was big enough to stand by the kettle with a wooden paddle for the “push ‘em down before they get burned” part. In later years she remembered “washing oily clothes in boiling gasoline” as a single memory event.
Wow, it’s amazing what people in the old days did. No wonder they don’t do this anymore.
Gasoline is *$&^(& expensive.
At the La Brea tar pits, fossils were once cleaned using hot kerosene.
This link mentions heated kerosene, which occasionally caught fire.
Early Excavations | La Brea Tar Pits
This link says it was boiling kerosene.
Natural History Magazine | Featured Story
In my memory the “history of the pits” film in the museum also says it was boiling kerosene.
No mention of six year olds or wooden paddles though.
When I was 14 or so, my dad asked me to pile up cornstalks in the garden and burn them. I made a decent sized pile, but being a preteen pyromaniac I also doused the pile with some gasoline. Since we were done mowing the lawn for the year, I just poured what was left out of the can.
I was smart enough to realize I had created a possibly dangerous situation, so I didn’t light the pile. My dad saw the pile of stalks and figured he’d light them. He, being an older pyromaniac went to get some gas and found the empty can. But then he remembered the Lawnboy gas/oil mix and poured that on the pile. He had second thoughts about the danger and he also walked away.
Meanwhile, we some how didn’t cross paths, but I returned with matches. I flipped one onto the pile, there was a “whump” and I got thrown back. My hair was singed and I looked sunburned. Scared the crap outa me. It was a hot, muggy, autumn day with no air movement which must have contributed to the explosion. When we figured out how it had happened it became one of those family legends.
When burning trashy wood piles in the yard, using gas as the ‘helper’ it is good to have a not too windy day. It is always good to not have a dead still day when you are lighting it or the pockets of fumes get kind big in the wood pile and you are more likely to get a kayaker tan.
Ummmm love the smell of burnt hair… not.