TODAY IN SCIENCE HISTORY ®  •  TODAYINSCI ®
Celebrating 24 Years on the Web
Find science on or your birthday


Today in Science History Home

Short Stories of Science and Invention

A Collection of Radio Talks by
Charles F. Kettering

INDEX

9.  Energy From the Sun
    

Benz     About this time men were work­ing on the development of a self-­propelled vehicle. But they needed an engine which could use some sort of fuel that was plentiful and inex­pensive. The steam engine didn't seem to be the answer. Dunlop had already solved the tire problem and the year of the Centen­nial in Philadelphia, America heard of the internal combustion engine - ­an engine that used gas as fuel. Some ten years later vehicles propelled by this type of engine were being built and, at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, many Americans saw the horseless carriage for the first time.

Dumping     With tires and engines available there was still no real supply of fuel in sight. Unknowingly the petroleum refiners in this country provided the answer. In refining petroleum to get kerosene they had a troublesome by product - gasoline. They could find no use for gasoline or even a way to get rid of it. You could have all you wanted if you would haul it away. In fact, laws had to be passed to keep the refiner from dumping gasoline into rivers and harbors. Government inspectors were on hand at every refinery to see that none of this volatile mate­rial got into the kerosene.

     Now this gasoline, that was such a great nuisance to the refiners, was a very good fuel for the new internal combustion engine and, as the automobile and airplane de­veloped, the "by-product" gasoline became more and more important each year. Now it is one of our most important civilian and military ma­terials.



backnext

Thank you for sharing.
- 100 -
Sophie Germain
Gertrude Elion
Ernest Rutherford
James Chadwick
Marcel Proust
William Harvey
Johann Goethe
John Keynes
Carl Gauss
Paul Feyerabend
- 90 -
Antoine Lavoisier
Lise Meitner
Charles Babbage
Ibn Khaldun
Euclid
Ralph Emerson
Robert Bunsen
Frederick Banting
Andre Ampere
Winston Churchill
- 80 -
John Locke
Bronislaw Malinowski
Bible
Thomas Huxley
Alessandro Volta
Erwin Schrodinger
Wilhelm Roentgen
Louis Pasteur
Bertrand Russell
Jean Lamarck
- 70 -
Samuel Morse
John Wheeler
Nicolaus Copernicus
Robert Fulton
Pierre Laplace
Humphry Davy
Thomas Edison
Lord Kelvin
Theodore Roosevelt
Carolus Linnaeus
- 60 -
Francis Galton
Linus Pauling
Immanuel Kant
Martin Fischer
Robert Boyle
Karl Popper
Paul Dirac
Avicenna
James Watson
William Shakespeare
- 50 -
Stephen Hawking
Niels Bohr
Nikola Tesla
Rachel Carson
Max Planck
Henry Adams
Richard Dawkins
Werner Heisenberg
Alfred Wegener
John Dalton
- 40 -
Pierre Fermat
Edward Wilson
Johannes Kepler
Gustave Eiffel
Giordano Bruno
JJ Thomson
Thomas Kuhn
Leonardo DaVinci
Archimedes
David Hume
- 30 -
Andreas Vesalius
Rudolf Virchow
Richard Feynman
James Hutton
Alexander Fleming
Emile Durkheim
Benjamin Franklin
Robert Oppenheimer
Robert Hooke
Charles Kettering
- 20 -
Carl Sagan
James Maxwell
Marie Curie
Rene Descartes
Francis Crick
Hippocrates
Michael Faraday
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Francis Bacon
Galileo Galilei
- 10 -
Aristotle
John Watson
Rosalind Franklin
Michio Kaku
Isaac Asimov
Charles Darwin
Sigmund Freud
Albert Einstein
Florence Nightingale
Isaac Newton


by Ian Ellis
who invites your feedback
Thank you for sharing.
Today in Science History
Sign up for Newsletter
with quiz, quotes and more.