Gasoline as fuel

Gasoline began as garbage. When mid-nineteenth century refineries processed crude petroleum into kerosene for lamps, gasoline emerged as a dangerous waste product—too volatile for illumination, too explosive for safe handling. Thousands of barrels were discharged into creeks and rivers. Refinery grounds became saturated with the stuff. The very property that made gasoline problematic for one purpose—its low flash point and extreme volatility—made it perfect for another that hadn't yet been imagined.

The internal combustion engine, developing in parallel, initially had no particular fuel. Early prototypes burned coal tar distillates, lighter kerosene fractions, even alcohol. The idea of deliberately atomizing and igniting a notoriously explosive petroleum byproduct required someone willing to experiment with what others considered waste.

Siegfried Marcus, an Austrian inventor, made the connection first. After abandoning gunpowder as an engine fuel due to its unreliability, Marcus turned to benzine (gasoline) sometime in the 1860s. When he used sparks to ignite an atomized gasoline-air mixture, he immediately recognized the explosive force could be harnessed. His two-cycle internal combustion engine emerged from this insight.

Marcus built a functioning gasoline-powered vehicle between 1864 and 1870—a full decade before Karl Benz's better-remembered Motorwagen of 1885. His second car survives today, owned by the Austrian Automobile Club, as the oldest gasoline-powered internal combustion car known to exist. Yet Marcus never patented his design, leaving his innovation open for others to commercialize.

The erasure of Marcus from automotive history reflects darker forces. After Germany annexed Austria in 1938, the Nazi regime ordered Marcus's work destroyed, his name removed from textbooks, and his public memorials dismantled—all because Marcus was Jewish. The story of gasoline-as-fuel was rewritten to begin with Benz and Daimler.

Karl Benz's contribution was systematic engineering rather than the initial insight. Building on Nikolaus Otto's 1876 four-stroke engine, Benz developed a gasoline-powered prototype in 1879 and produced the Patent-Motorwagen in 1885. The 0.55 kW (0.74 hp) single-cylinder four-stroke engine was modest, but it established gasoline as the fuel for automobiles.

Demand initially outpaced supply. The kerosene refining process that produced gasoline as waste couldn't generate enough for a growing automotive industry. The solution came from refining innovations: Vladimir Shukhov's 1891 cracking process and William Burton's 1913 thermal cracking allowed refineries to break heavier oil fractions into gasoline, dramatically increasing yields.

The transformation was complete: a waste product became the world's most strategically important fuel. The same volatility that once made gasoline worthless for lighting made it ideal for transportation—high energy density in a liquid form that could be easily stored, transported, and atomized for combustion. The infrastructure built around kerosene—wells, pipelines, refineries, distribution networks—found new purpose serving the automotive age.

Gasoline's trajectory from waste to foundation illustrates how value is context-dependent. What one technology discards, another might treasure.