Fuel

For years experiments have been made in an effort to devise an automobile engine which could use fuel oil, rather than the more refined product, gasoline. Mitten Management, Inc. (operating buses and taxicabs in Philadelphia) has developed the "gas generator," has tested it on 20 buses, traveling 300,000 miles of hilly country. Last week Mitten Vice President J. A. Queeney said that he was ready to use fuel oil in 600 buses, 3,000 taxicabs; advised all U. S. bus operators to use fuel oil if they want to save $50,000,000 yearly.

Vice President Queeney described the "generator" thus: "It consists of an aluminum pot in which is set a nest of stationary thin-curved plates radiating from a central core. The pot is heated by the exhaust from the engine. The fuel is drawn from a standard carburetor through the inside of the pot over the surface of the warm plates, where it is converted into a dry gas and there it passes through the intake manifold into the cylinders."

Automotive Engineers, in annual meeting at Detroit, were skeptical of the importance of the Mitten innovation, believed that it had been devised too late. H. C. Dickinson of the Federal Bureau of Standards argued: "Gasoline is made by cracking crude oil and the big oil companies can crack oil so cheaply now that it hardly pays to develop an automobile engine that will do this work. Besides, when the oil is cracked at the refineries, the by-products which have a market value are saved. When oil is cracked in an automobile engine it is lost."