Question

Why gasoline and air mix together to form a explosive in nature?

Answer 1

WITH reference to your note in last week's NATURE, I may say that, whilst the thanks of chemists, and particularly of those whose duty it is to perform lecture-experiments, are due to Prof. Lothar Meyer for once more drawing attention to the dangerously explosive nature of mixtures of acetylene and oxygen, it may be assumed that the facts already known concerning acetylene account sufficiently well for the great violence of the explosion, and hence for the circumstance that the mixture will shatter even the open cylinder in which it is detonated. What M. Berthelot terms the molecular rapidity of the reaction, as distinguished from the rapidity of propagation, in the case of mixtures of acetylene and oxygen is very high. The heat of the reaction, too, is nearly five times as much as in the cases of electrolytic gas and of carbonic oxide, and more than twice as much as that of methane. It is slightly exceeded by that of ethylene, but, on the other hand, the theoretical temperature of the change with acetylene is enormously greater than in the case of any other explosive mixture of gases. The temperature, too, required to initiate the change is, as Prof. Lothar Meyer showed indirectly some ten years ago, much lower in the case of acetylene than in that of the other gaseous mixtures of which he speaks. All the conditions tend to make the duration of the reaction so nearly instantaneous that the initial pressure cannot be far removed from the theoretical pressure, and this is sufficient to smash a much stronger envelope than a glass cylinder, even if the “tamping” be nothing more than the air. Everything we know about acetylene combines to show that it is extremely “sensitive” as an explosive, and that in this respect, as in its destructive action, it resembles mercuric fulminate.