In 1904, the price of alcohol suitable for use in internal combustion engines in the United States was, not thirteen cents a gallon, but about fifty cents a gallon, more than double the price of a gallon of gasoline. And this price did not include an excise tax placed on alcohol by the federal government, which raised the price of 94 percent commercial alcohol to $2.50 a gallon.
In 1862 Congress and the Lincoln administration had imposed the alcohol excise as a “sin tax” to raise revenue to pay for the Civil War. Lawmakers retained it after the war to encourage temperance. By the early 1900s the United States found itself the only major industrial nation that did not exempt alcohol used for industrial purposes from such taxes.
Efforts to repeal the tax or relieve industrial users of its burden had been made for nearly two decades and predated the automobile. But lobbyists from the petroleum and wood alcohol industries successfully rebuffed these assaults on the tax.
Spokesmen for these two industries naturally argued that repeal would cause an increase in the social misery caused by drunkenness.
Led by scientist Elihu Thomson and General Electric, lobbyists for several industries eventually turned congressional sentiment in favor of repeal. With evidence available that alcohol could be produced for less than twenty cents a gallon, the proponents of “free alcohol” believed that if the tax was removed, the price of alcohol would fall, especially as producers responded to the market opportunity with increased output. With the price of gasoline rising, they confidently expected that automobile manufacturers and consumers would soon switch to alcohol.
The pro-repeal efforts received a crucial twin boost from Standard Oil’s fall from public grace at the hands of muckraker Ida Tarbell, whose published exposé of Standard’s anticompetitive practices appeared serially in McClure’s Magazine from 1902 to 1904, and from President Theodore Roosevelt’s strong support for repeal, which he explicitly linked to punishing the oil monopoly. Despite early opposition from Senator Nelson W. Aldrich of Rhode Island, an oil industry investor whose daughter had married John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the Free Alcohol Act won congressional approval. Roosevelt signed it into law on 9 June 1906, permitting the sale of denatured ethyl alcohol excise-free after 1 January 1907.
Despite the strength of the consensus behind alcohol as the preferred alternative, the removal of the excise and reliance on market forces failed to bring about the switch from gasoline to alcohol. Timing played a decisive role in this outcome. By 1907, the automobile industry and American automobile owners were too heavily committed to gasoline.
Only a quick and substantial reversal in the prices of the two fuels at this point might have encouraged the switch. But prices did not fall enough because potential alcohol producers lacked either the will or the resources to make the investments to drive down the cost of the fuel. The “whiskey trust” Distillers Securities Corporation created the United States Industrial Alcohol Company to dominate the new market, but with monopoly profits in prospect, it saw no reason to drive down the price of alcohol rapidly. Farmers’ cooperatives lacked the capital to enter the new industry on competitive terms. What’s more, no obvious distribution system existed for the fuel, unless one contemplated tanking up at the saloon in more ways than one.
So long as the petroleum industry continued to find and develop new sources of oil to keep the price of gasoline from rising too sharply, the oilmen effectively discouraged others from making the large investments necessary to produce low-cost alcohol.
Alcohol faced technical hurdles as well. It could be used in existing internal combustion engines if manufacturers modified the carburetor to vaporize alcohol better during cold starts, but automobile owners still needed 25–33 percent more alcohol by volume to produce the same power or to cover the same distance as with the cheaper gasoline.
This problem could be solved with higher compression-ratio engines, since alcohol could withstand compression of two hundred pounds per square inch, whereas engine “knock,” a pounding, clanking noise, accompanied by overheating, a loss of power, and damage to the engine, occurred in gasoline engines when compression reached about eighty pounds per square inch.
Columbia University professor Charles E. Lucke concluded that with high-compression engines, alcohol fuel could sell for double the price of gasoline and still be superior to gasoline-powered vehicles on a cost per-mile basis. But the engineers and craftsmen involved with American metallurgy, machine tool, and automobile manufacturing at the time lacked the ability to build a high-compression, alcohol-powered car that was not so heavy as to make the vehicle lethargic yet strong enough to take the pounding delivered by the primitive suspension systems of early automobiles on America’s ungraded and unpaved roads.
Given these issues, manufacturers stayed with gasoline engines, opting for the challenge of meeting demand for these vehicles rather than developing competitive alcohol engines.
And with sportsmen such as Vanderbilt demonstrating the joys and the symbolic cachet of gasoline-powered automobiles, consumers saw no compelling reason to push for a change either.
The failure of alcohol disappointed many. “It will be some time before denatured alcohol will be more economical than other fuels,” Peter Heldt reluctantly concluded in 1908. Still, he saw reason for hope in the long run, especially given the large quantity of agricultural waste that begged to be used.
In the late twentieth century, some people looked back wistfully on electric and steam-powered vehicles as opportunities that were missed—options that were not in the running once it became clear that internal combustion engines delivered more of what consumers wanted—speed, power, and adventure with a declining level of inconvenience. Alcohol provided the best viable opportunity to switch to a renewable alternative fuel, a prospect that seemed promising to many in 1906 but one that fell short and then dimmed with the mass adoption of the gasoline-powered automobile.
Scientists and engineers spotted another environmental problem with the automobile remarkably early.
Automobiles produced an exhaust with a noxious odor that was often visible in the form of smoke. “Smoky exhaust,” as observers called it, was an unwelcome by-product of using gasoline. However, unlike the choice of gasoline, automobile exhaust more directly involved the nondriving public. Americans at the beginning of the twentieth century for the first time grappled with the issue of industrial smoke problems in a serious way. Consequently, they viewed automobile exhaust in the larger context of what was then termed the “smoke problem” or the “smoke nuisance.”
Although people worried about the impact of smoke on public health, they remained uncertain as to which smoke nuisances presented such a problem. They defined nuisances as sights, sounds, or smells that offended the senses, not necessarily as threats to health. The automobile and its emissions arrived amid this fundamental uncertainty.
Nonetheless, under Anglo-American common law, people did not need to demonstrate that a nuisance posed a threat to public health to act against it. In theory, they just decided that the nuisance offended community norms. In reality, acting against nuisances increasingly required lawmakers and judges who did not see tolerance for the nuisance as a necessary price of progress. But the automobile added several wrinkles to the nuisance problem. Apart from taxicab and livery services, automobile use and exhaust arose largely in the pursuit, not of business, but of recreation and pleasure.
Complicating the issue, the automobile smoke nuisance involved, not private activity on a fixed piece of real estate, but the use of numerous mobile pieces of private property on public roads. Urban public health concerns highlighted both benefits and problems with the automobile.
In a prevailing climate of near paranoia over germs (a recent discovery), many people noted the public health benefits of replacing horses with automobiles. But optimism about the health benefits of automobiles went further. Some physicians gushed about the benefits of motoring for all sorts of ailments, including baldness and dandruff. One English physician, considering airborne bacteria, even argued that automobile exhaust was an excellent disinfectant.
These outlandish views remind us that the tendency to view exciting new technologies as panaceas often worked to the automobile’s advantage. But the potential public health benefits of the automobile constituted only a minor strand in the larger discourse about the benefits and problems of the automobile that occurred before 1910.
The benefit of eliminating horse manure certainly did not obscure or overshadow the problem of exhaust or the biggest public health problem posed by the automobile—the number of people being killed by them, already the principal cause of the animosity directed at early automobile ownershttps://ebin.pub/auto-mania-9780300150025.html
