Today, every car sold on the market that has a petrol engine uses unleaded fuel. That wasn’t always the case - leaded fuel was available for about 50 years and for a purpose. Refined fuel, namely petrol, has a habit of auto-igniting, i.e the ability to detonate on it’s own without a spark and this meant that cars up to the 1920s could run roughly as the fuel ignited at the … [Read more...]
Universal Oil Products
I was prompted to write this article after the recent death of Don Nichols, who owned the Shadow Formula 1 team in the 1970s. I remember from my youth, the F1 cars with UOP sponsorship. UOP is short for Universal Oil Products, a company founded in 1914 on the back of inventions in chemical cracking developed by Jesse Dubbs and his son Carbon. Cracking is the process by which … [Read more...]
Standard Oil
John D. Rockefeller founded Standard Oil in 1870 in Ohio. Rockefeller was descended from German & English immigrants. He founded the company with his brother William, English chemist Samuel Andrews and Henry Flagler. Flagler’s half brother, Stephen Harkness was a silent partner, providing the cash for Flagler's investment. The original idea for the enterprise actually came … [Read more...]