Quotes About Octane

By 1936, 90 percent of all US gasoline was leaded. Domestic consumption of tetraethyl lead reached a high of 5.1 million pounds in 1956. In 1959 the US Public Health Service supported an Ethyl Corporation request to increase the lead content of gasoline from 3 cc to 4 cc per gallon—because refiners had reached a limit in improving fuel through refining and were now losing yield to keep up octane.

A fuel's octane rating is a measure of how much it can be compressed before the heat of compression ignites it. Octane ratings at American gasoline pumps today, for example, range from 87 to 93. Pure alcohol has an octane rating of 105.

Octane (C8H18) is one of the alkanes (hydrocarbons with the general formula CnH2n + 2) that form anywhere between 10 to 40 percent of light crude oils, and one of its isomers (compounds with the same number of carbon and hydrogen atoms but with a different molecular structure)