Temperate traffic policemen who grow dizzy on duty know that they are not drunk, but are mildly poisoned by carbon monoxide puffing invisibly from motor vehicle exhausts.— Carbon monoxide’s first effects are like those of alcohol. Heavy concentrations of the gas, as in closed garages, kill quickly, painlessly. Carbon monoxide (CO) is the result of incomplete combustion. Complete fuel burning would give carbon dioxide (C02), a gas ordinarily harmless to animals.† But no motor is 100% efficient with its gasoline. Some CO always escapes, dangerously. For him who invents a way of making such CO harmless awaits a fortune from motor car users.
Last week Professor Joseph Christie Whitney Frazer, 54, of Johns Hopkins University, felt the intimation of such fortune. He is a chemist who has made a thoroughgoing study of gas adsorption and of catalysts. His knowledge he recently applied to motor exhaust CO, inventing a way of detoxicating it. What his process is he refused to explain publiclylast week. A patent was not yet granted. In effect, he has found a catalyst which will quickly, cheaply, thoroughly get CO turned into C02 before it leaves the automobile. The catalyst is placed in the exhaust pipe line. How best to do this, mechanical engineers are now experimenting. Road tests over 1,500 mi. with an improvised mechanism have indicated that the Frazer process is good enough to commercialize.
* Because they knew that mild carbon monoxide poisoning simulates alcoholic intoxication two eminent Englishmen, John Scott Haldane, 69, honorary professor and director of Birmingham University Mining Research Laboratory, and Leonard Erskine Hill, 63, famed physiologist, recently saved a hapless Englishman from gaol. The fellow and two friends had drunk some beer before he took them for a ride in his closed motor car. The car bogged in a pool of water. Trying to pull out, he raced his motor for about 15 minutes, when he became drowsy. A constable came along to scold. He smelled the driver’s sour breath, arrested him for driving while inebriated. He did not arrest the two passengers. They were dead, from alcohol declared the police surgeon, from carbon monoxide swore a private physician who had noted the pinkness of the victims’ bloods. Professors Haldane and Hill read newspaper accounts of the driver’s jeopardy and voluntarily went to court, where they convinced the magistrate: that the car’s exhaust pipe was clogged with water, that the gas had escaped into the closed car through a pipe leak, that the men had died within the short period of 15 minutes because even a slight amount of imbibed alcohol increases a person’s susceptibility to carbon monoxide intoxication, that the driver was drunk from gas rather than from beer.
†CO2 is essential to plants, which “breathe” it. through their leaves. Sunlight working on assimilated CO2 turns it into starch.
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