Back in the mid 1970's, when THAT energy cirisis hit I looked into alternate energy possibilities as everybody else did at the time. One document that I found was a 30 page paper published in February of 1939 detailing a December 8,1938 conference on the subject of gasification for transportation use. It was put out by the (British) Institute of Fuels. It starts out being rather general, but then becomes very specific, covering every type of gas producer known to (European) man at the time. The writers describe, with text, pictures and drawings the 4 basic types and give examples from the many manufactures who were making them.
There are lots of data, including gas analyses, reliability, testing, road rally results, etc..
There are a couple of large tables comparing various vehicles, by weight class, against many criteria that all
gasification enthusiasts would recognize.
For example, there's a table on cylinder bore wear vs fuel type. Then there's data comparing the
"Methods of Gasification" for 16 different manufacturers on 10 different attributes. Another table lists
fuel usage for 6 "lorries" and a bus, weighing from 1.45 tons to 6.9 tons.
There is a rather detailed section wholly devoted to gas purification. 71 references are sited.
My copy is getting pretty yellowed, being a photocopy from microfilm, so I finally, just
yesterday (2009) scanned it in to my computer, a half page at a time since it's in 9 1/2" X 13" format.
I have now spent about 20 hours cleaning it up. The various pages "cleaned up" at several different levels, as will
become immediately apparent when you begin to view them. In some cases I had to leave a lot of junk in the background
to avoid loosing the text.
The originals, except for a few of the photographs, are quite readable by humans, but I doubt if there's any OCR software
in the range of my pocket book that could decode the yellows, organges, purples etc. that have bloomed thereon over the
last 30+ years. I tell you this so, in case there's some very imprtant piece of text that didn't survive my clean up,
you can contact me and I will try the get it for you.
The Modern Portable Gas Producer in pdf:
Thank you Robert, for taking the time to make this conversion.