Colloidal Fuel

When the Cunard Line's oil-burning liner Scythia slid into New York Harbor last week, coal companies perked up, oil companies were cast down and a dead inventor was remembered. Instead of oil, a black turbid liquid had been pouring through one set of her fuel pipes, burning with sudden fierceness when it reached the combustion area under the boiler. First commercial company ever to use colloidal fuel, the Cunard Line last week called its experiment a complete success. Ignored for eleven years, colloidal fuel was news at last.

Colloids are substances which do not form a true homogeneous system when combined with other substances. They retain their identity as particles of ultramicroscopic size (from 1 to 100 millionths of a millimetre) when dispersed in another medium. Pulverized coal when added to oil will settle out almost immediately. It was known that in an extremely viscous oil coal pulverized as small as 1/10,000 of a mm. would sink with less speed. Also surface energies on the particles would tend to keep the mixture more stable. With coal ground so fine that it would pass through a sieve of 80 meshes to the cm. the sinking would be at a rate of a few centimetres a day.

The viscosity of oil is lowered when the oil is heated. To permit the fuel to remain stable when the temperature is raised a saponifier, such as grease, or a peptizer, such as a coal tar product, is added. This mess of coal, oil and stabilizer was the turbid black liquid pouring last week through the Scythia's fuel pipes.

In 1918, when German submarines were sinking U. S. oil tankers, oil was precious. One of the jobs of the Engineering Commission of Submarine Defense was to make oil go further. Its chairman, Lindon Wallace Bates, with the backing of the late Cameraman George Eastman, finally stabilized a 50% mixture of coal dust in oil. The U. S. S. Gem tested it successfully. After the War, Inventor Bates learned that two Germans had invented a similar fuel in 1914. He bought up their patents, developed his fuel still further.

The U. S. was flooding the world with cheap fuel oil. No oil company was interested in developing a fuel to compete with oil. Bates had built a development plant in Brooklyn but it was dismantled in 1919 after the Greenpoint fire. His English contracts were broken. Litigation dragged on until 1929. In 1924 Bates had died in France of a paralytic stroke. A Vermonter and Yaleman, consulting engineer at various times for Australia, Russia, Belgium, he was moved to look for a cheaper fuel when his son Lindon Jr. went down on the Lusitania in 1915. His patents, 20 in the U. S., 15 in Canada, including the basic Plauson-Schroeder patent, now belong to another son, Lindell Theodore Bates, Manhattan lawyer. The foreign patents have lapsed.

England has plenty of low-grade coal but must import fuel oil. Many of her coal mines have been shut down. A fuel containing coal, capable of being handled like oil, was just what British ships and British coal mines needed. Cunard Line last week called its colloidal fuel "secret." Cunard officials said no information would be given until the Scythia returned to Liverpool. Bates's lapsed English patent covered "all stable mixtures of pulverized coal and oil." Furthermore. Bates's U. S. patents, non-lapsed, give his son a monopoly of colloidal fuel in U. S. waters.

U. S. fuel oil is still cheap and plentiful. Last week engineers predicted colloidal fuel might displace it when it becomes precious.

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