Fun fact, basic ethanol works excellent as a fuel additive to reduce knocking, but because it’s already a well known compound, fuel companies couldn’t patent it as an additive, that’s why they invented leaded petrol instead, so they could patent it.
(E: For full completeness, it should probably also be noted that potential legal difficulties surrounding reliably obtaining or producing industrial quantities of Ethanol alcohol in prohibition era America probably also played some role, but the patent thing was definitely the main reason)
So how did that work, did every fuel company have a patent for lead additives? Then this means the patents didn’t stop any one of them from having these additives, which is the supposed function of patents.
And if any one of them got the exclusive patent, the others could just use ethanol, which didn’t happen.
Fun fact, basic ethanol works excellent as a fuel additive to reduce knocking, but because it’s already a well known compound, fuel companies couldn’t patent it as an additive, that’s why they invented leaded petrol instead, so they could patent it.
(E: For full completeness, it should probably also be noted that potential legal difficulties surrounding reliably obtaining or producing industrial quantities of Ethanol alcohol in prohibition era America probably also played some role, but the patent thing was definitely the main reason)
So how did that work, did every fuel company have a patent for lead additives? Then this means the patents didn’t stop any one of them from having these additives, which is the supposed function of patents.
And if any one of them got the exclusive patent, the others could just use ethanol, which didn’t happen.