Bullet that ran on cooking oil
QUESTION Has there ever been a dieselpowered motorcycle?
ONE such machine was the Royal Enfield Bullet, produced by Enfield India.
This last vestige of the Royal Enfield marque is, as you may guess, built in India where the roads are not quite as smooth as ours or filling stations as frequent.
So such a machine with a lower top speed is not a disadvantage. A distinct advantage, though, is that it can run on tractor diesel, lamp oil or even cooking oil. This variant used a single cylinder developing about 15 horsepower, with a top speed of more than 70mph, although I could not begin to imagine the discomfort of a single cylinder diesel motorcycle vibrating at full revs.
The reason we don’t use diesel engines in this country is that petrol ones can be made to produce a more responsive power curve, which makes acceleration sharper and throttle control more responsive.
The fuel-saving advantage of diesel cars is not as obvious in a lightweight motorcycle capable of 50mpg and most larger powerful bikes have the performance of a Ferrari, so who cares about cost?
So the answer to the question is there is no real need for one, except if you’re a farmer and you don’t have a tractor!
Ian Duckworth, Chorley, Lancs.
QUESTION Is it possible to turn base metals into gold?
ONE of the key quests of alchemy was to produce the philosopher’s stone, a dense waxy, red material that could induce chrysopoeia, the transmutation of base metals such as lead into gold.
With the dawn of the atomic age in the 20th century, the transmutation of elements became possible. In commercial nuclear reactors, uranium 235 undergoes fission, i.e. the atoms break apart to yield smaller nuclei of elements such as barium and krypton as well as heat that can be harnessed to generate electricity.
Nuclear transmutation can also be achieved in a ‘collider’, a particle accelerator that uses electromagnetic fields to propel charged particles, electrons, protons and neutrons to nearly light speed and smash them into a target.
Around 1980, a research group from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) used a particle accelerator to create beams of carbon and neon moving near to the speed of light. They smashed these beams on bismuth foil targets.
Each bismuth atom contains 83 protons. If a bismuth atom loses four protons, it turns into gold. To determine if gold was created, the researchers measured radiation from the decay of unstable gold atoms. The reaction produced a minuscule amount of gold.
Gold has only one stable isotope: Au 197, an atom made up of 79 protons and 118 neutrons. If it has a different number of protons it isn’t gold. If it has a different neutron count it is gold, but radioactive.
That means that the element will eventually turn into a different element while emitting alpha, beta or gamma rays.
Most of the gold obtained by bombarding metals with neutrons will be real, but it won’t last very long and will be highly radioactive. While it is possible to create gold by bombarding mercury and lead in a particle accelerator, the cost and radioactive nature of the resulting isotopes would make it practically impossible.
Glenn Seaborg, a winner of the 1951
IS THERE a question to which you have always wanted to know the answer? Or do you know the answer to a question raised here? Send your questions and answers to: Charles Legge, Answers To Correspondents, Daily Mail, 2 Derry Street, London, W8 5TT; fax them to 01952 780111 or email them to charles.legge@dailymail.co.uk. A selection will be published but we are not able to enter into individual correspondence. Nobel Prize in Chemistry, suggested that it would cost more than one quadrillion dollars to produce just an ounce of stable gold using a particle accelerator. Peter Smith, Durham.
QUESTION Did the Bohemians behave in the way we use the word?
BOHEMIA was a region folded into the Czechoslovak Republic after World War I. It now forms the westernmost area of the Czech Republic, with Bohemian Prague as the Czech capital. It was the French who, in the 15th century, first used the word ‘bohemien’ to also mean ‘gipsy’, in the mistaken belief that the Roma people originated there.
The transferred sense of unconventional living first appeared in French in 1834 and was popularised by Henri Murger’s stories from the late 1840s, later collected as Scenes De La Vie De Boheme (the basis of Puccini’s La Boheme).
Its first appearance in English in this sense was in 1848 in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and was soon defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as, ‘a gipsy of society; one who either cuts himself off, or is by his habits cut off from society for which he is otherwise fitted; especially an artist, literary man or actor, who leads a free, vagabond or irregular life, not being particular as to the society he frequents and despising conventionalities generally’.
Historically there was a strong artistic heritage centring around Prague (though not an especially Bohemian one). The city had been a cultural powerhouse as capital of the Holy Roman Empire, reaching its peak under the arts connoisseur Rudolph II (ruled 1576–1612), who left us much of the gorgeous old city of Prague.
Martin Hoffman, London W4.