Iroline - A New Fuel Created by a 15 Year Old Girl

A 15-Year-Old Inventor

Here is Irene Laurent, the little French girl who with the aid of the family sugar-bowl developed a solution of irol that is declared to be a motor fuel twice as powerful as gasoline and half as costly as any other gasoline substitute. She is shown above holding a vial of the new liquid.

Girl Discovers New Fuel

Because a 15-year-old girl saw her little brother eating sugar one day, the motor world has been given a new fuel.

The girl is Irene Laurent, daughter of a French chemist. She had been working as a junior chemist in her father’s laboratory, and knew that scientists had been seeking a solvent for the heavy and bulky explosive irol as a possible means of developing a new fuel of tremendous power.

When she saw her brother dipping generously into the family sugar-bowl, she suggested to her father that carbon in the form of sugar might supply the solvent of which he and other chemists and engineers were in search. Despite her father’s insistence that the heavy irol placed in a sugar solution would sink to the bottom., the girl began experimenting, and recently produced a golden yellow liquid that represented a perfect solution of the irol, and that is said to be a motor fuel twice as powerful as gasoline and one that can be made for half the cost of any other gasoline substitute known.

French scientists have hailed the discovery of “iroline” as epochal both in its economic importance to France, which must import its gasoline, and from a standpoint of utility to the whole motor world. 

REFERENCE

Anon. "Girl Discovers New Fuel." Popular Science Monthly June 1925. 46.