Honda's first motorcycles ran partly on turpentine
Japan was so short of petrol after the Second World War that Honda's earliest motorcycles, built from 1946, burned a blend of gasoline and turpentine. The same pine-derived solvent once lit American parlours, was stirred into cheap gin and sailed with Magellan as a medicine. Today most of it comes from paper mills.
Turpentine, or turps, is distilled from resin tapped from living trees, mostly pines such as the maritime, Aleppo and longleaf species. It is a mix of terpenes, above all alpha-pinene and beta-pinene. The name travelled through French and Latin from the Greek word for the terebinth tree, whose sap it originally described; Chios turpentine was one such product before conifers took over the term.
There are several routes to the oil. Gum turpentine is steam-distilled from raw resin in a copper still, leaving molten rosin behind. Wood turpentine is pulled from shredded stumps and roots using a light naphtha fraction from oil refineries. The main modern source, though, is the kraft pulping of pine for paper, where the vapour from the digesters condenses into sulfate turpentine at roughly 5 to 10 kilograms per tonne of pulp. Kraft turpentine is rich in pinene, while the sulfite process yields a product heavy in cymene.
Its uses have shifted over time. Between the 1830s and 1860s, a lamp fuel called camphine gave bright but smelly light and helped push whale oil aside until kerosene, gas and electricity arrived. Painters thinned oils with it, furniture makers mixed it with beeswax, and chemists still turn its pinenes into fragrance compounds such as camphor, linalool and geraniol. Cheaper petroleum white spirit has largely replaced it as a solvent in industrial countries.
It is also toxic. Inhaled vapour can harm the lungs and nervous system, swallowing it can damage the kidneys, and US regulators cap workplace exposure at 100 ppm over an eight-hour day, treating 800 ppm as immediately dangerous. That did not stop sailors of the Age of Discovery from taking it for intestinal worms, or distillers from lacing gin with it during the Gin Craze. Vicks chest rubs still include it, though not as an active ingredient.
Source: Turpentine
