Alchohol fueled industrial revolution

In theory would an industrial revolution driven exclusively by alcohol fueled internal and external combustion engines in the early 1800s be practical?

No.

Steam became key to the industrial revolution for a simple reason : coal was being mined and coal mines needed pumps driven by a readily available fuel - i.e. by coal.

Steam engines grew in sophistication and in application from that point, but it was the combination of a need for a steady automated action (pumping) and a readily available fuel (no processing required for coal !) that made it take off.

Alcohol is a different thing entirely. You don't find e.g. alcohol lakes conveniently located next to a place you need to do some kind of mechanically repeatable task (like pumping). You don't even find alcohol located in underground reservoirs.

You have to manufacture alcohol. It needs lots of supplies brought to one place and lots of transport to move the alcohol from where you make it to where you need it (not always the same). You ideally needs lots of e.g. coal to fuel the production of alcohol and it's transportation.

And note there's a big difference between making alcohol as in beer and wine and making alcohol as in high purity spirits. And there a similar difference in burning them as fuel.

That's not the same as coal driven stream engines. You start from a need with the easily available fuel and as soon as you get it working it will be refined and improved and new applications become obvious.

And finally of course, it's a sinful waste in an era when alcohol was important as a safe (hygienic !) liquid to drink and water usually was not !

And in that sense alcohol did fuel the industrial worker for a long time, although not so much the industrial revolution. :-)

Steam just got lucky

The Industrial Revolution was more a series of events and inventions than a period of actual dates. It is therefore considered to be the approximate period of 1760–1830.

The first liquid fueled (gasoline) internal combustion engine was built by Robert Street in 1794 — about half-way through the Industrial Revolution.

It could be said that had coal not been so easily obtained and plentiful that gasoline and the combustion engine would have driven the Industrial Revolution, possibly having no more effect than to delay the final outcome of the period by 10-20 years, which would have ultimately had little to no effect on the presence of modern technology today.

Now, specifically addressing alcohol.

The Hot Rod Network explains the following about alcohol vs gasoline fuels:

For purposes of this story when we refer to alcohol we mean methanol or ethanol. Gasoline is much denser from an energy content perspective, meaning it takes less gas (versus alcohol) to make the same power. It’s easier to ignite gasoline than alcohol fuels.

Said simply, gasoline provides better bang for the buck, meaning (somewhat simplistically) the same engine can do more work. Further...

The great things about gasoline and its use in racing engines, is also why it’s inherently a riskier fuel than alcohol, gasoline will ignite in less than ideal conditions, as in outside the engine. And, once it’s lit, it’s harder to extinguish outside of the controlled burning that is taking place in the combustion chamber.

Gasoline will burn the barn down, where Alcohol only might burn the barn down.

There are some upsides, perhaps the most important being...

When you burn alcohol one of the byproducts of combustion is oxygen. This helps enhance the combustion process. Another is the cooling effect of alcohol as it “vaporizes” in the inlet track. This helps create denser air as the air/fuel charge enters the engine, another positive. The cooling effect also helps to cool the engine, at least on the inlet side of the equation. Remember, producing horsepower is all about creating and controlling heat.

In other words, it would be easier to make an operating internal combustion engine with alcohol, even if it wasn't as efficient as gasoline.

Conclusion

I believe it is completely believable to describe (for instance) an alternate history where the internal combustion engine stole steam's thunder. Make coal a scarce commodity and steam would have been relegated to something interesting.

However, when you analyze the whole effect it might have had on history — the anser is ultimately "none." Remember that technological development is a pyramid, with "today" at the top and an absolute mountain of knowledge, experience, perserverance, and luck beneath it.

You're talking about plucking combustion engines from where they were in that mountain and moving them a bit further down the slope. Yes, that would have changed a few things nearby, but ultimately, the shape of the mountain would have remained the same. After all, the line between steam and internal combustion engines and modern computers is mighty thin, if it exists at all (turbines for electricity were an altogether different branch of study).

So, nada, zilch. No impact on society at all, other than maybe to have the 1964 Corvette in 1954 instead.

The single biggest problem that you're going to have with this model is the burning temperature of the fuel.

The reason we use petrol (or gasoline as it's called in certain parts of the globe) as a fuel for internal combustion is that its burning temperature is reasonably low (somewhere around 250 degrees C for ignition, a little over 1000 degrees C for flame temp) meaning that when it explodes in the combustion chamber, the expanding gas is enough to push down the piston, and the heat can be absorbed by the metal surrounding the chamber. Despite this, we still need cooling systems to keep the engines from overheating.

Remember, that in these engines, the heat is a waste energy by-product. The internal combustion engine is not powered by heat; it's powered by expanding gasses.

Alcohol (on the other hand) ignites at around 365 degrees C (but burns at around 1920 degrees C). Some modern internal combustion engines can handle that, but the average domestic car (for example) cannot. Early IC engines would have either melted down or exploded with those kind of explosive temperatures inside the cylinders.

Also, alcohol (ironically enough) is harder to produce in industrial quantities than petrol. This is one of the key reasons that biofuels haven't taken off; I read an article around 7 yrs ago now that estimated that to supply just 20% of the USA's fuel needs via biofuel, its complete crop of corn and maize would have to be converted into biofuel. Clearly, that's an unacceptable tradeoff. And that's just converting it to fuel; converting it to pure alcohol would be even less efficient.

So, before we discuss the potential impacts, the question fails at the first limb; no, this isn't a practical solution for two reasons;

1) Engines would have to be much more robust than early IC engines were
2) The fuel production requirements would have been prohibitive.

Mind you; can you imagine the difficulty the British Navy would have had if both their sailors AND their ships were powered by rum in the 19th century?

Alcohol itself is a rather good liquid fuel, though its energy density is much lower. So you can do more or less everything with it than you would with gasoline, though you will need to burn more of it.

As an aside, the first modern rocket, used for the V2 weapon, burned alcohol as it is easier to handle than hydrocarbon. However, newer rockets based on the same principle need to use ultra-purified hydrocarbon (RP1 kerosene) though, as alcohol is simply not energy-dense enough to reach orbital velocities, if they don't want to use cryogenic and/or ghastly toxic fuel.

The big problem will be how much energy the civilisation has access to.

Fossil fuels mostly date back from the Carboniferous period (hence its name), when trees developed cellulose but scavengers hadn't found a way to decompose it yet. For millions and millions of years, non-decomposed tree trunks accumulated, to be slowly turned into hydrocarbon. In effect, those trees accumulated solar energy into fossil fuels like the world's biggest battery.

The industrial revolution used those massive reserves of energy as fuel. To a rather large extent, we are still dependent on it - Germany, the supposed champion of green energy, produces a staggering (and staggeringly polluting) 40% of its electricity by burning coal, since they decided to stop using that awful carbon dioxide producer that is nuclear power. You would be sarcastic too if you were living in a country that has made special efforts to get rid of coal just to breathe polluted air from another country that just went back at it big time in the name of ecology. But I digress again.

The point is, without it, the only energy source you have is primitive wind and hydroelectric mechanical power, and primitive solar power in the form of inefficient plants - grain, cane and wood for example. To an extent, those are used as an auxiliary energy source today as biofuel. WWII shortages, especially under German occupation, even drove creative engineers to build wood-biofuel-powered cars.

The problem is, the energy density per surface area of those is very low. So you simply do not have enough energy for a historical-type Industrial Revolution, by a wide margin.

You have some factories, but not the massive urban exodus and goods production that saw the XIXe Century. You have some trains, but not nearly as much. You have some combustion engine boats, but mostly warships - freight is using cost-effective, modern sailing ships. Planes, at first, should be less affected as they represented a smaller percentage of fuel use in general.

A possible upside is, the WWI Western Front equivalent may not quite be such a meat-grinder, as the war and its horrors were fuelled precisely by the industrial power of the belligerents. Without enough fuel, there is neither enough industry for weapons and - more importantly - artillery shells, nor even possibly for bringing enough food to the trench lines.