re: Do you turn off your vehicle when filling up?

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So, if you’re fast enough you could actually extinguish cigarette in a 5 gal bucket of gasoline. Just have to get the cig through the less concentrated vapor and you’re home free.

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We poured a very small amount of gasoline in an aluminum pie pan or slightly deeper cake pan and placed it in the middle of a concrete slab. The pie and cake pans were chosen because they allowed the gasoline to spread out into a very shallow puddle the way it would if spilled on the ground. It also pretty much guaranteed that the vapors at some point above the pan would mix enough with air to form an ignitable mixture.

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We lit a cigarette and tossed it into the pan. The cigarette paper wicked up gasoline and quenched the glowing tip without igniting anything (see Figure 4). We tossed in more lit cigarettes. We tried lighting gasoline soaked paper towels. We used long tongs for reaching far away objects to hold glowing cigarettes over the pan at various heights. More than once we placed several glowing cigarettes in the pan (see Figure 5). Our record was 40 glowing cigarettes at one time. In most cases, we allowed the glowing cigarettes to smolder until they went out.

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Various experiments were conducted at different times of the day with different air temperatures and humidity. A total of 223 cigarettes of 11 different types were eventually used all without ever igniting the gasoline. Yet, at the end of each experimental session the gasoline was successfully lit using a single match attached to a long pole (see figures 6 and 7). The gasoline would typically ignite just before the match touched it. This indicated that there was an ignitable mixture above the surface of the gasoline. Numerous lit cigarettes were in this region for significant periods of time.

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To test it, we built a simple smoking apparatus which could draw air through the cigarette or push it backwards out the tip.

We tested the apparatus repeatedly in both modes without getting ignition. During a test a cigarette was consumed rapidly and glowed brightly. Often sparks shot or fell off the cigarette. They were smoked at various levels above the gasoline to insure that at least part of the time they were in a region with an ignitable mixture. Surprisingly, even when a cigarette was puffed it didn't ignite the gasoline.

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