I work on heavy diesel engines and old timers know Eisenhower grease. its a nickname for cosmolene, a water resistant grease family used for anything in unforgiving environments. it comes in weights from wax to jelly. you'll see it frequently used to preserve guns for storage.
its also as I've experienced it kinda unrefined? it stinks, smells like turpentine sometimes and is a royal bitch to clean off parts. we don't use it anymore but you can still buy new old stock.
if you burn the wax version to remove it, it emits a choking white smoke. most cosmolene can't be used in high speed applications, and has no friction modifiers like copper or lithium.
just to add, the standard cleaning procedure is mineral spirits or xylene, which creates a toxic waste that most recyclers flat out do not accept. you have to take it to a specialty chemical disposal company.
I've used it to preserve the undercarriage of my Toyota Tacoma which is notorious for frame rot. Well I didn't use strict cosmoline, instead it's CRC marine heavy duty, but it's effectively just cosmoline in a spray can.
[1] says Eisenhower grease was based on "English asbestos grease" which I assume is "Compound 219" [2]. Arnold J. Morway is credited as the Standard Oil researcher who developed Eisenhower grease. [3]
[1] is excellent, thank you! It leads to another question, how did it come to Eisenhower’s attention that this is what was needed?
And [2] promises that answer. Before reading that, I was thinking some mechanic, or perhaps a farm hand turned logistics sergeant, had to see the problem and know that a special type of grease was the answer. Then, how to communicate that up the chain, when the bosses might not know about engines in that way?
I feel this is the struggle of innovation, repeated once more but in a literal life and death context.
I’d love to know more about that part of the story.
They would have been making lithium soap based grease of varying grades (google up "grease thickness scale" if you want to know exactly what the options are). Cheap mass produced lithium grease was relatively novel back then so there were all sorts of fancy trade names for it. I'm sure in it's day it was high performing but by modern standards it wouldn't be anything special.
Wartime orders made a Pittsburgh plant the world’s largest grease producer, eventually producing over five million pounds of “Eisenhower Grease,” an essential water repellent needed for virtually all amphibious equipment.
>Eisenhower requested a special kind of grease to help enable an amphibious attack on Sicily. On May 31, the Standard Oil Development Company (SODC), the technical hub of Standard Oil of New Jersey, where experiments and testing were centralized, received instructions to create a scalable formula so that delivery of the grease could happen within one week. SODC succeeded and SONJ began producing the lubricant in its Baltimore plant on June 2.
leading to many days in the grease plant like the one documented.
That's major milestones for you, the old fashioned way.
There's something about the way you can maintain readiness with decades of experiments & testing under one hat, on the same rare equipment.
