Fuel
In Back to the Future, Doc states that the time machine is electrical but that he needs a nuclear reaction (produced by plutonium stolen from a group of Libyan terrorists) to generate the 1.21 gigawatts of electricity needed. A bolt of lightning is used to power the flux capacitor twice in the series, once with a large pole and hook rigged up to the car to help Marty get back to 1985, and again accidentally in flight to send Doc to 1885. The Mr. Fusion model fusion generator, made by Fusion Industries, which uses garbage as fuel, is installed in place of the nuclear reactor from the first film during Doc's first journey thirty years into the future, 2015, when he also has the hover conversion installed. In Back to the Future Part III, the DeLorean's fuel line is damaged while fleeing from Native Americans in 1885, and Doc and Marty's only supply of gasoline is lost. It is stated by Doc that "Mr. Fusion only powers the time circuits and the flux capacitor, but the internal combustion engine runs on ordinary gasoline; it always has." In a desperate attempt to get home, alcohol is used in place of gasoline after the fuel line is patched, destroying the DeLorean's fuel injection manifold. The car never travels under its own power again but is pulled by a team of horses and later pushed by an 1880s locomotive.
The power required is pronounced in the film as "one point twenty-one jiggawatts." While the closed-captioning in home video versions spells the word as it appears in the script, jigowatt, the actual spelling matches the standard prefix and the term for power of "one billion watts": gigawatt. Though obscure, the "j" sound at the beginning of the SI prefix giga- is an acceptable pronunciation for "gigawatt." In the DVD commentary for Back to the Future, Bob Gale states that he had thought it was pronounced this way because this was how a scientific advisor that he had for the film pronounced it.
Read more about this topic: De Lorean Time Machine
Famous quotes containing the word fuel:
“Beware the/easy griefs, that fool and fuel nothing./It is too easy to cry “AFRIKA!”/and shock thy street,/and purse thy mouth,/and go home to thy “Gunsmoke,” to/thy “Gilligan’s Island” and the NFL.”
—Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917)
“It is now many years that men have resorted to the forest for fuel and the materials of the arts: the New Englander and the New Hollander, the Parisian and the Celt, the farmer and Robin Hood, Goody Blake and Harry Gill; in most parts of the world, the prince and the peasant, the scholar and the savage, equally require still a few sticks from the forest to warm them and cook their food. Neither could I do without them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I had an old axe which nobody claimed, with which by spells in winter days, on the sunny side of the house, I played about the stumps which I had got out of my bean-field. As my driver prophesied when I was plowing, they warmed me twice,—once while I was splitting them, and again when they were on the fire, so that no fuel could give out more heat. As for the axe,... if it was dull, it was at least hung true.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)