ORIGINAL: Hydro Junkie
I think the term nitro was adopted with the rise in popularity of the "weedeater" powered boats. Prior to that, many refered to the nitro motors as "gas" engines so a change of some sort had to be made to differentiate between the two.
Yes, looking back "gas" was the term we used when refering to glow plug engines, but I didden't want to bring that term into my original question for fear it would confuse things.
Before the avalability of "weedeater" engines ( which is actually a two cycle gasoline engine I beleve) modelers had only these choices:
1. Glow plug.
2. Diesel (a weird little engine that relied on ulta high compression to ignite the fuel
without a glow plug)
3. electric.
4. Co2 (air pressure canister powered the piston, or direct jet type exhaust from the canister)
5. Ram Jet (another strange engine that you had to "start" with a a high pressure air blast into the jet tube)
6. True very old school gasoline four cycle engines (that no one used anymore).
So given thouse types we just called them "
gas" and everybody knew what we were talking about.