As an interesting side note, that should be better known:

Foolestroupe: Dissolving a fuel gas in a liquid under pressure for storage has been going for a long time - acetylene bottles (for oxy welding/cutting) for instance.

Much has been said about "how explosive" hydrogen, propane, and gasoline are. None of them by itself is explosive. You must have a mixture of any of these with oxygen and the mixtures are, under some conditions, explosive. The difficulties attending use of each depends in part on how easily you can prevent mixing with oxygen, and on how broad a range of mixtures can be "exploded."

"Acetylene" alone and unmixed with anything else is explosive. The gas that's called acetylene is principally ethylene. If the pure gas is compressed (I believe the critical pressure is just over 200 psi) it can explode if subjected to shock, heat, electric discharge, or just about any other disturbance and does not require mixing with anything else to do so.

Acetone/ethylene dissolved in acetone can be compressed to the typical few thousand psi commonly needed to get useful amounts of a gas into a manageably sized cylinder. An acetylene cylinder is pretty much full of carbon, which has no function except to retain acetone. When you put ethylene into it, the ethylene dissolves in the acetone and can be safely brought to the typical 3,000 to 5,000 psi commonly used. When you take ethylene out of the cylinder the acetone is retained by the carbon and most of it stays in the cylinder.

If you "put a little bit of acetylene" in a container not equipped with an acetone reservoir - for example to take a bit home for a "home welding project" - there is a very good chance you will die.

The same ethylene gas is produced when you drop solid "carbide" into water, and rather large "carbide generators" were fairly common in welding shops in earlier times. References to "carbide gas" are to the same ethylene as for "acetylene." Automatic mechanisms were intended to regulate the gas pressure by controlling the rate that rocks were fed in. Typical operating pressures were in the 100 - 120 psi range. At 150 psi, you might make a quick check to see if "something might be hung up" that you might knock loose, but 170 psi was "run like hell and shout loud" time. The Santa Fe Trailways Bus Maintenance Facility at Kip, Kansas was mostly "removed from the face of the earth" by a carbide generator explosion ca early 1930s. My ex father in law "ran like hell," and it was a favorite story.

Of course ethylene/air (carbide gas/air, acetylene/air) mixtures are "explosive" at ambient pressures. It makes an impressive "bang."

John