Modern Tech Is Influenced By The Past

[Hugh Janus]

Kevin Cameron (Robert Martin/)

Yesterday’s mail brought me a book yellowed by age, describing the earliest days of auto racing, beginning 125 years ago in 1895. In that book is the dazzling array of clever ideas that explode from the human imagination when a new technology arrives—in this case, the internal combustion engine. Very soon, sadly, practicality takes over. Building fascinating prototypes is great fun, but the only thing that can in the long run pay for that fun is strong sales of product. Very quickly, the radical stuff is discarded in favor of the cheapest and easiest-to-produce designs that can sell at a profit. Orthodoxy squeezes out creativity.

Marketing folk are today lyrical over the excitement of driving three-wheeled machines whose single wheel is in the rear, but Léon Bollée in 1896 entered four of them in the Paris-Marseilles event of 1,063 miles. The Race Commission had no category for them, saying, “This hybrid vehicle, neither a car nor a motorcycle, belongs to no type.” It was therefore called “miscellaneous.” One of them won the event.

Visitors to today’s custom shows are delighted when a single part is made to serve two or more functions (I’m remembering a long ago issue of Mechanics Illustrated featuring a ladies’ handbag that was also a portable radio—order today! Operators are standing by!). One of the early racing cars employed a frame tube as a cooling-water duct, reprised by a 1950s Belgian Saroléa motorcycle whose exhaust passed through its frame. It all brings to mind Erik Buell’s use of a swingarm as an oil tank and frame beams as fuel tank. Mm, I’m also recalling a system which monitored the pressure of hydrogen gas confined inside hollow metal helicopter rotor blades: Any drop in pressure signified the appearance of a crack.

Single parts serving multiple functions is nothing new—long before Erik Buell using the frame spars as a fuel tank (like on this EBR 1190SX) engineers used the frame of vehicles as water-cooling ducts and exhaust pipes. (EBR/)

Overheating is timeless—the Bollée brothers’ engines of 1896, with “cooling by radiating ribs” (aka “cooling fins”) was termed “not effectual” because the region of the head surrounding the exhaust could during a long run be seen to glow at red heat. In 1982, Harley-Davidson’s great racing manager, the late Dick O’Brien, told me the prototype iron XR750, father to the aluminum XR dirt tracker only now being retired from the sport, could be seen to glow after a run, if the lights in the test cell were switched off. He quoted a cylinder head temperature of 900 degrees.

For this reason auto engines were quickly switched to water cooling, with the head to be the first part to be water jacketed. Motorcycles, whose engines were more exposed to airflow, persisted with “radiating ribs” for many more years. For the Paris-Boulogne race of 1899, the Filtz flat twin was given water-cooled heads. This engine also attempted to achieve exceptional operating smoothness by having its two cylinders on the same axis, so that the shaking forces of the two pistons, moving at 180 degrees to each other, would completely cancel. This engine accomplished that by having two crankshafts, each geared to a third shaft carrying a large flywheel—quite a price in complexity to pay for notional perfection. In today’s BMW flat twins, the cylinders are offset to allow both crankpins to be on a single crankshaft (practicality rules!) but this offset generates an oscillation around a vertical axis, bothersome enough to cause that company to now cancel it with a balance shaft. Yet thoughtful people were considering this problem in 1899.

Harley-Davidson’s iron XR750 flat track racer would glow red in the dark after runs in the test cell from temps reaching 900 degrees. (Harley-Davidson /)

When you see the expression “45-degree V-twin,” what brand comes to mind? Think again—the 9-hp Cottereau entered for the Paris-Toulouse race of July 1900 was a 90 x 110mm 45-degree V-twin of 85ci. In the event, Cottereau and his creation, intrepidly pressing on through darkness, hit a roadside stone pile.

I went to a Loudon test of a Rokon 238cc prototype roadracer, equipped with a variable-pulley snowmobile drive. In the early 1970s, Californian Dan Hanebrink would earn many column inches in motorcycle magazines for a similar creation. In 1911, the managers of the Isle of Man TT races decided they must compel the motorcycle industry to accept new technologies, by banning pedaling gear. The enduring response to this was Indian’s two-speed gearbox (they swept the event, 1-2-3) but another approach was Zenith’s “Gradua” drive, which employed a variable pulley on the engine crankshaft while maintaining belt tension by sliding the rear wheel fore and aft to suit. They are all upstaged by the Fouillaron of 1900 whose drive employed “expansible pulleys.”

The venerated Ferdinand Porsche produced many combustion-powered vehicles with electric drive, but now I learn that the Belgian Pieper firm had since 1899 produced a car with a backbone frame containing an electric drive system.

The history of invention is like this: A new way of doing things arrives and suddenly there are a million ingenious new ways to apply it. We are living in such a time right now—the new way of doing things is instant global electronic communication of words, photos, and data from powerful personal computers that fit in a back pocket. We still have no idea what its ultimate consequences will be.

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