Fugen eBooks

That is why I
stayed only a year with that company. There was nothing more that the
big steam tractors and engines could teach me and I did not want to
waste time on something that would lead nowhere. A few years before--it
was while I was an apprentice--I read in the _World of Science_, an
English publication, of the "silent gas engine" which was then coming
out in England. I think it was the Otto engine. It ran with illuminating
gas, had a single large cylinder, and the power impulses being thus
intermittent required an extremely heavy fly-wheel. As far as weight was
concerned it gave nothing like the power per pound of metal that a steam
engine gave, and the use of illuminating gas seemed to dismiss it as
even a possibility for road use. It was interesting to me only as all
machinery was interesting. I followed in the English and American
magazines which we got in the shop the development of the engine and
most particularly the hints of the possible replacement of the
illuminating gas fuel by a gas formed by the vaporization of gasoline.


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