Use in Cars and Motorcycles
Although rotary engines were mostly used in aircraft, a few cars and motorcycles were built with rotary engines. A famous motorcycle, winning many races, was the Megola, which had a rotary engine inside the front wheel. Another motorcycle with a rotary engine was Charles Redrup's 1912 Redrup Radial, which was a three-cylinder 303 cc rotary engine fitted to a number of motorcycles by Redrup.
In 1904 the Barry engine, also designed by Redrup, was built in Wales: a rotating 2-cylinder boxer engine weighing 6.5 kg was mounted inside a motorcycle frame.
In the 1940s Cyril Pullin developed the Powerwheel, a wheel with a rotating one-cylinder engine, clutch and drum brake inside the hub, but it never entered production.
Cars with rotary engines were built by American companies Adams-Farwell, Bailey, Balzer and Intrepid, amongst others.
Read more about this topic: Rotary Engine
Famous quotes containing the word cars:
“I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.”
—Roland Barthes (1915–1980)