Large Gas Engines - 1909
Recent Developments in Large Gas Engine Design

by Percy Allen, Cassier's Magazine
reprinted by Lindsay Publication

Yah, I know. Your idea of a big engine is that 7-1/2 cylinder smoke-belching piece of junk mounted in that rusted out school bus parked in front of your house that you keep telling the idiots next door is the world's largest SUV. But I've got news for you. It ain't nuthin...

The gas engines we're talking about here are BIG! Just one of the engines, for instance, has a bore of 42" inches with a stroke of five feet! Running at 50 to 75 rpm its job using its 3000 hp was to blow 50,000 cubic feet of air per minute into Carnegie blast furnaces in Youngstown! And if that's not enough, you'll see the room in which four of these monsters were housed.

In the early days factories used waterwheels, and then steam power. By 1900 internal combustion engines and electric motors were starting to replace steam. The engines in these articles look like classic monster steam engines but actually burn fuel like carbon-monoxide producer gas by-products from blast furnaces and coke ovens. Some burned water gas produced by a local municipal gas plant.

You get technical details on giant 2-cycle and 4-cycle IC engines in the US, Britain and Europe used for making steel, pumping water, turning alternators, and more. The three well-illustrated articles reprinted here revealed the state-of-the-art to power engineers in 1909. You get technical details about how sections were put together, how problems with wear were solved, what type of enormous spark advance was necessary to get any kind of efficiency at all out of an engine so large, the alloys used, etc.

You get scores of photographs and a fair number of drawings showing the working details. I have to wonder how long these engines operated before being replaced by much more efficient equipment. A model based on one of these designs would be unique.

If engines are your thing, you've got to see these machines. They're kind of like one-lungers on steroids! Reasonably priced. Get a copy. 5-1/2 x 8-1/2 softcover 64 pages.

No. 23098 ... $7.95