Inventions of a non-Engineer

In my younger days, I used to invent things. It would be wrong to say that I was an inventor, for I never actually did anything about the ideas I came up with, but just occasionally I'd have a brainwave and think of a solution to some technical problem or other. And the fact that it later turned out that most of my inventions had been thought of before doesn't depress me at all. It was somehow encouraging to know that I had been right.

Take my idea for increasing the lift on an airplane wing, for instance. I figured that if one were to cut a notch along the length of the wing, above and behind the leading edge, this would increase the area of low pressure and therefore give more lift. Then I discovered that the engineers had thought of this and gone one better; they designed slats that move forward on top of the wing to increase lift when taking off and landing. The really clever idea that the slats should be movable and fold back into the wing for normal flight had not occurred to me, but at least my thinking was in the right area.

And there is the horizontally opposed internal combustion engine, I think my favorite invention of all. Although quite simple in concept, this one is really difficult to describe, so bear with me while I try to picture it for you.

Like any internal combustion engine, this can have any number of cylinders but the trick is that each cylinder has two pistons. The pistons work against each other, approaching from opposite ends of the cylinder (hence horizontally opposed), squashing the fuel/air mixture in between them as they do so. The spark plug is right in the middle of the cylinder and provides the spark as the pistons approach most closely. Bang. The explosion drives the pistons apart again.

If that description makes any sense, you will have realized that this arrangement requires that there be two crankshafts that the pistons are attached to, one on each side of the engine. These could be geared together to prevent any variation in speed and power could be taken off at the same time.

Of course, having two crankshafts means that the engine begins to suffer a weight disadvantage in comparison to more conventional engines. So why bother with it at all? My only excuse must be that I just liked the idea of all these pistons furiously charging at each other, creating their own combustion chamber between themselves, and then driven apart by each ignition.

You may laugh but the last laugh is mine. The engine exists and is in production. Years after I thought of it, I discovered that they make this type of engine for very large trucks and machinery with heavy loads. Apparently it gives massive amounts of torque and this compensates for any weight disadvantage. See? I was right!

I have one invention that has not been produced, as far as I know. To explain this one, I have to tell a little story so, once again, I must ask you to bear with me.

It begins in the mid-sixties, when it was decided to change the formula for F1 racing cars from 1.5 liters to 3.0 liters. This came at a time when two or three of the engine manufacturers had just invested huge sums in fiendishly complicated little engines that they thought would outperform the rest (BRM had an H-16 would you believe? Imagine that - 16 tiny pistons in miniature cylinders, all screaming their little guts out to provide the power. No wonder the thing only managed to finish one race. And I'm not even going to attempt to describe what configuration an H is). And so it was decided to throw the manufacturers a bone: an allowed alternative to the big 3.0 liters was to have a 1.5 liter supercharged engine.

This was actually no compensation at all. At the time, no supercharged 1.5 could hope to match the power of a 3.0 liter and so the provision was ignored for ten years. But over those years the science of turbo-charging developed and, in 1977, Renault entered a turbo-charged 1.5 liter car. It was fast but unreliable at first but, as the engineers solved the heat problems of turbos, it became clear that such an engine could produce far more power than any 3.0 liter. The turbo era of the eighties dawned.

But, if I may take you back to the time of that rule change in the sixties, another wild idea had been born in my imagination. I read an article in a motoring magazine that considered the alternative specification that had crept into the regulations and pointed out that, if one could supercharge a 1.5 two-stroke, it would produce phenomenal amounts of power. Theoretically, such an engine would be an almost unlimited power source; what a pity that it was impossible to supercharge a two-stroke.

"Is it?" thought I. One sees the problem immediately: no valves. Without valves, any pressure built up by a supercharger would force the mixture straight through the combustion chamber and probably cause a nice little explosion in the exhaust system. But what if you added valves? Ordinary valves won't do, of course - they would stick out into the cylinder and get wiped off promptly by the piston. But there are other types of valve that don't need to protrude into the combustion chamber; rotary valves, for instance. And one could time the opening of the valves so that the exhaust closed just as the inlet opened.

Now, anyone who knows anything about engines also knows that rotary valves are more trouble than they're worth. They have tremendous problems with sealing - finding a material that will stand up to the heat and wear implicit in seating such a valve would be enormously difficult. The valve would have to rotate at astronomical speeds to keep up with the high revs of our theoretical engine. It was probably beyond the technology of the time to seal such valves effectively. But today, it might just be possible. Certainly the Mazda engineers have solved similar problems on the rotary engine that bankrupted NSU in the sixties.

So I maintain that it's not impossible to supercharge a two-stroke engine. And, if my memory serves me correctly, the article I read suggested that power output of such an engine would exceed 700 bhp. With that sort of power, it would have dominated F1 for a decade at least.

If it had ever managed to finish any races, of course...