July - Mazda MX-5 Club of Victoria & Tasmania

Hur in the record lap of the 1st LatinGP; it carried Caesar and Charlemagne;Boadicea, with a special hub cap,successfully cut her enemies, and evenher own careless pedestrians, down tosize; upon it Marie Antoinette rolledto the guillotine, Napoleon’s guns toMoscow, and the Conestoga wagons toCalifornia and television fame in thelongest reliability trial thitherto recorded.Stephenson’s “Rocket” gave the wheelnew and tremendous significance for,throughout history until his first steamlocomotive, the wheel was still the loadbearingand animal-propelled device ithad been in the desert east of Eden.Stephenson made it work for itself. And itwas the enunciation of the basic principleof internal combustion that followed thediscovery of petroleum and the inventivedrive of the Industrial Revolution inEurope that opened the door to a new ageof transport, and allotted to the wheelits functions of driving and steering and,later, braking.In 1877, Nikolaus Otto, a Germanengineer, propounded the principle of areciprocating internal combustion enginewith four strokes of the piston to eachpower propulsion. The “Otto cycle” ofinduction-compression-power-exhaust(or “suck, push, shove, blow” as it mightbe called) is still the basis of 90 percentof engines, and these all spring fromGottleib Daimler’s adoption of the fourstrokeprinciple in his gas engine of 1883.Unknown to Daimler, who was a formeremployee of Otto’s, another brilliantGerman engineer was also workingtowards the production of a self-propelledvehicle, and in 1886 actually produced anauto-tricycle. This Karl Benz, whose namebecame linked with Daimler’s in afteryears both as the title of a famous firm... continued27