I’m going to have to be that “axshualy” guy, but their fears were not ludicrous at the time. Grab a copy of The Railway Journey by Wolfgang Shivelbusch, and you’ll get an explanation for the various reasons why. But to sum it up: people who were accustomed to walking, or riding horses everywhere, basically suffered… Read more

Somewhat famously, the team responsible for designing the 92 (the first Saab) only had three or four people who had ever driven a car before. Read more

In the Saab 96 I had, the light for the heater controls was built into the blinker stalk, and aimed at the dashboard. It does actually work, as I’ve driven older models at night and you can’t see the heater controls at all. But it seems like a bizarre solution.
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I can imagine that trying to sync/balance multiple mixers and intake valves would be a headache. Cadillac did attempt to use variable timing on four cylinder engines in 1905, using a very different approach (more similar to modern systems) where the whole camshaft was shifted over to change the timing, but it… Read more

Yes, but valvetronic doesn’t have the pop culture cache for a headline that vtec does.
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It’s a good point, and one which I considered mentioning. I think the idea of incorporating variable timing in an IC engine in 1903 probably seemed less novel than it did by the 1980s as engineers in 1903 would have been fully aware of the valve gear used in steam engines. And indeed, Stanleys and Whites had variable… Read more

I know very little about the oil governed system. It was mentioned to me by a collector when I was researching this article. It worked by shifting the camshaft back and forth, in the manner of most modern systems. However instead of having discrete cam profiles to shift between, the cams themselves were elongated,… Read more

There is definitely a very general similarity there, although the mixer is definitely much cruder. Unlike the SU with its damper, the mixer’s needle valve is spring loaded and designed to basically snap open and closed. One of the reasons the intake valve opens so late in the intake stroke is to ensure an incredibly… Read more

Thank you for the compliment. I was honestly quite surprised that nobody seemed to have covered this topic before - anywhere. Articles about the development of variable valve timing usually peg the beginning of this technology about a half century later. And yet the fact that Cadillac had variable valve timing in 1903… Read more

You’re welcome, glad you enjoyed it.
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A lot of very advanced tech was invented very early on - but because companies are cheap, and didn’t want to license patents, a lot of of it took two or three decades to catch on. Oddly, few later patents for variable timing reference Brush’s patent. It’s hard to say if it was forgotten or not, as plenty of later… Read more

An interesting tangent is that Brush actually built an automatic variable timing system into the 1905 Cadillac four cylinder models. The timing was governed by the engine’s oil pressure, so really pretty similar to today’s technology. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to have been a success. It was not offered again in… Read more

I have to be that actually guy, but actually there were tons, and tons, and tons of inexpensive cars being sold in the 1950s. Companies don’t want that market because the margins are low, not because nobody will buy the cars. Read more

You’d be surprised how quickly a person’s mental health can deteriorate when they’re forced to live day to day with no stability and no way to get a leg up. It’s been shown that for a lot of homeless people, all that’s needed is some security, once a person has that, they can get their life in order and move on.
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Doesn’t seem surprisingly expensive for a bridge that length.
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You probably aren’t going to drive a car through ten feet of snow either, to be fair. Read more

Did you not read the article???
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Cool story?
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You know, a bridge made specifically for pedestrians/cycling could be made for a fraction of the cost of one that needs to be able to hold semi-trucks end to end.
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It is certainly odd that roads don’t make money, but somehow mass transit is expected to be profitable.
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