A CRANK?

Liners will soon cross the Atlantic in a day and a half. Fords speed along at the rate of one hundred miles an hour, and all sorts of other wonderful things happen in the way of breaking speed limits. In addition, one hundred and fifty heavy parts will no longer be needed in the automobile, so that here-after heavy cars will ascend into the Franklin class and the Franklin will turn into a balloon. A great new invention is going to perform all these wonders, a crankless engine, one that delivers the power, not by a heavy and cumbersome crankshaft, but by an oscillating disk. This disk, it is confidently predicted by the inventor, will transfer the power from engine to shaft with absolutely no waste of energy. Such perfect efficiency will permit a car to run a thousand miles on a single tank of gasoline. Advertising will no longer read "tires guaranteed for ten thousand miles" but "a gallon of our best will take you where you want to go."

These statements are very interesting; we should like to believe them, but such things have been heard before. Tesla once claimed he had invented a steam turbine one foot square that would develop one hundred and fifty horse power. An Italian gentleman residing in Boston announced that he had invented a perpetual motion machine, but a committee of government physicists showed him his error.

A hundred and fifty years ago an English "Macaroni" made a bet with several of his fellow "bucks" to send a letter a hundred miles in an hour. His wager was immediately accepted and he proceeded to write a letter, place it inside a cricket ball, and have it thrown around by a circle of England's best bowlers for an hour. At the end of the time, it was computed that the letter had travelled upwards of a hundred and twenty-one miles.

If twenty men could get such distance and speed from a cricket ball, who can limit the possibilities of an oscillating disk inside a Ford?