REJECTED INVENTIONS

Evening Star, Issue 19786, 9 February 1928, Page 14

REJECTED INVENTIONS

WHAT AUTO MIGHT HAVE BEEN. Tho pathway of the motor car has been strewn with rejected inventions. In the tiles of the Patent Office one may learn of ingenious efforts to cause the automobile to develop along different linos than those actually followed in the last quarter of a century. Once a, resourceful young man determined to do away with the sweating and toiling then required to start an engine. Tho self-starter of to-day was at the time far in the future, but this young man saw no reason for hand cranking to prime the motor, and worked out a method of hinging the body to the chassis that would allow the'front, to ho jacked up high above the wheels. A release button would let the weight of the body fall on a series of cog wheels in such a fashion that they would rotate the crankshaft and so start the engine. The car would he off without the hand-cranking exertion —with a jolt, however, that was not in tho calculations.

Many of the early annoyances on the road would have been eliminated long before they were, according to some of the obscure inventors, bad their devices not been ignored. Iter instance, according to an inventor, tho need for donning goggles and duster could have been removed long ago before closed cars and oiled roads were made, if ho had been listened to. His patent dust disperser consisted of a series of windmills driven by belts which in their turn were moved by the driving mechanism of the car. Their action was simple enough. They blew the dust in all directions away from the ante mobile so equipped. The skidding problem 'vas attacked by another inventor. His solution was to attach a sand box underneath the car; through a funnel at the Lack it could bo filled at any convenient beach. As tho car moved the contents of this box would be sprinkled rnd tho most slippery road would *.e made safe, Fut the sprinkling cf sand on pavements was found to have 'no (pposite effect; so this invention came to naught. In the limbo of the Patent Office is a device that was intended to widen tho scope of the automobile born. It would enable the driver 10 signal that ho was about to turn to tho right, to ike left, to back, or to do anything else for which warning is necessary. It was to be an adjunct to the ordinary horn, a phonographic attachment carrying a full record of different warmngs that might be broadcast as needed by touching a swntch.