Motor Inventions

Into Paris last week chugged a 14-passenger motor bus, back from a 3,280-mile turn around France. Its fuel cost had been only $15. The Bleriot Co. (headed by M. Louis Bleriot, first man ever to fly over the English Channel (TIME, Aug. 30) posted advertisements beside the bus in the Paris National Automobile Exposition setting forth that it would henceforth manufacture this conveyance, the economy of which arose from its burning fuel, vaporized charcoal or raw wood. The wood is piled by the driver's seat, where he feeds it into a stove, which manufactures hydrocarbon gases which are then yalved into the motor in the ordinary way. An 80% reduction in fuel cost for light trucks was claimed. The truck could carry fagots enough for a 60-mile run without stopping; could refuel with anything driftwood, barrel staves, roots, cigar boxes.

In Manhattan, one John A. Bosmans 32, Dutch inventor from Brooklyn, exhibited a novel gasoline engine having no connecting rods, wrist pins or crankcase, but instead, hollow pistons fastened directly to the drive shaft at their centre, propelled by two firing chambers each, one above and one below. Inventor Bosnians claimed to have refused a million for his patents; threatened to revolutionize automobiles.