INVENTOR OF FLUID FLYWHEEL

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXIII, Issue 78, 14 March 1933, Page 3

INVENTOR OF FLUID FLYWHEEL

A YOUNG SCOT. Sitting at a desk in a bungalow office set amid frozen fields of Isleworth, Middlesex, I have discovered a young man whose inventive capacity is not unlikely to revolutionise the transport systems of the world. He is Harold Sinclair. His age is 35, and he is the inventor of what is known as tho fluid flywheel system for power units, writes Montague Smith in the “London “Daily Mail.” This new system was first seen in use two years ago in a motor car. Since then its development in various branches of engineering practice have been phenomenal, and experiments suggest that it is only at the beginning of its range of utility. NO WEAR AND TEAR. Its principle can bo quite simply explained. Two hollow wheels, lined with vanes, face each other, separated by some small margin of space, such as an eighth of an inch, which prevents actual contact. They are enclosed in a non-leakable container and their hollows are partly filled with oil. To one half an engine is attached; the other operates mechanism. When the engine is working slowly the oil rests more or less at the bottom of the coupling. As speed increases it is thrown with ever greater force against the vanes of the other

half of the coupling. The mechanism begins to work. Faster still, the oil ia thrown with still increasing power against the opposing vanes, and eventually the two halves of the coupling turn as one. Complete power transmission is achieved without the contact and the consequent wear and tear of any metals. A simple idea, but like all simple ideas someone had to think of it first. Sinclair did think of it first. GERMAN METHOD USED. He is a Scot by parentage and was born in South Africa. Before the war he was trained as an engineer in the workshops of the South African .railways. During the war he served with the air force in South Africa. After the war ho came to England looking for a job, and joined the staff of Messrs. Vickers as an engineer. There he made a study of the coupling systems between turbine engines and propellers, particularly a new method installed by the German Vulcan-Werko firm in the German pocket baltle.slHp lately launched, and considered its possible application to commercial uses. The result was the evolution of the I fluid coupling system. Messrs, Vickers released Sinclair

to develop his own invention. The German firm gave him the knowledge of their existing patents and experiments, and so was launched on the world a new system of motive force. YEAR’S DEVELOPMENT. N o one knows the number of uses to which it may ultimately be put, tt is little more than a year since Sinclair began to develop the invention in his own w’orks at Isleworth; yet to-day it is difficult to take a ride in any public vehicle in London without depending on his invention. All the newest London motor omnibuses arc equipped with fluid flywheels. Colliery engine winding machinery depends on them. Compression engines that operate tho terrible picks that break up our roads arc being made more humane by them. Diesel oil engines for railway locomotives are being fitted with them, and they promise in a short time to become the standard method of power transmission in petrol engines.