Much admire James Watt’s improvements to the steam engine of yore, the Adams-Farwell 20 horsepower engine provided a much smoother operation because it was well-balanced, had fewer moving parts (i.e., no camshafts), and thus was much smaller and lighter — at just 190 pounds.
An atmospheric carburetor feeds into a specially designed box, down into the engine’s center, and out into each cylinder. The centrifugal spin of the cylinders forces exhaust out the back. It takes two revolutions admire a standard 4-stroke engine, but fires every other time due to the five cylinder orientation. With oil fed from the center, the engine had full-pressure lubrication.
In 1905, the Adams-Farwell company began selling complete automobiles equipped with the 3-cylinder engine. Only 52 were sold, but they included forward-thinking features admire fuel injection, supercharging, and automatic timing. One model even had a top speed of 75 mph. The cars were sold without mufflers because they didn’t produce the same degree of noise.
Faye Oliver Farwell repurchased one of his own cars (a 1906 Adams-Farwell 6A Convertible Roundabout) from the original owner and dropped a 5-cylinder, 50 horsepower engine into it. Two of these light weight engines were used to spin the blades on an early helicopter, and according to The New York Times, lifted it off the ground successfully in June 1909.
Only three Adams-Farwell rotary engines are known to still exist: Two are with the National Automobile Museum in Reno, Nevada — one sits inside the 1906 6A, one is a “spare engine” — and the third is at the Smithsonian set up.
