Navy's miracle motor is direct descendant of famous 1917 liberty
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Title (Dublin Core)
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Navy's miracle motor is direct descendant of famous 1917 liberty
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Article Title and/or Image Caption (Dublin Core)
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Title: Navy's miracle motor is direct descendant of famous 1917 liberty
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extracted text (Extract Text)
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THERE'S no other engine just
like it. With minor changes
it becomes a top-flight air-
plane engine. It boasts many il-
lustrious ancestors, including the
famous Liberty Motor. It powers
the Navy's fastest boats.
It is, prosaically, the Packard
4M-2500 Marine Engine.
As rapidly as the manufacturer
can fill its contracts for 700 of the
engines, they are being installed,
three to a boat, in the Navy's 60-
mile-an-hour Motor Torpedo Boat
fleet, or shipped to Canada for
similar Dominion and British
craft.
When the United States en-
tered the World War back in
1917, we were caught without a
plane motor suitable for quantity
production. Colonel, then Major,
J. G. Vincent, Packard vice pres-
ident of engineering, hurried to
Washington and laid before the
Aircraft Production Board his plans for a
new plane engine, evolved from the Packard
Twin-Six introduced two years before.
Colonel Vincent and E. J. Hall of the Hall-
Scott Motor Company of San Francisco five
days later had pooled their ideas and de-
signed the Liberty, closely following Pack-
ard’s patterns. Packard built 6,500 of them.
Not long ago, history repeated itself when
Colonel Vincent again took to Washington
his plans for a motor to power planes for
the nation’s air-defense program.
‘While it lost out to the Americanized Brit-
ish Rolls Royce, it created a sensation. Mod-
ified, it became an engine ideally suited to
fast Navy patrol boats for coast defense.
Turning up 1,350 horsepower at its ‘“‘emer-
gency speed” of 2,500 revolutions a minute,
it is probably the lightest engine per horse-
power ever used in a boat, with a weight-to-
horsepower ratio of less than two to one.
If a chart were made of the advances
pioneered between the Liberty and the
4M-2500, the logical evolution of the latter's
design would show in dozens of parts.
After the World War, much credit for the
victory was given to the Liberty Motor.
Many see promise of new laurels to be won
by the Liberty's direct descendant in possi-
ble future conflicts.
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Language (Dublin Core)
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Eng
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Date Issued (Dublin Core)
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1941-04
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pages (Bibliographic Ontology)
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118-119
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Rights (Dublin Core)
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Public domain
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Archived by (Dublin Core)
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Sami Akbiyik
Popular Science Monthly, v. 138, n. 4, 1941
