The concept of engines dates back to the late 1800s. While engines are now well understood, the field hasn’t always been a settled one. After the idea gained popularity, various innovations emerged. Enthusiasts sought to build better engines, pushing the development of engineering history forward. One notable example of these endeavors was the Hit-And-Miss engine, introduced around the late 19th century, as internal combustion engines were becoming increasingly prominent.
We’re familiar with this type of engine, which was designed for non-consumer vehicles, such as farm equipment, rather than everyday automobiles.
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A hit-and-miss engine is a four-stroke engine that fires at set speeds.
A Hit-And-Miss engine is a type of four-stroke internal combustion engine that uses a single piston. Most of these engines were fueled by gasoline, but some could also run on kerosene or diesel. The basic process in this engine is similar to a standard combustion engine: A mix of fuel and air is added to a cylinder, the piston compresses it, a spark plug ignites a small explosion, and then the piston moves back down. All of this energy is transferred to a crankshaft connected to a big flywheel, which stores and transmits the energy to the engine’s output device.
The main distinction between a Hit-And-Miss engine and the traditional combustion engine lies in how it regulates its speed. A Hit-And-Miss engine is designed to run at a set speed, managed by an internal “governor” component. As the engine operates, certain working strokes are skipped automatically to maintain the speed consistently. To put it another way, the engine only runs to maintain its set speed, then skips when it needs to slow down. Interestingly, this process gives the Hit-And-Miss engine a distinctive sound characterized by short whooshing noises and occasional loud “PUTT” sounds when it skips.
Farmers Found Hit-And-Miss Engines to be Very Popular
Compared to a traditional combustion engine and its manual speed control, a Hit-And-Miss engine’s self-regulating speed made it easy to just set it and let it run. You’d simply hook it up to a device, add fuel, and get it going, and it would just keep running until the fuel was gone. Also, since Hit-And-Miss engines were relatively small, some of them even had wheels or built-in carts, so they could be easily taken apart and moved as needed.
Compared to some of the earlier types of farm machinery, such as water wheels or steam engines, the Hit-And-Miss engine was a significant improvement in terms of efficiency and relief from worker fatigue.
Unfortunately, the Hit-And-Miss era came to a close in just a few decades, as more advanced and practical engines took their place in the 1930s. Most of the remaining Hit-And-Miss engines from that era have been retired and junked, but the few that have survived are now highly coveted by collectors of vintage engineering artifacts. Some are even still in operation today at historical reenactments and engineering exhibitions – if you spot a vintage tractor trundling along a rural farm, it’s likely running on a well-preserved antique Hit-And-Miss engine.
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