For a company came about as a merger between one unit that made cast-iron plows, heating stoves and scales, and another that made what is easily the most iconic windmill design of all time, the Fairbanks-Morse company shouldn’t really register on the radar here. But they do, because they were one of the earliest producers of commercially available engines. Whether they ran on oil, naptha, kerosene, coal gas, semi-diesel or a fully diesel engine, Fairbanks-Morse was probably the engine seen in everything from trains to ships, as a back-up plan to the windmill for power generation or even locomotives up until the mid-1950s, when a series of mergers, sell-offs and other business decisions pretty much split the company up into three major namesakes that continue on to this day in various forms. If you’ve spent time in the Navy, then you might have seen one of their massive horizontally-opposed two-stroke diesels on a tender, a submarine or used as a power generator.
We’re spoiled in the land of electric starters. Imagine having to use your weight to start the flywheel’s motion. Imagine having to haul your hide out of the sack, into the field, and to start your day by hoping that you moved your hand out of the way of the wheel while simultaneously hoping that a backfire didn’t blow your hat off or worse, make you more deaf than you probably already were. Complain all you want, though…this is what state of the art looked like over a century ago!
