1920's Browne - Acetylene Powered British Motorcycle

makegooddecisions · Feb 21, 2012

I'll try to order the pictures if I get a chance, but here is what I could get for now. From a 70's issue of Cycle.

My buddy who introduced this to me (he read the original article back in the 70's) did a bit of digging recently. It looks like all the roads are pointing to this article, author, and bike being a hoax, and that somehow it made it's way into Cycle. I'll get the details up later, but there are many hints. For example, the name author's name, Goodwin Sands, refers to 10-mile long sand bar in the English Channel known for wrecking over 2,000 ships (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodwin_Sands). There are a couple more articles I have from other issues of Cycle written by Goodwin Sands about the Browne being raced at Daytona, and it has to be some sort of joke.

Link to picture album: http://imgur.com/a/MakFb

Link to original post: http://www.dotheton.com/forum/index.php?topic=33668.msg367327#msg367327

makegooddecisions said:
I also wanted to throw this out there: A friend of mine recently introduced me to what has to be the most steampunk motorcycle I've ever heard of. A little known British make from around the 1920's called the Browne. He showed me some articles from vintage issues of Cycle circa the 1970's, and they're ridiculous. I tried Googling it, but the Browne is basically lost to history.

It's the most impracticable contraption I've ever heard of. Browne was a mechanical engineer, but he didn't understand or like electricity. So he built a chemical combustion engine (I hesitate to call it "internal combustion") with a unique transmission of his own design. I'll try to get pictures.

Get this, the thing was acetylene powered. It uses a "temperature regulated chemical ignition" instead of a spark plug, which is basically a tube that sticks out of the front of the cylinder head that is heated by an acetylene fueled pilot light. In order to adjust the ignition timing (on the fly while riding), you have to fiddle with a knob on the handlebars that opens or closes the valve to the pilot light. The crazy[ier] thing is, the faster you go and the more air blows past the thing, the cooler the tube gets and the higher the chance of flaming out your pilot light. So you have to constantly be adjusting the thing. However, if you turn up the pilot light too high or come to a dead stop, the tube turns red hot and you risk detonation.

The thing also has only one valve. One?! And no exhaust. In fact, Isle of Man passed a law that banned unmuffled vehicles specifically because of these things; the residents would get pissed off at how loud they were. Browne interpreted this as an attempt by his competitors to prevent him from proving the superiority of his motorcycles on the raceway, when in fact these things were rickety and unreliable gas bombs on two wheels.

And the cam? Well... the cam is also the transmission. The transmission? Well... it's clutchless, chainless, and resembles the needle mechanism in a sewing machine. The wheels? Made of wood.

Think of a ratchet wrench and a sewing machine... that's the mechanism used to transfer power to the rear wheel. Retarded!

1920's Browne - Acetylene Powered British Motorcycle

makegooddecisions

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