The Icelandic Canadian - 01.06.1973, Side 40

3B
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
BUMMER 1973
RICHARD EIRIKSSDN’S RDTARY ENGINE
by Peter Carey
Staff Aerospace Writer
INVENTIONS SOMETIMES
OVERLOOKED
One of the Santa Clara Valley’s na-
tural resources is the imaginative mind
of inventors, often men who spend
spare time tinkering with pet projects
that never see the light of day.
The plight of the man who wants
to introduce a new aircraft engine, or
an improvement on existing ones, is
particularly bad.
After all, a handful of major corpor-
ations have the market cornered, and
listen with deaf ears to the few men
that get through to them.
Meanwhile the Pentagon — which
often filters new research — is tied in
with large laboratories and seems to
have come to depend exclusively on
those major engine makers.
It seems sad to waste such a resource.
But the complaints that nobody seems
to be listening come in steadily from
men with skill and expertise in their
fields.
No man with a new engine could
be more unique than Richard Eiriks-
son, an Icelandic electrician now liv-
ing in San Jose, though.
He has proposed a rotary engine
(like the Wankel that’s finding its way
into European cars and the engine
which powers the Japanese Mazda)
with an elegant twist.
And it has been sitting on the shelf
for more than 20 years.
Back in 1951, Eiriksson submitted
his proposal to the U.S. Air Force base
in Keflavik, Iceland. He was shunted
to Wright-Patterson Field in Dayton,
Ohio.
“They were very enthusiastic about
it, the engineers that is,” he said. Eir-
iksson remained at the field for three
days before he learned that the re-
search budget had been blown on an
unsuccessful project.
“They told me they were broke.
They didn’t have a nickel,” he recall-
ed last week.
Then, the undaunted inventor went
to the University of Toronto’s engi-
neering department. There, he was
told that he had an engine. “They
said ‘You build it and it will run’.”
Since then, the 51-year-old electric-
ian has been to the Pentagon (his
souvenier: a parking ticket) and Mitsu-
bishi International Corp. in New
York.
Eiriksson’s engine began in a novel
way back in the Iceland tundra.
He used to putt around town in an
old 1924 Chrysler. “It was good for
short trips, but when I took it 30
miles out in the country someone
would have to push me back.”
At that point, he hit on the idea
of building a small rotary engine in
the hub of a spare tire.
“I figured that when the engine
conked out, I could change tires and
putt back at about five miles an hour.”
The engine was never built, but its
design laid the foundation for the trips
that took him to America, Canada
and eventually the San Clara Valley.