Anzani 3-cylinder fan engines
1900s French piston aircraft engine range
From 1905 to 1915, Alessandro Anzani built a number of three-cylinder fan engines and radial engines, one of which powered Louis Blériot's 1909 cross-channel flight. An Anzani three-cylinder engine that powers a Blériot XI operated by The Shuttleworth Collection in England is thought to be the oldest airworthy engine in the world.
Design and development
Alessandro Anzani began building motorcycle engines in France around 1905. Unusually, his motors were air-cooled rather than water-cooled, making them light. His first designs were two-cylinder V-engines, and he rode machines powered by them to records and race success in 1905 and 1906. In the same period he had developed a three-cylinder version, more powerful than the twins. As the image shows, the engine fit neatly into a motorcycle frame. Engines with cylinders arranged radially but only in the upper half-circle were termed fan type, or semi-radials; by about 1910 other manufacturers were building e.g. five-cylinder fan engines, most notably R.E.P. Three-cylinder fans were known as W or W-3 engines. The appeal of the fan configuration was that, because all the cylinder were above the horizontal there was little danger of the plugs being fouled by the lubricating oil.
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This entry incorporates text from “Anzani 3-cylinder fan engines” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.