Stephen M. Balzer
American businessman
Stephen Marius Balzer (c. 1864 – September 29, 1940) was a Hungarian-born American mechanic and inventor. He was the founder of the Balzer Motor Company and later donated one of his cars to the Smithsonian Institution, which was the first car in its collection. An engine he created for pioneering aviator Samuel Pierpont Langley was heavily modified and used in a craft that has been considered one of the earliest heavier-than-air aircraft.
Born c. 1864, Balzer immigrated in the 1870s from the Kingdom of Hungary to the United States. He apprenticed as a watchmaker at Tiffany & Co. When he started his own business in 1894, a machine shop, he already held several patents for mechanical devices, among them a device for making milling cutters and his rotary engine. In the same year, he completed his first prototype automobile, a motorized quadricycle with a tube chassis, less than 3 by 6 feet (0.91 by 1.83 m). It had a rotary, air-cooled, 3-cylinder engine, mounted vertically in the rear and revolving around a fixed crankshaft. Turning with the crank case was a stub shaft. It further had a three-speed manual transmission with no reverse.
“Stephen M. Balzer” enters the record as american businessman. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Stephen, Balzer and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Stephen M. Balzer” 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.