PUB TALK

The'long mingling spark'has been a laughing stock for almost 120 years, ever since his peers ridiculed Pennington's use of the term in conjunction with his 1890s creations. What those pioneers kept to themselves, and is now almost forgotten is that many of them quietly adopted long mingling sparks of their own for another 10 years until the high tension magneto became commonplace, followed by the 'Kettering' style coil ignition (which came into general use much later on bikes than cars). Before that was the era of the 'trembler' coil.

The Belgian Etienne Lenoir, in his briefly successful non-compressing engine, had adopted electric ignition and spark plugs in the 1860s. Carl Benz (and let's have none of the Germanified 'Karl' here please - the man signed himself Carl), is just credited with beating Daimler to the first (successful and eventually marketed) 'horseless carriage; and he also used electric ignition. As far as PUB can divine, this was of the 'trembler coil' type, as certainly was that of the production Benz type cars - widely licensed and copied by others.

Daimler adopted the fearsome 'hot tube' ignition system, with its exposed petrol burners, but there can hardly have been a longer more mingling ignition than a red hot tube throughout all four strokes. Hiram