Engine

With over 300 specimens, the Museum of Engines and Mechanisms of the University of Palermo collectively narrates the evolution of engine technology. This collection of engines, from water-powered devices, through the era of steam and reciprocating engines, to jet turbines, includes engines that once served to power pumps, factories, automobiles, airplanes, and ships.

 

The largest rocket built at the time of the historic first missions to the moon, the Saturn V carried aloft the 45-ton Apollo spacecraft on earth orbital and lunar missions from 1967 to 1972. It also launched the 120-ton Skylab into earth orbit on May 14, 1973. 

The Pegasus 3 is the earliest surviving example of the prototype engine for vertical/short takeoff and landing (V/STOL) jets, namely the Royal Air Force's Harriers and US Marine Corps' AV-8Bs. Owned by the Rolls- Royce Heritage Trust (a company-sponsored history and preservation society), the artifact is an early developmental model of the Pegasus 3 engine, the first to fly with sufficient thrust to prove the vectored-thrust concept for V/STOL jet aircraft, in 1960.

The 367-80 is the prototype for most jet transports. Its success was due largely to its mechanical systems, including turbine engines with thrust reversers and noise suppressors, redundant hydraulic control systems, and an improved cabin-pressurization system. Honeycomb flap panels were introduced, along with a strong, lightweight structural design that controlled fatigue cracking. These led to several innovations in aircraft tooling and manufacturing techniques. The Dash-80 was the first commercial airliner economical enough to take the US airline industry off subsidy.

Smaller and cheaper than a triple-expansion vertical engine, the horizontal cross-compound pumping engine, Pump No. 2, ran at relatively slow revolutions and was considered the height of engineering from the 1890s to World War I. This pumping engine at the York Water Company was built by the Worthington Pump & Machinery Corporation, Snow-Holly Works, Buffalo, New York.

The Advanced Engine Test Facility was built in 1964, three years after President John F. Kennedy committed the United States to world leadership in aeronautical science. Conceived and designed by Wernher von Braun, the first director of the Marshall Space Flight Center, this facility was used to perform static tests on the booster of the Saturn V rocket, which launched Apollo 11 to the moon on July 16, 1969. The stand has four concrete legs, each four feet thick and rising 144 feet to a steel superstructure supporting a 200-ton crane.

The Cooperative Fuel Research (CFR) engine is used extensively throughout the world for testing, research, and instruction in the performance of fuels and lubricants for the internal combustion engine. Principal design work on this prototype engine was accomplished by engineers of Waukesha Motor Company, now a division of Dresser Industries, who served on a Cooperative Fuel Research Committee with representatives of the American Petroleum Institute, Society of Automotive Engineers, Automobile Manufacturers Association, and the National Bureau of Standards.

Built by the Bay City Dredge Works of Bay City, Michigan, this dredge was used to construct a portion of US 41 called the Tamiami Trail, which connected Tampa with Miami through the Everglades and Big Cypress Swamp. The last remaining display of walking dredges (of some 145 walking machines), it has a unique propulsion design enabling the dredge to cope with drainage problems in a wetlands environment.