Identity politics — the great explanatory growth engine of our time — focusses on gender and ethnicity.
Once again, GM's engineers, spurred on by Dennis Mooney, the company's executive director for vehicle integration, hope to make displacement on demand work by using a microprocessor to take the pulse of the engine thousands of times a second, and then make adjustments so swiftly and subtly that the driver has no idea how many cylinders are firing at any particular moment.
GE carried out test flights with an open-rotor engine in the 1980s, and reckoned it would use 30% less fuel than similar-sized engines of the time.
As a young engineer, the instructor had himself helped design the Rolls-Royce Merlin, arguably the most successful aero-engine of all time.
There's an imposing Packard diesel aircraft engine, the DR980 9-cylinder radial design that used 40 percent less fuel than the gas-powered aircraft engines of its time (and its diesel fuel was much less flammable than gasoline).
But for decades, steam power was not considered feasible for Atlantic crossings; scientists insisted that ships could not carry enough coal for a voyage that long with the primitive engines of the time.
The new company's air-cooled Wasp radial piston engine, completed by the end of that year, proved far superior to the water-cooled engines of the time and became the basis for a number of piston engines and the continued growth of the company in the 1930s and '40s under United Aircraft.
The night before, a fellow diner had warned us about it: she grew up in the area in the 1950's, and during family trips over the pass, everyone except her father had to get out of the car, because automobile engines of the time couldn't handle hills that steep with a full load.
Named 'Cuill' and very much in stealth mode for the first part of the year, they finally emerged end of July 2008 with a 'massive' search engine that would rival the most popular search engines of our time with an enormous index, an innovative interface and some nifty features.
Before 1190 mining was used rarely and the siege engines of the time were largely incapable of damaging the thicker castle walls.
