Intro

I was riding in a car to Humbolt County, CA when I thought of the idea for the McCoskey rotary engine. I think that was around 1979 or 1980. I had been thinking about the limitations of the conventional internal combustion engine for several years, and I thought I saw a way around some of them.

In those days I was sending a series of ideas to my patent attorney, and my business manager, so I wrote this one up and sent it to them.

Over the twenty years that followed, I intended to get around to doing some more work on the concept, but didn't, though I spent some time thinking about it. I finally came to realize that I probably never would do the idea justice, so I decided to publish. In 2002, I got an email from David Chalk about the proposal for "Liquid metal Fusion" on my AOL web site. David has been working on sonofusion since way before I read the Scientific American article. Since he was a mechanical engineer, I decided to ask his opinion about the rotary combustion engine. David works on pumps, which are like engines, only backwards.

He decided it would probably work and that as far as he knew is was novel. He also made a suggestion for an improvement. He asked if he might use the concept in designing a pump, and I told him to go ahead. He gave me permission to publish his suggestion.