Who was the 1st with superchargers?

[Daan]

What company was the first to have widely-used, easily available superchargers? Was it Studebaker? I mean, where anyone could walk into the dealer and drive away with a "blower" on their car, not "we made one in 1948 but never showeed it to anybody" kind of thing. Thank you.

[curt]

Gram Page had blowers in the 1930's. Kaiser had them by 1955.

[Swifster]

Like any car before the 1960's, powerful cars were for those who could afford it. Superchargers, in one form or another, have been around as long as the internal combustion engine. The first production car that I'm aware of was the 1929 & 1930 Bentley 4.5L (the Bentley Blower) that had a roots style supercharger mounted off the front of the car. A 1929 Bentley Blower won LeMans that year.

Duesenburg also used superchagers in their SJ models (The 'S' was for supercharged). Both of these cars were sold to the wealthy.

1929 Bentley Blower 4.5L - http://www.autoemirates.com/Classic/...tleyBlower.asp




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Tom - Lakeland, FL

1964 Studebaker Daytona

Michigan Speed - www.michiganspeed.com
Club Hot Rod - www.clubhotrod.com
LS1 Tech - www.ls1tech.com

[N8N]

I believe Auburn had a blower in about that time frame as well... again a car for people of means... there's a real pretty one that used to (maybe still does) show up at the Pittsburgh Vintage Grand Prix every year. Don't remember exactly what year it was but I do recall it had a dash plaque certifying that it had been driven at xx MPH (xx being in excess of 100) prior to delivery.

nate

--
55 Commander Starlight
62 Daytona hardtop

http://home.comcast.net/~njnagel

[GTtim]

I was thinking Mercedes had the first one, here is what I found on the About Inventors site. There's lots of interesting info there.

Supercharger; Ferdinand Porsche invented the first supercharged Mercedes-Benz SS & SSK sports cars in Stuttgart, Germany in 1923.

http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blcar.htm

Tim K.
'64 R2 GT Hawk

[rockne10]

The "K" in SSK meant Kompressor, what we Yanks refer to as a supercharger. The supercharger is driven by belt from the crank pulley and has a more immediate response than a turbo, which is driven by exhaust pushed through an impeller.

[Swifster]

The first supercharged car could have been the first one in 1885. I attached the following from The History of Supercharging.

Forced induction was devised within a few years of the invention of the internal combustion engine, and actually predates the advent of automobiles. Gottlieb Daimler received a German patent for supercharging in 1885, specifying an ext ernal fan, pump, or compressor to push the increased air into the engine.

In 1908 Lee Chadwick in Pottstown, Pennsylvania built a supercharged Vanderbilt Cup racer, which ran at 100 mph, using a fan driven by a leather belt to spin at five times crankshaft speed. Louis Renault had patented this centrifugal s upercharger concept in France in 1902.

Another Frenchman, Auguste Rateau, in 1916 tested turbocharging an aircraft, and in 1918 General Electric produced a gain in horsepower with a turbocharged Liberty aircraft engine on the top of Pike's Peak - delivering 356 hp at high a ltitude compared with the engine's stock output at sea level of 346 hp, which formerly would drop to 222 hp at this altitude.

The principles of positive displacement had long before been turned into working pumps by the Roots brothers, beginning in 1859 to develop a better water wheel, and discovering instead a very effective air mover. They formed the Roots Blower Company, but the name is used generically to describe the positive displacement type of blower. The blower has since been used for deep mine ventilation, pneumatic carrying systems, and countless industrial applications including refrigeration and air conditioning.

During the early twenties Mercedes innovatively developed a Roots type blower instead of the earlier centrifugal compressors. Over the next two decades interest was intense in both turbocharging and supercharging, in America and Europ e, and across several industries. By World War II almost all military aircraft intended for high altitudes were supercharged.


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Tom - Lakeland, FL

1964 Studebaker Daytona

Michigan Speed - www.michiganspeed.com
Club Hot Rod - www.clubhotrod.com
LS1 Tech - www.ls1tech.com