The 200 Mile-per-Gallon Carburetor: The Story of the California Carburetor

by John Elle. Courtesy of Mopars Unlimited of Arizona
and the Grand Canyon Walter P. Chrysler Club, Box 5537, Glendal AZ 85312.

I have a couple of old reference manuals in my library that occasionally I will look at to just read about technology and how it has changed or how the influence of one man may have effected how others operated over their life.

Walter P Chrysler started his automotive career by working at the Buick Division of General Motors in 1912. It was 1925 before he started his own company, absorbed Maxwell and launched the Plymouth, which now is an orphan in its own right.

Coincidently, Charles W. Nash also joined Buick, soon after the turn of the twentieth century. By 1910, Nash had worked his way into the presidency of Buick. In 1912, Nash assumed the presidency of GM at the same time that Walter P. Chrysler was there. Now, the company that Charles W. Nash founded is part and parcel of the company known as DaimlerChrysler, as is the Chrysler Corporation. If you attempt to establish a family tree of DaimlerChrysler today I am afraid it would look much like a plate of spaghetti as each branch would probably extend in a convoluted manner to attach to others. Who would believe or even care that some of the other orphan products that make up Chrysler Corp include Thomas-Detroit (1906), Chalmers-Detroit (1908), and Electrobat and Electric Vehicle of (1885 and 1889)! Let us not forget the ever-popular Moyea, produced from 1901 to 1903.

200 mpg carburetor - urban legend or fact?

\Car"bu*ret`or\, n. (Chem.) An apparatus in which coal gas, hydrogen, or air is passed through or over a volatile hydrocarbon, in order to confer or increase illuminating power. [Written also carburettor.]  — Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Copyright © 1996, 1998 MICRA, Inc.

This carburetor was designed by Roy Marks; it was sufficiently novel to be granted US patent number 710,330 on September 30, 1902. This patent, together with number 710,329 (Explosive Engine for Motor Vehicles), covered all the major features of the California Carboretor.

This is not your run-of the-mill carburetor. Like many of the day it worked on the "surface" principle, and was basically a box in which the fuel was allowed to form a vapour that could be mixed with air and fed to the engine. Unlike the European examples as typified by Minerva and De Dion, Mark's carburetor used cotton wicking to draw the fuel up onto a series of shelves to give a larger surface area for evaporation.

Note that there is no equivalent of a float chamber. You, the rider, had to open the tap every so often and add fuel to the appropriate level, as judged by the level glass on the front of the tank. Tricky to do while riding!

In practice, with fuel consumption claimed to be close to 200 mpg, one fill would keep you going between stops.

Well, the solution has been found. It is real. It was one of the popular technologies used when the automobile engine consisted as a large one or two cylinder engine that ran not much faster than 600rpm. A fixed speed. Throttle control technology had not been discovered yet. Engine rpm was fixed by some form of governor applied to the sparking system (if any) or to holding a valve open when the rpm increased above a certain speed.
Road speed was generally achieved by two forward gears of sorts. One gear used for a fixed low speed and the second gear for a fixed higher speed. Very rarely did the high speed exceed 15 mph.

To build one for yourself is not difficult. Remove the lid off of your air cleaner. Remove the air filter, and fill the cavity with cotton cloth waste. Disconnect the fuel line from the carburetor and plumb it into the air cleaner using some form of a shut off valve similar to a toilet valve. When the fuel rises to a given level the fuel would be shut off. As air passes by the gasoline soaked rags, the fumes generated by evaporation would then be sucked into the engine and thus the engine would run. Sort of, with a drivability problem or two. The carburetor butterflies would sort of control the mixture into the engine but not really well. Also be aware when you shut the engine off there would be a fair amount of evaporation of the gasoline taking place. The fumes would be quite obvious. But that could be solved by using a system such as the boats use to vent the engine compartment before the engine starts to prevent explosions. In the winter, you could route the hot exhaust gasses up to the air cleaner to encourage the evaporation to take place, as long as you carried a fire extinguisher along, there should be no real concern.

No!!!! The oil companies did not buy off this patent. Why should they, it was hardly practical in the first place!

All of the automobiles (except for the electric ones) that used this carburetor are listed on a carburetor repair web site with a list of components that the company is building for the restoration of some of these cars. Some of the carburetor kits have not been designed but they are planning on doing so if one is needed.

There have been only a handful of manufacturers listed so far as orphans. But would it surprise you to find out that there has been over 5000 different manufacturers of automobiles since the turn of  20th Century in the U.S. and Canada? That includes about 165 manufacturers that filed the proper paper work to become a company and never went any further than that. This does not count the approximately 1000 or so trucks that were manufactured during that same time frame powered by steam, electricity, and the gasoline or later the diesel engine. In many cases these vehicles had a production run of under 10  before they too became orphans while others managed to stay in production for a number of years before they either closed their doors or were bought out by some other firm.

Being an orphan in this hobby is not necessarily a bad thing. We have at least one orphan car show a year that has always had a good review by any one who has attended. The orphan population out numbers the Corporate aligned collectable cars by at least 100-fold or more and includes such reputable cars as the Dusenberg, Marmon, Pierce Arrow, and many others of that class. It also includes Twombly (1913-1915), Veerac (1905), and the ever popular Smith & Mabley Simplex (1904-1907, produced in New York City).

So! Hedge a bet, if you see the opportunity to purchase an orphan from the early years, it might just be your financial ship coming in. Of course it might not, too. Hint: I have been informed secretly that there is a large market looking for Chain Drive race cars from the early 1900s.