The internal combustion engine, for all its mechanical sophistication, still runs on a 19th-century mechanical idea: pistons rising and falling, a crankshaft spinning, a steam-age architecture ...

Most car enthusiasts associate the term “rotary engine” with Felix Wankel’s invention, developed in the 1950s and most commonly associated with Mazda. However, more than half a century before the ...

Wankel rotary engine powered thousands of aircraft. One of several problems: It spewed castor oil on its pilots.

Wankel engines first saw use in production cars as early as 1964 — and not even in a Mazda, but rather in an NSU. That little single-rotor powerplant quickly evolved into the more typical two-rotor ...

Launched in the late 1960s, the Ro 80 wasn't just the world's first mass-produced sedan with rotary power, but also one of the most innovative production vehicles of its era. Follow us: The rotary ...

Long before Felix Wankel became synonymous with rotary engines, an inventive Hungarian-American engineer named Stephen M. Balzer secured one of the earliest patents for a rotary-powered automobile on ...