I saw this photo at
Lushlight and assumed it was an eccentric inventor's one-off, but a little searching revealed more information:
Leyat was a French automobile manufacturer established by Marcel Leyat in 1919 in Paris... The first model was called Hélica, also known as 'The plane without wings'. The passengers sat behind each other as in an aircraft. The vehicle was steered using the rear wheels and the car was not powered by an engine turning the wheels, but by a giant propeller powered by an 8 bhp (6.0 kW) Scorpion engine. The entire body of the vehicle was made of plywood, and weighed just 250 kg (550 lb), which made it dangerously fast.
In 1927, A Hélica reached the speed of 106 mph (171 km/h) at the Montlhéry circuit. Leyat continued to experiment with his Helica, he tried using propellers with two and four blades. Between 1919 and 1925, Leyat managed to sell 30 vehicles.
That is impressive for the era. I also found a page showing
all of the Helica models from 1913-1933, including these:
More at the
link, which is in French.
I have to wonder what line of thinking led to putting the poor driver downwind of a loud propeller. I imagine the bulb horn was really effective...
ReplyDeleteCan't tell you the original airdate but the propeller car you show first, or one remarkably like it, was shown recently on a rerun of "My Classic Car." They even took it out for a spin.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the post! Oh note that the linked site also has an English version:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.helica.info/eindex.htm
A plane builder that turns planes into cars, that reminds me of a car builder that once built planes: Bugatti
ReplyDeletehttp://www.bugattirevue.com/revue4/plane.htm