Word: crankshafts
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...early bronzes and terra cottas were heavily influenced by French Cubist Sculptor Henri Laurens, and their dominant rhythm was taken from Mayan art-a blockish, crankshaft-like sequence of shapes. They may have been stylistically uncertain, but they were powerful, and on seeing them, a leading New York dealer named Nierendorf gave Nevelson her first one-woman show, in 1941. She was past 40, an age when some artists start thinking not about their debuts but about their retrospectives...
...flywheel works on a simple principle: a rapidly spinning weighted wheel serves as a highly useful reservoir of energy. It has been put to work in a wide variety of ways. As a potter's wheel, it smooths out motion between movements of the foot pedal. On the crankshaft of an auto engine, it prevents uneven rotation that would result from piston strokes. But it is only recently that engineers looking for less polluting means of transportation have begun to give serious thought to tapping the whirling flywheel's energy...
...burning fuel is converted directly into rotary motion.* Yet unlike other rotaries, it retains many of the acknowledged advantages of conventional internal-combustion engines. In standard auto engines, for example, the reciprocating actions of cylindrical pistons successively suck in a mixture of gasoline and air, compress it, turn a crankshaft after an electric spark touches off the explosive vapors, then expel the burned fuel residues. In rotary engines like the Wankel, the same effect is achieved not by reciprocating pistons but by a turning rotor. As it revolves inside a specially shaped chamber, the rotor is able to perform...
...double-ended and have entirely separate functions (see diagram). It is the job of one piston to draw in air. The other provides the power; all the explosions in the engine occur within its cylinder. Thus it is the movement of this second piston that actually turns the crankshaft (which passes through both pistons) and the rotor...
...conventional reciprocating engine, combustion drives the pistons in straight-line up-and-down movement, which is converted into rotary motion by connecting rods and the crankshaft...