Editing Rotary engine (section)

===Balzer===
[[Stephen M. Balzer]] of New York, a former watchmaker, constructed rotary engines in the 1890s.<ref>{{cite web|title=Balzer automobile patents|url=http://americanhistory.si.edu/onthemove/collection/object_1282.html|publisher=National Museum of American History|date=2016-11-02|access-date=2011-06-29|archive-date=2011-06-30|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110630214015/http://www.americanhistory.si.edu/onthemove/collection/object_1282.html|url-status=live}}</ref>  He was interested in the rotary layout for two main reasons:
* To generate {{convert|100|hp|abbr=on}} at the low [[Revolutions per minute|rpm]] at which the engines of the day ran, the pulse resulting from each combustion stroke was quite large. To damp out these pulses, engines needed a large [[flywheel]], which added weight. In the rotary design the engine acted as its own flywheel, thus rotaries could be lighter than similarly sized conventional engines.
* The cylinders had good cooling airflow over them, even when the aircraft was at rest—which was important, as the low airspeed of aircraft of the time provided limited cooling airflow, and alloys of the day were less advanced. Balzer's early designs even dispensed with cooling fins, though subsequent rotaries did have this common feature of [[air cooling|air-cooled]] engines.

Balzer produced a 3-cylinder, rotary engined car in 1894, then later became involved in [[Samuel Pierpont Langley|Langley]]'s ''Aerodrome'' attempts, which bankrupted him while he tried to make much larger versions of his engines. Balzer's rotary engine was later converted to static radial operation by Langley's assistant, [[Charles M. Manly]], creating the notable [[Manly–Balzer engine]].