The Mégy Mystery (Upd. see Patents)

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Jorge Virdo has send us some pages from an old book on cars that has an illustration of a "System Mégy" car. The book dates from 1911 (according to the foreword) and is in Spanish. What we do know about the Mégy is that it was a car made in France from 1901-1903. According to Georgano it had a rudimentary form of ‘automatic transmission’ in which the gear ratio changed according to the surface of the road. The clutch was operated by moving the steering wheel down, while an upward movement worked the brake. But when we look at the Spanish text, it seems to work slightly different: “The car was driven by tilting the steering column: forward to obviously go forward, backwards to brake, and extremely back, to activate reverse”. Anyway, to us it looks like a very complicated way of driving. Can anyone shed some more light on this “System Mégy”?

Update: one of our readers tipped us to have a look a the Beta version of Google Patents. And with succes: a complete set of drawings by Léandre Mégy explaining the 'variable speed gearing'. He also came up with a more recent article about this principle for automatically shifting gears.

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