Soon after the invention of the conventional internal combustion engine, engineers realized that a tremendous savings in both weight and energy could be realized if the combustion of gasoline could be used to produce rotary motion directly instead of via the reciprocating action of the typical piston engine. The engineer who transformed this idea into a working rotary engine was Felix Wankel.

Felix Wankel was born in Germany at Lahr, a town near the French border, in 1902. During World War II he worked in the German Aeronautical Research Establishment researching rotary piston technology. After the war, he went to work for a German automotive firm. By 1957 he had built a prototype of his "Wankel" engine and received numerous patents, including several for the special tools needed to build the rotary engines.

The rotary-piston engine uses a triangular-shaped piston which revolves within an oval-shaped chamber that is...