A Scale Company’s “Toy” Engine Helped Strangle Japan
They called it a toy built by a scale company, but this engine helped bring Japan’s economy to its knees. Discover how a rejected design out-lasted its German-engineered rival and became one of the most important machines of the Pacific War.
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SHORT FORM TRANSCRIPT:
In nineteen thirty-three, the U.S. Navy handed submarine engine contracts to a car company and a scale manufacturer, and naval engineers called it a joke. One design came from Winton, the same company that built the engine for a record-breaking passenger train. The other came from Fairbanks Morse, a firm famous for windmills and farm scales, using a strange engine with no cylinder head at all. Meanwhile, the “respected” German-licensed design, built by engineers everyone trusted, seemed destined to power the entire fleet. Then the war started, and everything flipped. The prestigious engine developed catastrophic gear failures so bad that crews gave it an unprintable nickname. One submarine lost all four engines mid-ocean and limped home on a backup generator. By nineteen forty-four, the Navy ripped that engine out of every boat that had it. The mocked engines kept running, and they powered a submarine force that quietly did something devastating to Japan’s entire war economy, cutting off nearly all its oil by the war’s final year. What that submarine force ultimately achieved, and why one of these engines is still running today inside America’s nuclear submarines, is a story worth hearing in full. Watch the complete documentary now.