The internal combustion engine, for all its mechanical sophistication, still runs on a 19th-century mechanical idea: pistons rising and falling, a crankshaft spinning, a steam-age architecture ...

In a world dominated by pistons, the rotary engine was something different for motorists. It was the vision of German engineer Felix Wankel, built on the belief that the up-and-down motion of pistons ...

In 1965, a company called the Curtiss-Wright Corporation bought a Ford Mustang and installed its own version of Felix Wankel's rotary engine under the hood. The aeronautical company was partly formed ...