Who knew that today’s top-fuel dragster engines totally consume their spark-plug electrodes during each crazy sub-four-second run? Stumbling over that startling spark-plug snippet prompted this look at that humble engine component.
While the everyday long-suffering spark plug isn’t exposed to destructive forces near the scale of those in top-fuel drag-racing engines, its role of reliably lighting the fire in conventional petrol engines isn’t all beer and skittles.
Even doing family-car duty requires plugs to keep their metal electrodes and ceramic insulators more or less intact and functional for 20,000km or more under quite harsh conditions.
Although the spark plug hardly shares centre-stage with sexier stuff like forced-induction, variable cam-timing, ABS systems and the like, a look at its history uncovers some surprisingly colourful chapters and individuals.
It was Robert Bosch engineer Gottlob Honold who improved on early designs and by 1902 had developed versions that pretty much resemble the spark plugs we have been familiar with for many decades.
Names on early spark-plug patents include period electricity A-listers like Tesla and Edison – I can recall replacing Edison-branded plugs in either a Model T Ford or an old Harley-Davidson. I wish I had kept one …
In the motor cars’ early years, a French bicycle and motorsport competitor who had been competing in the USA for some time began to make spark plugs in a small way to support himself. He was Albert Champion.
His move to full-scale manufacturing in Flint, Michigan in 1904 turned out to be ill-fated. He left within four years after falling out with his business partners. With the backing of William C Durant of Buick Motor Company (soon to become the General Motors Corporation), he established a new enterprise, the AC Spark Plug Company, its name bearing his initials.
By 1916 AC was a division of GM. AC must have been doing something right given that pioneering aviators Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart both chose AC plugs for their aircraft engines. Champion, known as ‘a ladies’ man’, sadly succumbed to a heart attack in 1927, aged 49, apparently soon after a physical encounter with a jealous husband.
During my time at GM-H in the late-1960s, the company was producing AC-branded plugs at its Disco plant in Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne.
KLG is another spark-plug brand with a story. The initials are taken from the name of the inventor, Kenelm Lee Guinness. Yes, a member of the Guinness brewing family, whose participation in motor racing and land-speed record attempts inspired him to produce a better spark plug in 1912.
KLG’s reliability led to its choice by the British military for aircraft applications during WWI. Guinness’s life began to spiral down following a race-track crash in 1924 that killed his mechanic/passenger and left him badly injured.
He never raced again and after apparently becoming delusional in later life he died by suicide in 1937, coincidentally at 49, at the same age as Champion.
In 1929 Seattle man Alfred Matthew Hubbard added some radioactive-action to the mix of the spark-plug story by producing a polonium spark plug.
Radiation produced by polonium-impregnated electrodes was said to ionise fuel to promote easy starting and efficient combustion – why is the Brock ‘Polariser’ suddenly coming to mind? One company is said to have manufactured his plugs ‘sparingly’.
His radioactive plug efforts had followed his ‘atmospheric power generator’ that was claimed to be suitable for powering cars, boats and aircraft using ‘nothing more than electricity from the air’.
Surprisingly polonium spark plugs popped up again in 1940 bearing the Firestone brand.
Dave Morley helped me with the NGK story. After visiting NGK’s Nagoya HQ a while back, Morley was pretty much full bottle about the brand. It turned out that before I encountered my first NGK plug in the 1960s, I had enjoyed many a meal from Noritake brand fine-China dinner plates.
The ceramic skills required to produce top-quality tableware cross over into producing ceramic insulators for industry as well as the ceramic insulator cores of spark plugs. This led Noritake’s owner NTK to ultimately set up the separate NGK Spark Plug Company in 1936.
NGK seems to have gone alright – since first appearing in Formula 1 in 1964 firing Honda’s racer, NGK has been well represented in the winners’ circle. Its 100th F1 victory came way back in 1998 with Mercedes-Benz.
