“I put a new engine in my car, but forgot to take the old one out. Now my car goes 500 miles per hour."
Stephen Wright, comedian
As anyone who has ever tried to start up an old automobile will tell you, a choke is a miserable thing to operate. Pull it out too far and you flood the engine, do not pull it out far enough and the engine will not fire. It is not surprising, therefore, that automotive engineers did everything in their power to eradicate the need for carburetors. How did they do this? They invented fuel injection.
Now commonplace on all production cars, fuel injection is an automatic, accurate way of keeping the engine's fuel-to-air ratio at suitable levels. Modern computer systems use precise sensors and gauges that react to very quick changes in operation, such as sudden accelerations to decide how much fuel is needed at any one point. Then the fuel injector releases a spray of pressurized fuel into the air stream passing through the engine. The first fuel injection system, developed by the manufacturer Adams- Farwell of Dubuque, Iowa, employed this principle but was entirely mechanical.
Designed for use with automotive diesel engines, the idea of fuel injection sat on the shelf largely untouched for about thirty years before it was used in wartime aviation. Even after that, it still wasn't really seriously considered for use in spark-ignited gasoline engines until the mid-1950s.
