Jewish Invention Myths: The Carburetor
Moving on to our next ‘Jewish Invention’ myths we have the carburetor which is used in a petrol internal combustion engine to control and mix air and fuel entering the engine and is an extremely part of historic and current petrol engines (diesel engines use fuel injection instead).
Now Pam Karp writing up her ‘Jewish Inventors’ project at Geni claims that a jew named Donat Banki invented the carburetor in 1893 and thus jews should be credited with its invention. (1)
This however is complete nonsense since the carburetor was invented in 1826 not in 1893 by an American inventor and son of a Revolutionary War officer from Connecticut named Samuel Moray.
As William Ashworth, Jr. writes:
‘Morey invented the internal combustion engine and received a patent for it in 1826. He even built an automobile; his engine ran on turpentine and had valves and a carburetor and many other features of the modern internal combustion engine.’ (2)
Indeed, carburettors were fitted to Siegfried Marcus’ early automobile/car in 1875 (3) – and no Marcus (who was jewish) didn’t invent the first automobile/car either – (4) and Karl Benz’s ‘Benz Patent-Motorwagen’ in 1885 (5) so they cannot have been invented by Banki in 1893!
What Karp is thinking of is the 1893 modification of the existing carburetor technology by Donat Banki and Janos Csonka – note that only Banki was jewish having been born Donat Lowinger; hence Karp deliberately left Csonka out to make it seem like Banki created his modified carburetor (called the Banki-Csonka engine no less) alone! – to fit stationary engines like a pump or generator rather than a car. (6)
So, no Donat Banki didn’t invent the carburetor; Samuel Moray did!
References
(1) https://www.geni.com/projects/Jewish-Inventors/12388
(2) https://www.lindahall.org/about/news/scientist-of-the-day/samuel-morey
(3) https://www.asme.org/about-asme/engineering-history/landmarks/203-siegfried-marcus-car
(4) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/jewish-invention-myths-the-automobilecar
(5) Doris Simonis, 2008, ‘Inventors and Inventions’, Vol. 1, 1st Editon, Michael Cavendish Reference: New York, pp. 90-91
(6) https://web.archive.org/web/20120717091817/http://www.scitech.mtesz.hu/51landmark/banki.htm