Asquith,
I have never seen or heard of that one either, very neat!
I was "employed" once by a friend of a friend to provide cranking power on a four cylinder Kelvin diesel on a launch trip up the Thames. It was hard work, decompressed and all!
We had a Lister "Startomatic" when I was a kid, it provided all our power. They had a clever system for starting. You simply turned on a light switch or whatever in the house, and the 24? volt battery-supplied circuit energised the generator, which started spinning the diesel. A solenoid held it decompressed. The motor was run right up to full speed before being allowed to start, whereupon
it began generating 230 volts AC at the correct cycles. A great system!
As for the lawn mowers with wind up start (Lawson too?) they were a gimmick. I used to mow our neighbours lawn (and then I could watch their TV
), this system worked ok when the mower started well, otherwise it was a curse! You unfolded a sheetmetal lever, wound up the spring, re-folded the lever, hit the release button....mutter, mutter.
It went the way of those other gimmicks like B&S electric starter, the little plunger that allowed you to check the oil level without unscrewing the oil filler etc etc.
Of of the very best of the early motor cars was the French built Delaunay-Belleville. They built some big cars (11.8 litres) for the Russian Tsar and fitted them with air starting gear in 1909. "A Saurer compresed-air starter which could be used to inflate tyres, jack up the wheels, or blow a whistle".
The air start allowed the Tsar to make silent and quick getaways, lessening the chances of an assasins bullet....
Later in 1912, they fitted the Barbey compressed-air starter as an optional extra. Instead of sending air into the engine cylinders, there was a horizontally opposed four-cylinder motor and pump mounted on the nose of the crankshaft. It could also double as tyre pump or jack, and later, to assist the brakes in downhill work.
A brief life, as electric starters appeared by 1914.
Other unusual starters that intrigue me? The shotgun cartridge start on the Marshall tractors, the Coffman starter on the Napier Sabre (one of my teachers flew Typhoons, he said they could be a swine to start, and if you used all the start cartridges, you then had to remove all 48 sparkplugs....
Another old friend told me about using the inertia starters on the Bristol Pegasus motors we had in NZ pre WW2 on the Wildebeeste aircraft. Hard work, he said, curses all round if the engine didn't fire first time!
A very large Ruston single cylinder diesel engine near me uses an air bottle start - effortless! Then recharges the bottle using its own compression (without fuel).