Topaz Partners Client Scuderi Group Featured in Wall Street Journal
April 20th, 2009 by Tim Allik
After an action-packed day Monday with the official unveiling of the Scuderi Engine prototype in Detroit, we checked our news alerts this evening to find not one, but two, articles about the Scuderi Group in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal. Read excerpts below. Just be sure to click through to read the entire articles on online.wsj.com. They are well worth it!
New Engine Design Sparks Interest
APRIL 20, 2009
By Neal E. Boudette, The Wall Street Journal
WEST SPRINGFIELD, Mass. — On Easter Sunday in 2001, Carmelo Scuderi called his family together in his home here and announced, essentially, that he had outsmarted the world’s auto makers and their billion-dollar research departments.
The retired engineer and inventor told his children and grandchildren he had developed a dramatically more fuel-efficient design for the internal combustion engine, something car companies have been chasing for decades.
Eight years later, the late Mr. Scuderi’s revelation no longer seems as far-fetched. His design — which involves grouping an engine’s cylinders in pairs, with each pair focusing on specific tasks — is gaining attention in an auto industry that is now more open to fuel-saving innovations.
LINK TO FULL STORY: Read the rest of this Wall Street Journal article about the Scuderi Group on www.wsj.com.
How the Scuderi Engine Came to Be
APRIL 20, 2009
By Neal E. Boudette, The Wall Street Journal
The unusual engine design unveiled on Monday by the Scuderi Group, a family-run start-up based in West Springfield, Mass., is the product of a uniquely American story–it came from a lone inventor, a first-generation American and a D-Day veteran, who struck on an unorthodox idea and was at first ignored.
Early on, the Scuderi Group had so little success in approaching auto engineers that it contacted Ford Motor Co. through a man who had been a prep-school advisor of William C. Ford, great-grandson of Henry Ford.
The engine was conceived by Carmelo Scuderi, the son of Italian immigrants. Born in 1925, he got a job on a farm during the Depression and learned to tinker with engines. In 1943, he joined the Navy, wore his uniform to his high school graduation, and was put in charge of the giant engines powering a ship designed to land tanks and trucks on a beach. In the days after the Normandy invasion, it became a hospital ship and he helped tend the many wounded brought aboard.
After the war, he married, started a family, studied engineering on the G.I. Bill and landed at a defense contractor. Later he started his own engineering firm and developed test equipment and military fire trucks.
LINK TO FULL STORY: Read the rest of this Wall Street Journal article about the Scuderi Group on www.wsj.com.
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