ASME-Landmark:Roosa Master Diesel Fuel-Injection Pump

The Hartford Machine Screw Company was founded in 1876 by Christopher Spencer for the production of fasteners on the Hartford automatic screw machine. The company began to produce airplane parts in the 1920s, in 1947, Vernon Roosa's 1941 invention of the rotary distributor-type diesel fuel injection pump came to the company's attention. At that time, Roosa was in New York City repairing and maintaining diesel-electric generator sets; in June 1947, Roosa and development engineer Ernest J. Wilson Willson went to Hartford to develop the concept for the pump, and by 1952 they had landed its first contract.

In Roosa's diesel fuel-injection pump, mechanical injection forces fuel through a spray nozzle into the cylinders of a diesel engine under hydraulic pressures of 2,000 pounds per square inch or more. The Roosa Master injection pump, now on display at the Stanadyne Auto Corporation (Windsor's modern incarnation), was the first distributor-type to provide a simple mechanism for controlling the speed of generator sets, thereby reducing its complexity and number of parts. The pump combines a single-cylinder opposed-plunger pumping system to feed all cylinders of a multicylinder engine with the concept of inlet metering. This method of plunger action reduces the size and weight from the in-line camshaft system.

The distributor-type rotary diesel-fuel injection pump helped to make smaller, high-speed diesel engines cost-competitive with gasoline engines and opened up markets for the diesel engine in agriculture, marine propulsion, and power generation. See ASME website for more information