The Shuttlebug

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The original inspiration for THE MOTHER EARTH NEWS@ SHUTTLEBUG goes back at least to the very late 1940's . . . when Editor-Publisher John Shuttleworth-then a student at a small country grade school in Indiana-used to watch a King Midget automobile occasionally buzz past the playground during recess.

The King Midget, in case you've never heard of it before, was an ultra-small and ultra-light vehicle manufactured by Claud Dry and Dale Orcutt in Athens, Ohio from 1947 to 1969. The little car weighed just 690 pounds, was powered by a single cylinder, 12-brake-horsepower Kohler industrial engine, and averaged between 50 and 70 miles per gallon of regular gasoline. It was also a tough little machine that performed well on everything from rough trails north of the Arctic Circle to potholed tropical sections of the Pan-American Highway on both sides of the Equator.

That was the good part. The bad part was that the King Midget's right rear wheel—and right rear wheel only—transferred power to the road . . . which made the tiny car veer in one direction as it accelerated and in the other whenever it was slowed down. The miniature automobile also tended to float around a lot at anything over 40 miles per hour and, according to a test report in the January-February 1974 issue of Special-Interest Autos, the old KM was guilty of both understeer and oversteer-simultaneously!—as it was herded around a corner.

Be that as it may, Dry and Orcutt delivered a quality crafted product for the money (the price of the vehicle hovered around $550 during most of its manufacturing history and barely topped $1,000 at the time the car went out of production). And the two men are certainly to be commended for marketing a real alternative to bloated, costly, wasteful "regular" American automobiles for as long as they did.

It seemed only natural then—back in the fall of 1973, once the staff of THE MOTHER EARTH NEWS ® had [1] successfully produced methane from organic waste, [2] used that methane to fuel an automobile engine, and [3] begun to think about building an ultralight vehicle specifically designed to operate on this "homemade gasoline"—for MOTHER's self-proclaimed car designers to reach into the past and dust off the old King Midget concept. Especially natural, as a matter of fact, during the winter of 1973-1974 when—as you'll recall—the Arabs suddenly called a halt to their shipments of oil to the U.S. and gas lines began to form all over the country.

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