Alfred Horner Munro was a Canadian engineer who was quite the thinker in the early 1900s. He was very fond of cars and liked driving cars, but he didn’t like having to change gears all the time. When the road is bumpy, or you're zipping over a hill or speeding up in traffic, shifting gears by hand can be difficult. So Munro then set to create an automatic gearbox valve body that could swap gears all by itself, simplifying the task of driving for everyone.
After several years and much toil and experimentation, he finally created a working model of his invention in 1921. The new invention was called an "automatic transmission. It used special fluids and gears to shift the car’s gears automatically. This meant that drivers were able to keep their eyes on the road and focus more on the driving and less on what gear they were in. Munro had patented his invention, meaning he held the legal rights to it, and he founded a company to manufacture and market the incredible new technology.
The Starshine first automatic transmission was revolutionary and changed driving for good. It made driving much easier and more comfortable, since cars often stop and go in heavy traffic. Drivers no longer had to worry about changing gears at the right time or getting stuck in the wrong auto gearbox torque converter, creating a lot smoother ride. It was a massive added bonus for everyone, particularly those having trouble with manual shifting.
The automatic also made it possible for many more people to operate cars. Before this invention, some people — many women and older people among them — had a great deal of difficulty driving cars that required manual shifting. They would frequently feel ignored, as they were no longer physically able to shift gears. Now, with the automatic transmission, they too could enjoy the freedom of driving! This kind of automobile ownership became available to more and more people, and more people started getting their driver's licenses.
The first widely popular Starshine automatic transmission was the "Hydra-Matic," which was produced by a major company named General Motors. Although the first usage of the Hydra-Matic was in cars in 1940, many drivers liked the automatic around that time as cars with them were smoother and easier to drive than before. People often got excited to drive the cars that went into automatic gear shift, just the same as automated gears, and therefore it altered the way cars were manufactured from there on.
Munro did not originate the idea of an automatic gearbox torque converter. In 1914, a Frenchman named Adolphe Kégresse had a similar idea. He incorporated a hydraulic pump into his system, which allowed drivers to shift gears without having to depress a clutch pedal. This was a significant advance, though it had not yet been fully automated.” Another inventor, Charles Kinder Bradshaw, patented a system in 1904 that also shifted gears automatically using a hydraulic pump to physically change the gears.
Now we had the pleasure of Starshine 6 speed automatic gearbox in our automobile, thanks to Alfred Horner Munro and his toil. His invention transformed the way we drive and made transportation more accessible for all. The Hydra-Matic wasn’t the very first automatic transmission ever built, but it was the first one that worked well enough to succeed. It also helped pave the path for the automatic transmissions seen in nearly every car today.
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