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California Pioneer
'Closed system' characterizes Bean engine
By Nancy Smith
Don "Wiley Coyote" Wiley of Riverside, Calif., describes his Bean engine as "kind of a rare bird." He bought it 10 years ago at a Branch 30 swap meet purely to keep another guy from taking it home.
Today, though, the rarity of the Bean, which Don thinks probably was made in the 1920s or '30s, makes .him happy he indulged in its purchase.
"Out here," he notes, referring to California, "I only know of one other in existence, and it's not in very good shape."
The Bean engine originally was made to power these high-pressure rigs, Don says, but most of those rigs ended up being equipped with Novo engines. He speculates that's because the Bean engines proved too costly to build.
"This engine is really overbuilt," he says. "Most (engines) are more like a tea kettle, but this is a closed system, like a car. They spent so much money on them, the engines weren't economical."
It has an external water pump to circulate water, which Don explains is very unusual on such a small engine, and its flywheel does double duty as the radiator fan.
The original Bean Spray Pump Co. eventually turned into FMC Technologies, Inc., which today offers a bit of historical information about Bean on its Web site. John Bean is reported to have invented a continuous spray pump in the 1880s to battle scale in his California almond orchards. When neighboring growers wanted their own spray pumps, a new business was born.
At the turn of the century, Bean's son-in-law, David Crummey, incorporated the company and began large-scale manufacturing. By the 1920s, mergers with makers of food processing equipment prompted a name change to Food Machinery Corp., and by the mid-19305, FMC claims it had become the world's largest manufacturer of machinery and equipment for handling fruits, vegetables, milk, fish and meat products.
World War II prompted FMC's diversification, first into the manufacture of military machinery and later, into chemical and petroleum equipment. In the 1970s, corporate headquarters moved to Chicago, and in 2000, the company restructured into a machinery business, FMC Technologies, and a chemicals business, FMC Corporation.