The Belmont Aeroplane Co. and their Levis engines

In the Science Museum, London, there sits a unique and unusual five-cylinder inline aero engine dating, it is thought, from 1913. There is a photo of it at https://www.flickr.com/photos/cliffpatte/13952553941/ . A two-stroke type, it was made by the Levis motorcycle company and, according to the Birmingham Post, the monoplane to which it was fitted had an accident prior to takeoff and never flew. The monoplane’s other claim to fame is the involvement of patents owned by Lt. J.W. Dunne, he of the Farnborough Balloon Factory, the Army’s secret trials at Blair Atholl and the world’s first certified stable aeroplane, which was of his trademark tailless swept configuration.

Almost everything else we think we know about this aeroplane turns out to be distorted or just plain wrong. Referred to variously as the James monoplane or Leonie monoplane, even bizarrely conflated with the mysterious Dunne D.9, gleanings from Flight suggest that it was in fact of 1915 vintage, last in a series of designs from the Belmont Aeroplane Company, owned by James and Thompson. All the designs of this company were based on the earlier work of one Francis Hill (not, it seems, the F.T. Hill who later rose to some prominence) and the control system of the powered types was patented by James and Thompson. Built by Levis, it should more correctly be called the Levis-Belmont monoplane, and an unpublished photograph in the Museum’s Technical File bears this out.

The Birmingham Illustrated Weekly Mercury tells of an earlier Levis-powered hydroplane which skimmed the surface of a local reservoir but was too underpowered to take off. The details of that machine have always been a mystery, but a horizontally-opposed two-cylinder Levis engine with propeller attached, and still in working order, was sold ca. 2007 to an Australian or New Zealander and its specification is a close match to that of the hydroplane. Levis are not known to have made any other multi-cylinder two-strokes, and certainly not of that period. Some photos and its more recent history are posted at http://cybermotorcycle.com/gallery/levis/index5.htm

I am preparing a short piece on all this and, new to this news forum, have two reasons for posting here. First is to ask if anybody knows anything more beyond the sources already given (which I have only skimmed here), and secondly to ask whether any aviation magazines still publish this kind of thing, or should I go for self-publishing?