ORIGINAL: speedster 1919
Well if I remember right as a kid my dad had a 1936 Stinson and he would lean engine to quit first and then hit kill switch. If the switch was bad he wouldn't know it because the leaning would kill the engine first. Just as engine was dying he would put fuel back to normal. A couple of members in my Model T club have good running but wore out engines . When warmed up and shut off will self start just by turning on key. This is not magnito but battery fired coils. This will not happen on a fresher (higher compression engine) I could see a big person lean on a prop of a well worn airplane engine and turn it just fast enough to create a spark.
There is no such thing as a 200 lb catfish in the USA. Record is about 100 lb but if you caught that on 2 lb test line you'd be famous. This is just an old urban legend around if your a fisherman...............
----------------
If I'm not mistaken, the old, ancient Fords did not use breaker points in a distributor to fire the spark plug. The ignition coil was set up with enough capacitance to go into resonance (self oscillation - producing sparks continuously). The compression in the engines was low enough that the piston had to be a fare way up the cylinder bore before the continuously sparking spark plug would ignite the mixture. It was similar to glow operation in that the plug was always lit. Later, they became more sophisticated and used a distributor as we know it. If I am wrong, please let me know. But be forewarned that the pulsejet guys were using these old spark systems to ignite their pulsejets, so I know these ignitions existed for a fact. Although it is possible that they had to be modified to operate in the "constant on" mode.
Ed Cregger