Spherical Drive Wheel Propels Odd Vehicle (Nov, 1937)
Spherical Drive Wheel Propels Odd Vehicle
Propelled by a spinning, motor-driven half globe at its rear, a strange three-wheeled vehicle recently made its appearance on the streets of Paris, France. The fantastic machine serves as an experimental model to test the inventor’s idea of a new gearless transmission, the speed of the vehicle being varied by tilting the hemisphere.





Women with hairy armpits and now this, the French are WEIRD!
Basically this is an external CVT. If the drive hemisphere was sold stopping would have been interesting.
Hemispherical Omni-directional Gimbaled (HOG) drive!
Here’s a recent small-scale implementation.