The Combustion Engine· built byUuser-e8a0f3

The Combustion Engine 28

• 1680 Huygens designs a gunpowder engine The idea before the fuel Christiaan Huygens sketches a cylinder in which a small charge of gunpowder is exploded to drive a piston. It is never built into anything useful — gunpowder is a terrible fuel for repeated cycles — but the principle is exactly right: burn something inside the cylinder rather than heating water outside it. His assistant Denis Papin carries the idea forward into steam.
• 1791 John Barber patents the gas turbine A century too early English inventor John Barber patents a machine that compresses air and gas, burns the mixture in a chamber and directs the hot exhaust at a paddle wheel. It is the gas turbine, described in full a hundred and fifty years before the metallurgy exists to build one. Nothing comes of it in his lifetime.
• 1794 Robert Street burns liquid fuel From gas to spirit Robert Street patents an engine that vaporises turpentine over a heated cylinder base and ignites it — the first internal combustion engine to run on a liquid fuel rather than coal gas. The step matters enormously later, when the liquid in question is petrol.
• 1807 – 1808 De Rivaz drives on hydrogen The first engine-powered vehicle Swiss engineer François Isaac de Rivaz builds a cylinder in which hydrogen and air are ignited by an electric spark, and the following year mounts it on a wheeled cart that moves under its own power. The vehicle is hopeless — it advances in lurches and stops constantly — but it is the first time a vehicle is moved by an internal combustion engine.
• 1823 Samuel Brown's gas vacuum engine The first engine sold Brown patents a gas vacuum engine and actually sells them — for pumping water at the Croydon Canal and, briefly, for pushing a carriage up Shooter's Hill in London. It works by burning gas to create a vacuum rather than by direct pressure on the piston, so it is enormous for its output, but it is the first internal combustion engine applied to industry.
• 1860 Lenoir's gas engine goes on sale The first commercial success Étienne Lenoir patents a double-acting engine that burns illuminating gas drawn straight from the town mains, ignited by an electric spark, with no compression stroke at all. It produces roughly a third of a horsepower and wastes most of its fuel, but several hundred are sold to workshops across Europe — the first internal combustion engine anyone can simply buy. Every serious engineer of the next twenty years starts by studying it and deciding they can do better.
• 1862 Beau de Rochas describes four strokes The theory, unbuilt French engineer Alphonse Beau de Rochas patents a description of the four-stroke cycle — intake, compression, power, exhaust — and identifies compression before ignition as the key to efficiency. He never builds an engine and never pays the fees to keep the patent alive. Fourteen years later Otto builds exactly this and spends the rest of his life in court over the priority.
• 1864 – 1867 Otto and Langen build an engine factory The industry begins Nikolaus Otto and Eugen Langen found N. A. Otto & Cie in Cologne, the world's first factory dedicated to internal combustion engines. Their atmospheric engine — noisy, tall, and roughly three times as efficient as Lenoir's — wins the gold medal at the 1867 Paris Exposition. The firm later becomes Deutz, and its payroll at various points includes Gottlieb Daimler, Wilhelm Maybach and Robert Bosch.
• 1872 Brayton's constant-pressure engine The cycle that ends up in jets American engineer George Brayton builds a liquid-fuelled engine that burns fuel continuously at constant pressure rather than in a sharp explosion. As a piston engine it is a commercial disappointment. As a thermodynamic cycle it is the basis of every gas turbine and jet engine flying today.
• 1876 Otto builds the four-stroke engine The design that wins Otto compresses the fuel-air mixture before igniting it and gets a machine of roughly three horsepower at eleven per cent efficiency — an order of magnitude better than anything before. The four-stroke Otto cycle becomes the operating principle of essentially every petrol engine built since. Around fifty thousand are sold in the following decade, and the patent is broken in the German courts in 1886 when Beau de Rochas' prior description surfaces, throwing the design open to everyone.
• 1878 Dugald Clerk's two-stroke engine One power stroke per revolution Scottish engineer Dugald Clerk builds the first successful two-stroke engine, firing on every revolution instead of every second one. Simpler, lighter and dirtier than the four-stroke, it goes on to power motorcycles, chainsaws, outboards and most of the small machinery of the twentieth century.
• 1879 Benz's petrol engine runs on New Year's Eve A workshop in Mannheim After a night of failed attempts, Karl Benz's two-stroke petrol engine finally runs on the last evening of 1879. His wife Bertha, who has funded much of the work with her dowry, is there to hear it. He patents it the following year and it becomes the financial foundation for everything that follows.
• 1885 Daimler and Maybach make it fast The Grandfather Clock and the Reitwagen Working in a garden shed in Cannstatt, Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach build a compact, vertical, high-speed petrol engine — nicknamed the Grandfather Clock for its shape — running at six hundred revolutions per minute where the Otto engines managed under two hundred. In August they bolt it to a wooden two-wheeler, the Reitwagen, and create the motorcycle. Speed, not size, is what makes the engine portable.
• 1886 The Benz Patent-Motorwagen Patent DRP 37435 Benz files patent number 37435 for a "vehicle powered by a gas engine" — a three-wheeled machine designed as a single integrated unit rather than a carriage with an engine strapped on. It is generally taken as the birth certificate of the automobile. Almost nobody buys one for two years.
• 1888 Bertha Benz drives to Pforzheim The first road trip Without telling her husband, Bertha Benz takes the Motorwagen and her two teenage sons on a hundred-and-six-kilometre run from Mannheim to Pforzheim. She buys fuel at a pharmacy, clears a blocked fuel line with a hatpin, insulates a wire with her garter and has a cobbler nail leather to the brake blocks — inventing the brake lining. The press coverage turns an eccentric contraption into a product, and her observations on the way lead directly to the addition of a lower gear.
• 1892 Diesel patents compression ignition No spark required Rudolf Diesel files a patent for an engine that compresses air so violently that injected fuel ignites from the heat alone. His stated aim is efficiency — he wants to give small workshops an engine that can compete with the great steam plants. The result is the most thermally efficient engine type ever built, and the workhorse of every ship, lorry and locomotive of the following century.
• 1897 The first working diesel at Augsburg Twenty-six per cent efficient After four years of explosions and near-fatal failures at the MAN works in Augsburg, Diesel demonstrates an engine achieving around twenty-six per cent efficiency at a time when steam engines manage ten. It weighs five tonnes and produces twenty horsepower. Diesel becomes a millionaire, then loses most of it, then disappears over the side of a cross-Channel ferry in 1913.
• 1901 The Mercedes 35 hp The first modern car Maybach's design for Daimler — long wheelbase, low centre of gravity, honeycomb radiator, pressed-steel frame, gate-change gearbox — abandons the horseless-carriage shape entirely. Everything after it looks like a car rather than a trap with an engine underneath. It is named after Mercédès Jellinek, the daughter of the dealer who ordered the first batch.
• 1908 – 1927 The Model T puts everyone in one Fifteen million cars Ford's Model T is not technically remarkable. It is light, high off the ground, simple enough for a farmer to repair, and — crucially — priced to fall year after year rather than rise. Over nineteen years it sells more than fifteen million units and turns the combustion engine from a rich man's toy into the default way an ordinary person moves.
• 1913 The moving assembly line Ninety-three minutes per chassis Ford starts the moving chassis line at Highland Park. Assembly time for a Model T falls from over twelve hours to around ninety minutes. The engine made mass mobility possible — the assembly line made it affordable. It also makes the work so monotonous that Ford has to double wages to five dollars a day to keep anyone on the line.
• 1921 Tetraethyl lead stops the knock The worst decision in the engine's history Thomas Midgley at General Motors finds that adding tetraethyl lead to petrol eliminates engine knock and allows higher compression ratios. It works beautifully. It also puts lead into the air of every city on earth for the next seventy years, with measurable effects on the intelligence of an entire generation. Midgley later invents CFCs.
• 1939 The Heinkel He 178 flies Combustion without pistons Hans von Ohain's turbojet lifts the He 178 off a runway at Rostock, the first flight by a jet aircraft. It is the same idea Barber patented in 1791: compress, burn continuously, extract work from the exhaust. Within twenty years it has taken long-distance travel away from the piston engine entirely.
• 1957 The Wankel rotary engine runs A triangle instead of a piston Felix Wankel's rotary engine runs for the first time at NSU — no pistons, no valves, a triangular rotor sweeping three chambers at once. It is smooth, compact and powerful for its size, and it burns oil, wears its seals out and fails emissions tests. Mazda persists with it for fifty years out of something close to stubbornness.
• 1970 The US Clean Air Act The engine acquires a regulator Signed on the last day of 1970, the Act sets emissions standards that no existing engine can meet and gives manufacturers a deadline. For the first time the design of the internal combustion engine is driven by law rather than by performance or cost. Every engine built since has been shaped by it.
• 1975 The catalytic converter arrives And leaded petrol starts to die Catalytic converters become effectively standard on American cars for the 1975 model year. They are poisoned by lead, which forces the introduction of unleaded petrol and begins the long removal of tetraethyl lead from the world's fuel supply — one of the largest public health interventions ever made almost by accident.
• 1997 The Toyota Prius goes on sale The engine starts sharing Toyota launches the Prius in Japan, pairing a petrol engine with an electric motor and a battery. Toyota loses money on every one for years. The significance is not the fuel saved but the precedent: for the first time a mass-market car treats the combustion engine as one component among several rather than the whole point of the vehicle.
• 2015 Dieselgate The engine caught lying The EPA issues a notice of violation to Volkswagen: eleven million diesel cars carry software that detects an emissions test and runs clean only while being watched. On the road they emit up to forty times the legal limit of nitrogen oxides. The scandal costs VW over thirty billion euros, sends executives to prison, and destroys the political case for diesel in Europe within about three years.
• 2035 The EU end date for new petrol and diesel cars A deadline, still argued over The European Union legislates that new cars and vans sold from 2035 must be zero-emission at the tailpipe. The date has been contested and partially reopened since it was agreed, with carve-outs debated for synthetic fuels, but it stands as the first firm end date any major market has put on the machine Otto built. Whether it holds is one of the open questions of the decade.