History of Internal Combustion Engine

 

An internal combustion engine is any engine that uses the explosive combustion of fuel to push a piston within a cylinder - the piston's movement turns a crankshaft that then turns the car wheels via a chain or a drive shaft. The different types of fuel commonly used for car combustion engines are gasoline (or petrol), diesel, and kerosene.

 A brief  of the history of the internal combustion engine

 

• 1680 - Dutch physicist, Christian Huygens designed (but never built) an internal combustion engine that was to be fueled with gunpowder.
• 1807 - Francois Isaac de Rivaz of Switzerland invented an internal combustion engine that used a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen for fuel. Rivaz designed a car for his engine - the first internal combustion powered automobile. However, his was a very unsuccessful design.
• 1824 - English engineer, Samuel Brown adapted an old Newcomen steam engine to burn gas, and he used it to briefly power a vehicle up Shooter's Hill in London.
• 1858 - Belgian-born engineer, Jean JosephÉtienne Lenoir invented and patented (1860) a double-acting, electric spark-ignition internal combustion engine fueled by coal gas. In 1863, Lenoir attached an improved engine (using petroleum and a primitive carburetor) to a three-wheeled wagon that managed to complete an historic fifty-mile road trip. (See image at top)
• 1862 - Alphonse Beau de Rochas, a French civil engineer, patented but did not build a four-stroke engine (French patent #52,593, January 16, 1862).
• 1864 - Austrian engineer, Siegfried Marcus*, built a one-cylinder engine with a crude carburetor, and attached his engine to a cart for a rocky 500-foot drive. Several years later, Marcus designed a vehicle that briefly ran at 10 mph that a few historians have considered as the forerunner of the modern automobile by being the world's first gasoline-powered vehicle (however, read conflicting notes below).
• 1873 - George Brayton, an American engineer, developed an unsuccessful two-stroke kerosene engine (it used two external pumping cylinders). However, it was considered the first safe and practical oil engine.
• 1866 - German engineers, Eugen Langen and Nikolaus August Otto improved on Lenoir's and de Rochas' designs and invented a more efficient gas engine.
• 1876 - Nikolaus August Otto invented and later patented a successful four-stroke engine, known as the "Otto cycle".
• 1876 - The first successful two-stroke engine was invented by Sir Dougald Clerk.
• 1883 - French engineer, Edouard Delamare-Debouteville, built a single-cylinder four-stroke engine that ran on stove gas. It is not certain if he did indeed build a car, however, Delamare-Debouteville's designs were very advanced for the time - ahead of both Daimler and Benz in some ways at least on paper.
• 1885 - Gottlieb Daimler invented what is often recognized as the prototype of the modern gas engine - with a vertical cylinder, and with gasoline injected through a carburetor (patented in 1887). Daimler first built a two-wheeled vehicle the "Reitwagen" (Riding Carriage) with this engine and a year later built the world's first four-wheeled motor vehicle.
• 1886 - On January 29, Karl Benz received the first patent (DRP No. 37435) for a gas-fueled car.
• 1889 - Daimler built an improved four-stroke engine with mushroom-shaped valves and two V-slant cylinders.
• 1890 - Wilhelm Maybach built the first four-cylinder, four-stroke engine. 

 

Karl Benz ( The first car maker )

Carl Benz was born in November 26 in the year 1844 in Germany. He was a German national. He had most of his education at the University of Karlsruhe in Germany. He was the founder of the great and well known motor industry called Mercedes- Benz. He was one of the first sets of people to make use of gasoline to power automobiles. He was granted a patent for the first automobile that he made in 1886.

His early education was sponsored by his mother after his father died in a railway accident. While he was studying in poly-technical university in Germany, he focused on lock smiting. But later, he changed his mind about this course of study and went into locomotive engineering just like his dead father. He graduated from the University of Karlsruhe at the age of nineteen.

Karl Benz found himself working with August Ritter at the age of twenty seven. They both launched a mechanical workshop through which they supplied construction materials. The whole idea of this business turned out to be a total failure. He never faired well in several other businesses that he got himself into afterwards.

He later joined a bicycle repair workshop and he joined hands with the owners to form a company that produces industrial machines. The company’s name was Benz and Cie. The company actually grew within a rather short period of time.

Benz decided to create carriages that did not require the help of horses for movement. His knowledge with bicycles was very helpful in this regard. He made use of wire wheels to create the wheels of the carriage. He designed a four stroke engine for the carriage. The engine was placed between the two rear wheels of the carriage. The Benz patent motor wagon was finished in 1885 and this made him the first person to design an automobile that is able to provide its own power. In fact, the automobile became the very first automobile that was available for commercial use.

The automobile was taken on its first long distance travel by Benz’s wife Bertha Benz. The purpose of the journey was to create awareness for the automobile. She was actually successful in her bid. One limitation to the production was its inability to climb high hills. It was also challenging to get fuel in other places apart from pharmacies.

The automobile was taken through various stages of development. The first was the Benz model 1 and the second was Benz model 2. Later, the Benz model 3 was available on the road. The Benz “valo” model came with four wheels instead of three and more modifications brought about the production of a Benz truck in 1895.

Karl Benz died on April 4, 1929 at the age of 84. The Benz Company grew so much that it became the largest automobile company in the whole world in the latter part of 19th century. It was also one of the largest employers of labor during this period.

The Steam Buses

 

 

 

As France fell into the grips of revolution, Cugnot's work was largely forgotten, and the next big innovations in automobile technology came in Britain. Over the next several decades, various inventors worked on steam carriages, which resembled a cross between buses and rail locomotives. William Murdoch created a working model of one of these in 1784, but it wouldn't be until the beginning of the 19th century that Richard Trevithick was able to get a full-sized vehicle on the road.

Steam-powered mass transit had some limited success in the opening years of the 1800s, but it wasn't until the 1820s and 1830s that steam buses began gaining some measure of popularity with the British public. Further technological innovations in this early form of road-based mass transit including better brakes, a more advanced transmission, and improved steering.

The steam buses proved to be something of a dead end, and engineers turned their attention to traction engines, which were slower, more stable machines that were basically just steam locomotives adapted for use on land. This was a move away from the line of innovation that would eventually lead to the car, but even these proved too raucous for the public at large. The Locomotive Act of 1865 said no land vehicle could travel faster than 4 miles per hour, and that all such vehicles had to be preceded by a man waving a red flag and blowing a horn. This was not, as you might imagine, the automotive industry's finest hour.

Cugnot's Car

 

 

 

The 1700s were dominated by various inventors working to perfect the steam engine - Thomas Newcomen and James Watt are probably the most famous of these, but there were many more. But the first person to take a steam engine and place it on a full-sized vehicle was probably a Frenchman named Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot, who between 1769 and 1771 built a steam-powered automobile more than thirty years before the railway's first steam locomotive.

Cugnot's design was, to put it mildly, unique. The contraption weighed about 2.5 tons, had two big wheels in the back and a single thick central wheel at the front, and could seat four people. The boiler was placed well out in the front, which made the vehicle even more fiendishly difficult to control. While its top speed was meant to be about five miles per hour, it never even got close to that fast in practice.

The very first car  The Emperor's Toy

 

 The very first car might well have been the invention of a Flemish missionary named Ferdinand Veriest. Born in Flanders in 1623, Veriest was an accomplished astronomer who left Europe for China in 1658. He helped to modernize the now outmoded Chinese astronomy using recent European innovations, and he was asked by the emperor to become the director of the newly refurbished Beijing Ancient Observatory. What's more, he spoke at least five languages fluently, wrote thirty books, was a skilled diplomat and mapmaker, and tutored the long-lived Kantian Emperor in everything from mathematics to poetry. He was, even by the standards of the time, ridiculously accomplished.