Car Engine History
The most popular car engine in use nowadays is known as the internal combustion engine. Here the engine converts fuel into movement that drives a piston. This piston then causes a crankshaft to turn which causes the wheels to move.
The development of this engine goes back for centuries. It is thought that the earliest design for the internal combustion was made in the 1680s by Christian Huygens, a Dutch Physicist. Huygens's engine was never constructed and was designed to run on gun powder.
Things developed more in the 1800s. A Swiss inventor, Francois Isaac de Rivaz, tried to make an engine that would run on hydrogen and oxygen. He even designed a car that would run on the engine however the designs did not work well. In the 1850s and 60s a Belgian engineer, Jean Lenoir, built both an engine that ran on coal gas and an engine that used petroleum and that had a basic carburettor built in. This design was more successful.
Further developments in this century saw the four-stroke engine patented (Alphonse de Rochas) and the building of a vehicle that was powered by gasoline (Siegfried Marcus). Then in 1976 Nikolaus Otto invented a four-stroke engine that worked. This would come to be called the 'Otto cycle'. And, Sir Dougald Clerk invented a two-stroke engine.
In the 1880s Gottlieb Daimler built an engine that proved to be the cornerstone of the modern internal combustion engine and by 1890 the world had its first four-stroke and four cylinder engine (Wilhelm Maybach). The addition of electric starting in the 1920s basically gave the car engine prototype that is still used today.