Internal Combustion Engine: Inventor & History

Internal Combustion Engine: Inventor & History

What Is an Internal Combustion Engine?

An internal combustion engine uses a fuel that combusts in the presence of oxygen and a spark. The explosive combustion pushes a piston in a cylinder. The piston's movement drives a crankshaft that turns the wheels on a vehicle or blades on a turbine. Internal combustion engines are most commonly used to fuel automobiles, motorcycles, ships, airplanes, helicopters and coal-powered trains.

You can think of a shotgun as an internal combustion engine of sorts. It involves a fuel, in the form of gun powder, exploding in the presence of oxygen and a spark. This explosion creates a force in a cylinder that produces work. The work performs in the pushes a bullet forward at high speed. In an internal combustion engine the bullet is replaced with a piston that is forcefully shot forward. Because the piston is connected to a crankshaft, the linear motion of the piston is transformed into the rotational motion of a wheel or turbine.

Image of Crankshaft

Who Invented the Internal Combustion Engine?

Whereas a number of scientists and engineers paved the way to the invention of the internal combustion engine, the first internal combustion engine to be produced commercially was invented by Jean Joseph Etienne Lenoir. He was born in 1822 in Mussy-la-Ville, which was then in Luxembourg, but now part of Belgium. In the early 1850s he immigrated to Paris, France, where he worked as an engineer, experimenting with electricity.

Jean Joseph Etienne Lenoir

In 1860 he patented a gas-fired, single-cylinder internal combustion engine that he mounted to a three-wheeled carriage. Although it worked reasonably fine, it did not have fuel efficiency, made a lot of noise and overheated frequently. The engine would stop altogether if water was not applied to cool it down, and it required a tank that stored the gaseous fuel.

In 1863 he built a three-wheeled carriage that ran on petrol. In a demonstration in Paris, the carriage covered a distance of 7 miles in about 3 hours, which amounts to an average speed of 2 mph. Not too fast at all! What was so impressive about a carriage than moved so slowly? Well the fact that it moved powered by an engine and not a horse or a mule made it quite an innovation. His engines actually met with relatively good success, with about 500 built in total, but they clearly left room for a lot of improvement.

Lenoir became a French citizen in 1870 for assisting the French during the Franco-Prussian War. In 1881 he received the Légion d'honneur, an award for excellence, for developments he made in telegraphy. Despite practically inventing the automobile, Lenoir was destitute in his later years. He died in France in 1900.

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