History of the Oil Engine

[Music] This is the story of an idea which began in Cologne in the year 1861. An idea that has given man in one short century the power to move swiftly and safely across the face of the earth in the skies above and the seas beneath. It is the story of the oil engine. Just before Christmas 1861, strange sounds could be heard from a little workshop on Hzogstrasa next door to the hotel dish. They came from a new type of engine which was being built to the order of a young commercial traveler. Invented by a Paris engineer, Jean Lenoir, the engine operated on illuminating gas from the main supply. >> The Lenoir machine works like an ordinary steam engine with the difference that instead of steam, the piston is moved by a mixture of air and gas exploded by being ignited by means of an electric battery. News of this interesting invention had reached the ears of our 30-year-old commercial traveler whose job was to sell tea, coffee, sugar, and other commodities to grocerers in the villages around Cologne. His name was Nicolas Agugust Otto. Like most young men, he dreamed of greater things beyond the daily routine of his job. And the Lenoir engine was the spark which his active mind required. Could he improve on it? Might he be able to design something better? Not being an engineer, Otto was forced to commission the little workshop on Hedog Strasa to build a Lenoir engine. Then he went to work on the finished model, experimenting with it in his spare time. Basically a steam engine in which steam was replaced by burning gas. The Loir engine was inefficient and heavy on fuel, but it was a means of producing power for the small factory. This engine does away with manpower for turning wheels, so often used in Paris industry. It will work as well as a steam engine for small power requirements, and it will be simpler to operate. In the world of 1861, the world of Nicolo's Otto, this problem of cheap power was rapidly becoming more and more important. Otto's world in the middle of the 19th century, steam was king. Steam drove the hissing, shining locomotives of this world. It powered the great iron ships. Otto's world a changing world. In London, the prince consort had died and the nation mourned. In Liverpool, keen manufacturers were selling cutlasses at four shillings and nonsense each to the Confederate States in America's Civil War. In Pennsylvania, a man called Drake was dragging a viscous fluid from the earth. Oil through England stretched the railway lines. Even in London where the underground railway was being built on the cut and cover principle to operate with steam locomotives. Of course, men thought in terms of steam engines, great brassbound steam engines. So it had been for nearly 200 years since the time of Christian Hygens, the famous Dutch physicist. In the late 17th century, Hygen's engine, of which only these rough sketches remain, worked by means of a charge of gunpowder to lift the platform D up the cylinder. But it was not found possible to deliver a sequence of charges to make it operate continuously. After Hygens, another century passed and a significant date emerged in history, 1791, the year of the French Revolution. All men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinction cannot be founded but on common utility. >> In London that year, one of the earliest attempts to design an internal combustion engine was made by an Englishman John Barber. >> It consists of a metallic vessel called a retort. So contrived that when heated by circumambient fire, coal, oil, wood, or other combustible substance may be put therein, and the smoke or vapor may be brought out by a small pipe, and converged in a regular stream into another metallic vessel called an exploder by means of an air pump and a compressor. This engine is wrought by the steam issuing from the mouth of the exploder and may be applied to grinding, rolling and every other mechanical operation. Following close on barber in 1794 came Robert Street. >> To all to whom these presents shall come, I Robert Street of Providence Row in the parish of Christurch in the county of Surrey, varnish maker send greeting. His invention was probably the first example of an engine to run on liquid fuel. As soon as the bottom is heated sufficiently, pour a small quantity of spirits of tar or tarpentine into the funnel. >> 44 years on, from 1794 to 1838, and William Barnett of Brighton patented his version of the internal combustion engine. My said invention consists of producing and employing as a prime mover of machinery the explosive or expansive force of certain inflammable gases as hydrogen or carbureeted hydrogen gas. But it required the genius of Nicolas Otto with the first design of the Lenoir atmospheric gas engine to take the internal combustion engine to its next stage. Even as early as 1861, Otto was convinced that a four-stroke engine was a practical proposition. I felt so sure of myself that I threw caution to the winds and instead of building a single cylinder machine, I immediately started with a design of a larger four-cylinder engine. I had this machine built in her workshop in Cologne. >> Otto told his fianceé Anagosi about his labors with the engine. >> Before leaving town, I spent several hours with Z. We still achieved pretty favorable results, and I think everything will soon be in order. In the spring of that year, Otto gave more and more time to his engine, and Anna Gossi wrote in her diary, >> 15th May 1862, my dear August, resigned from the business of Carl Merton. 13th September 1862. My dear August left for London to go to the industrial exhibition. The four- stroke engine was put into operation in 1862 and was completely ruined the same year by the strong vibration setup. My experience with a four-stroke machine was so depressing, I doubted at the time whether it would be possible to build a direct acting gas engine. Then I made plans for the building of atmospheric gas engines. Otto was about to change the world and the world was changing around him. In England, new ironclads were replacing the old wooden walls. The annual register for 1862 reported the experimental construction of the warrior and black prince have been deemed so successful by the admiral that they have ordered the building of three vessels of greater bulk. Whilst in Cologne, >> we started the new year 1863. Well, and pretty merry, and we drank a toast, hoping that this new year will at last fulfill our burning desires. >> Those first three months of 1863 saw the transition of Otto's engine from the drawing board to an actual model. And in March 1863, Otto's atmospheric engine made its first puffing, rattling turns of the flywheel. Another year an NA auto and company was founded in partnership with a young engineer Oegan Langan while Otto made certain of patenting his atmospheric engine in Britain and other parts of the world. At the Paris World's Fair of 1867, the company invested in a grand exhibit. Langan suggested the advertising it should bear, gas engine, auto and Langan system, offering industry a 1 to three horsepower motor cheaper to operate than the steam engine. So read the firm's sign, and the engine swept the field, winning a gold medal awarded by the French government. The wheels turned on. Within months, Otto's success was widely known. And before long, an agreement was signed by the Crossley brothers of Manchester to make the atmospheric engine in England. The gas motor and fabric douts grants by this agreement to Mess Crossley brothers, the exclusive manufacturer and exclusive agency in respect of the working of all their patents. Crossley's were quick off the mark with their designs and by 1869 the engines were in full production. [Applause] They were installed in factories throughout the country. Europe's industrial revolution was entering a new phase. Hard manual labor, often the backbreaking work of little children, was being replaced by machinery between Prussia and France. War broke out. 1870 saw the terrible siege of Paris when balloons were used for artillery observation. And the zoological gardens were plundered to provide food for the starving people. But in the new world across the Atlantic, oil from the wells of Pennsylvania was already creating new industries and new thoughts in the mind of man. George Brightton, an engineer from Rhode Island, invented an internal combustion engine to run on NAFTA. Known as Brighton's ready motor, it was produced commercially in the 70s when it operated on kerosene. The Braatton motor was rated at 2 horsepower, but its thermal efficiency was much too low for practical purposes. In Cologne, Otto and Langan were now prosperous businessmen. Their company had expanded and they'd built a new factory at Douts on the right bank of the Rine. Now they were making more than 600 atmospheric engines a year. But Otto had never put out of his mind his conception of a compression engine, one in which the gases could be exploded in a controlled pattern. From his office window, he could see the smoke of factory chimneys. Now, if that smoke were an explosive fuel mixture, first there would be a powerful explosion in the rich, thick black portion of the mixture. In Otto's mind, the problem was being solved. Though the theory he evolved from watching the factory smoke was incorrect, it led him on the 9th of May 1876 to the first diagram of the working procedure of the new four-stroke engine. This diagram might be called the birth certificate of the internal combustion engine. From the cylinder of an old steam engine, Otto put together the working model of his new invention. My engine will work on the principle of compressing by one instroke of the piston a charge drawn in by the previous outstroke so that a compressed charge when ignited propel the piston on its next outstroke and the products of combustion are expelled by the next instroke of the piston. The first test reports of the four-stroke engine were excellent. Otto was again quick to obtain patents in England and other countries as well as his own. and the company gas murin fabric deits launched the four-stroke engine Otto's new motor in a blaze of publicity. The great step had been taken. The true internal combustion engine had been born. Born in Germany, it's true. But across the North Sea in Britain, a tinside engineer called James Robson was already putting on paper the details of his two-stroke compression engine. As far back as 1857, 3 years before Lenoir, he had built an atmospheric gas engine, which was destroyed when part of his iron monger shop collapsed during excavations next door. England was in the great period of industrial prosperity of the Victorian age. For Victoria's citizens, it was an era of peace and plenty, secure behind the walls of the Royal Navy. It was a time of great projects like the uprooting of Cleopatra's needle from the banks of the Nile and its voyage by sea from Alexandria to London's embankment. [Music] Temple Bar blocked traffic. So the Victorians took it to pieces and transported it elsewhere. And even in those days there were curious bystanders to watch men digging a hole in the road. Kenny James Robson was one of these great Victorians. His problem was how to build an internal combustion engine for which he need not pay royalties to Nicolas Auto. He solved it by the invention in 1877 of the two-stroke engine which he improved and fully patented in 1879. These were the first two-stroke compression engines and also the first to employ a system of underpist scavenging. About the same time, another inventor, Doug Clark, also conceived the idea of a two-stroke compression engine. This invention has for its object to improve the construction and action of motor engines in which a combustible gas is employed as the source of power. Figure one on sheet one of the accompanying drawings is a side elevation of any improved gas motor engine with the valve cover and part of the admission valve of the power cylinder removed. Figure two is a sectional plan. And in the city of Munich, a 20-year-old German technician completed his course at the Munich Technical Institute. He was a brilliant pupil, so astounding that at the end of his studies, his teachers gathered to offer their congratulations to the young Rudolph Diesel. At Munich, Diesel studied under Dr. Carl Linda, the pioneer of artificial refrigeration. In one of Dr. Linda's lectures, Diesel learned that the best type of steam engine then in use wasted 90% of the energy in the coal and he wrote in his notebook, mechanical theory teaches us that only a part of the heat in the fuel can now be utilized. The possibility suggests itself of putting the energy directly to work. But how can this be done? >> Dr. Linda had sewn the seed, but the answer still lay in Diesel's mind. The key to the solution was in something which Diesel had seen as a boy when he attended the technical school in Agsburg. This was a new type of cigar lighter rather like a pop gun. Air in a cylinder was heated by compressing a plunger to ignite a piece of combustible material. How can this be done? While Diesel was studying and planning in England, the engineers were building. William Priestman with his brother Samuel was developing his oil engine which was patented in 1886. In this engine, the fuel vaporizer was kept at working temperature by the exhaust gases. The charge of kerosene was blown into the vaporizer by a compressed air atomizer and ignited in the cylinder by a spark plug and coil. 1886 cigarettes for ladies were becoming accepted and the new fangled craze of bicycling was all the rage. It was the great age of the music hall, the masher, the stage door Johnny, the time when OS was erected in Piccadilly Circus and Feat Street looked like this. 1890, the year when Herbert Akroyd Stewart, a Buckinghamshire engineer, patented the first airless injection oil engine. An immediate success, the engine was within a year taken over by Richard Hornpin sons and made at Granthm. The first model supplied to a local authority in 1892 gave a lifetime of service before being retired to the Rustin Hornsby Museum at Lincoln. Acroyd Stewart was one of the great pioneers in the development of the oil engine. A practical engineer, he built an engine in which fuel was pumped into a charge of air at about 40 lb per square in. To start the engine, it was necessary to preheat the fuel in the vaporizer. Once this had been done, it ran steadily. [Laughter] But what of Rudolph Diesel? What was happening to him? Working now for Professor Linda in Berlin, Diesel was busily engaged in the manufacturer of icemaking machines. His spare time was devoted to working out a theory for a rational heat engine. A man to whom theory was all important, he plotted every detail of his new engine on paper without ever building it at this stage. In 1892, patent number 67207 was lodged in Berlin by Rudolph Diesel. Compressing in a cylinder by a piston working in a cylinder pure air to such an extent that the temperature thereby produced is far higher than the burning or igniting point of the fuel. >> 1893 and Diesel published his paper on the engine. Though only a part of his theory proved to be correct, this slender pamphlet is one that helped to change the world. Agsburg 1893. The man factory. Here in an experimental shop, Diesel's first engine stood ready for its trial. Impatiently, Diesel waited with an official of the company. Everything was ready. First, it was necessary to turn over the diesel motor by means of a belt drive from another type of machine. A lever was pulled. Vaporized fuel spurted into the superheated compressed air in the cylinder. The explosion resounded through the factory. But far from being a catastrophe, in diesel's eyes, it was a triumph. >> That is what I wanted to know. >> This engine, which Rudolph Diesel tested in 1893, was a single cylinder unit of 150 mm bore and 400 mm stroke. It had no cooling arrangements. And at one time diesel suggested pulverized coal as a possible fuel. Four years of development by man followed the original test. Then in 1897 the man engineers produced this engine now in the Deutsches Museum at Munich. With a bore of 250 mm and a stroke of 400 mm, it attained an output of 20 horsepower at 172 revolutions per minute. But its basic working principle remained true to diesel's original conception that compressing air to a pressure exceeding the igniting point of the fuel will produce a working internal combustion engine. Now oil engines built to the diesel formula rolled steadily from the production lines of the '90s. Slow speed stationary engines, they were built for workshops and factories. It became fashionable to be photographed with your engine. The French did it and so did the Scots when number three in the world production of diesel engines was built in Glasgow by Merlys, a company which ever after was to be associated with the production of oil engines. As the 19th century turned and became the 20th, men continued their search for oil, though their drilling methods were often primitive. The search went on in Los Angeles, at Signal Hill, California, where tanks very similar to those of today held the pulsing streams of oil. And at Spindle, the start of the great Texas oil boom. The 20th century came. Queen Victoria died and in Britain development continued fast on all forms of oil engines. 1900 saw a rail locomotive powered by a 20 horsepower Hornby acid engine. In 195 the Swiss firm of Sulzer built the first direct reversible marine diesel which developed 90 brake horsepower. A year passed and Alfred Bookie another Swiss engineer designed the exhaust driven turbine for pressure charging. This system used the energy in the exhaust gas to drive a turbine coupled to an air compressor which delivered an air charge to the cylinder under pressure. 198 and the Russians built two oil engine ships for service on the Caspian Sea. They were oil tankers transporting the fuel they themselves used. Holland 1910 and the first oceangoing motor ship, the Volcanis, was ordered by the Anglo-Saxon Petroleum Company. In this year too, a Scots engineer James Mckne patented a form of airless fuel injection for high compression ignition engines. The Acrody Stewart engine, which worked at low pressures, also employed a system of airless fuel injection, but pressures in diesel's engine were 10 times higher. The fuel was atomized and blasted by high pressure air into the cylinder. Mckettney's discovery of airless fuel injection for high compression engines was outstanding because it dispensed with the air compressor and air storage tank which were essential components of engines using air blast injection. His invention was the beginning of fuel injection for high compression oil engines. Today of course we also have the jerk pump as well as the common rail system which developed from Mckne's discovery. 1910 was an historic year in every way for oil on the streets of London. The horsedrawn vehicle was giving way to the motorc car, the petrol bus, and the taxi. Within another year, the young first sea lord Winston Churchill told the nation to change the foundation of the navy from British coal to foreign oil was a formidable decision in itself. And in the same speech, Churchill disclosed that the Navy was building 74 submarines to run on oil. And Germany too was building. This first Ubot engine was designed for U19 and her sister ships, the underwater terrors of the sea. Europe went to war on coal and steam and horses and men. But as the pace of battle increased, so did the need for a fuel which was geared to the speed of 20th century warfare. [Applause] With the armistice, another era opened. In the story of the oil engine, the age of development. For every application of power, man turned to oil. On the road, on rail, at sea, the Glennap, the first oceangoing passenger ship to be powered by oil. and in the air. This Bristol Phoenix fighter had a compression ignition oil engine, an early attempt to use the oil engine for aviation. The R 101, launched in 1929, was another important experiment in aerial transport. Powered by five Beardmore 8-cylinder oil engines, she was hailed as the flying machine of the future. Though weather conditions caused her to crash on her maiden voyage, the R 101 stands out as an historic landmark in the oil engines development. Sir Harry Ricardo, a world famous pioneer of oil research, was hard at work in these years between the wars. With his famous E35 experimental engine, he was studying the effects of detonation in the internal combustion motor from 1920 onwards. At his shoram works, Sahari also carried out many experiments in the field of lubrication. Metallological advances produced heatresisting highduty alloys which permitted higher engine speeds and greater operating temperatures. In turn, these called for new developments in lubricating oil. This bearing test machine was among many ingenious devices which the Harry Ricardo created to solve problems of lubrication. By the 30s, oil engine was becoming an accepted part of everyday life. The rail car and the shunting engine burned oil. Farmers tilled their land with compression ignition tractor. And even that familiar figure, the bus was switching to oil. This one, described by the Nottingham Journal for March the 12th, 1930 as the first motor omnibus to run on crude oil, was powered by a Gardner 4L2 engine developing 50 brake horsepower at 1,300 revolutions per minute. Stationary oil engines also grew with the times. This Crossley engine is a good example of a two-stroke diesel of the 30s. And Agsburg, the home of the diesel, built this two-stroke 11cylinder engine of 1,400 brake horsepower in 1935. Yet here in Britain, interest lay in events like the breaking of the land speed record. Slowly, the years of peace were slipping away. >> This country is at war with Germany. World War II gave a tremendous impetus to the development of the oil engine. It was the war of the machines. Machines to do work like digging a trench 6 ft wide and a mile long in 1 hour. Machines to transport men and materials. To power the new devices of the 1940s, to save lives. Many a hospital was grateful to its standby generator sets. Then with peace came the time of reconstruction. Oil engines had grown in size and speed. The oil industry matched the pace of this growth. At Thornton, the great Shell research center. The demand for improved fuels and lubricants was met by a neverending flow of products from test rooms and laboratories. Today, the world runs smoothly on oil, as smoothly as the highspeed express trains of British railway. 85% of the passenger and goods vehicles on the roads of the world are now powered by oil engines. In the past 50 years, brake mean effective pressures have climbed from 80 to more than 200 lb per square in. Thermal efficiency figures have soared from the original 28% of diesel's engine to 40% at the present day. The oil engine ranges from the portable 1 1/2 horsepower single cylinder used in many modern building operations to multi-cylinder monsters of thousands of horsepower. We have taken the dreams of those great inventors of the 19th century and molded them to our own uses. Molded them into the reality of a world of oil power. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Applause] [Music]