All About Engines

CHAPTER VII The Gas Engine THE idea of an engine which should be self-con- tained, an engine which should need no boiler, is a very old one. Papin and others tried, at the end of the seventeenth century, to produce power by exploding gunpowder inside a cylinder and arrang- ing for the piston to do work as it fell by its own weight. At odd times in the eighteenth century, and very frequently in the nineteenth century, men worked at the problem of the internal combustion engine, trying now gases and again highly inflam- mable volatile liquids. The Patent Office records bear witness to the ingenuity and persistence of these early inventors, and the history of applied science indi- cates their failures by naming Lenoir, a Frenchman, as the first to achieve any degree of success, in i860. Lenoir’s engine was intended to use gas from the town supply, and its manner of working shows, by comparison with present-day engines, how feeble and uncertain was man’s control over the forces which he sought to harness in his service. The cylinder, like that of the earlier steam engines, was set verti- cally, with the shaft above the upper end of the cylinder, and the piston was very heavy, lest by the explosion of a mixture of gas and air underneath it 183