Internal combustion engine
An engine that burns fuel inside the cylinder itself, so the expanding combustion gases push directly on the piston. Nikolaus Otto's four-stroke cycle — intake, compression, power, exhaust — made it practical.
L'archive profonde est pour l'instant rédigée en anglais — des traductions vérifiées font partie de la feuille de route. La fonction de traduction de votre navigateur fonctionne bien sur cette page.
✦ Attendez, vraiment ?
The four-stroke cycle that now runs in more than a billion vehicles was first written down by a Frenchman who never built it. Alphonse Beau de Rochas patented the principle on paper in 1862 — fourteen years before Otto's first working engine — and forgot it. When the dormant pamphlet resurfaced in 1886, it stripped Otto of his German patent, even though he had worked out the cycle entirely on his own.
Ce que c'est
An internal combustion engine burns its fuel inside a sealed cylinder and lets the burning gas do the pushing directly on a piston — no boiler, no separate furnace, no working fluid carried around. Otto's four-stroke cycle is the arrangement that made it run smoothly and efficiently. Each cycle is four sweeps of the piston, two full turns of the crankshaft:
1. **Intake** — the piston slides down and draws a mixture of fuel and air into the cylinder. 2. **Compression** — the piston rises and squeezes that mixture into a fraction of its volume. This is Otto's key move. 3. **Power** — near the top, a spark or flame ignites the compressed charge; it burns almost instantly, and the pressure jump slams the piston down. This is the only stroke that makes power. 4. **Exhaust** — the piston rises again and pushes the burnt gas out.
A heavy flywheel stores enough momentum from the power stroke to carry the piston through the three unpowered strokes to the next firing.
Pourquoi cela a compté
The steam engine turned fire into motion, but it carried its fire outside the cylinder, in a boiler that had to be lit, watched, and stoked, and it was heavy for the power it gave. Burning the fuel *inside* the cylinder threw away the boiler and most of the weight, and — because the fuel could be a liquid poured from a tank — it made an engine small and self-contained enough to sit under a carriage seat or in the nose of an aeroplane. Everything that carries its own power plant and goes where there are no rails or wires — the car, the truck, the tractor, the propeller aircraft, the portable generator — descends from this.
Ce que cela a débloqué
Otto's engine was an immediate success — more than thirty thousand were built within a decade — but its true reach came through the liquid-fuelled descendants. Within a single generation the petrol engine put Karl Benz's and Daimler's automobiles on the road (1885–86), the Wright brothers' aeroplane in the air (1903), and eventually motorised farming, freight, and warfare. It also bound civilization to refined petroleum as its portable fuel, and to the atmosphere as the place its exhaust goes — the defining bargain, and the defining problem, of the twentieth-century world.
Version minimale viable
Otto's 1876 'Silent' engine: a single horizontal cylinder burning a coal-gas-and-air mixture, drawn in and compressed by the piston, fired by a flame or spark near top of stroke, with a heavy flywheel to carry it through the three unpowered strokes. One power stroke every two revolutions.
Cette fiche attend encore son récit complet — les cartographes sont à l'œuvre. Sa place dans le graphe est déjà vérifiée.
Fils passant par cette capacité
Why did flight take 2,000 years after kites?7 étapesSources
- — C. Lyle Cummins Jr., *Internal Fire: The Internal-Combustion Engine 1673–1900* (rev. ed. 1989)
- — Nikolaus Otto, German Patent (DRP) on the four-stroke gas engine (1877); Alphonse Beau de Rochas, French Patent 52,593 (1862)
- — Encyclopædia Britannica, 'Nikolaus Otto' and 'Otto engine'
Quelque chose d'inexact sur cette page ? Chaque affirmation ici est censée survivre à la contestation. Suggérer une correction →