Gasoline Powered Cars and the Internal Combustion Engine
In cars the internal combustion engine uses three main types of fuels: kerosene, diesel and the petrol or gasoline fuels.
In 1680 the first internal combustion engine was designed by Christian Huygens who was a physician from the Netherlands and wanted to fuel his engine with gunpowder but never built it. In 1807 a physician from Switzerland invented an internal combustion engine which was fueled by the mixture of oxygen and hydrogen (water). Francois Isaac de Rivaz produced an automobile for his engine but his design was an unsuccessful one but he created the first car which was motorized by an internal combustion engine. Between 1860 and 1863 an engineer built an automobile which was powered by an internal combustion engine which was fueled by petroleum and an undeveloped and basic carburetor, the engine was later attached to a wagon (in the same year) which could complete fifty miles on a road trip, the name of the engineer was Jean Joseph Etienne Lenoir. Several years after 1864 and engineer from Austria made the forerunner of modern automobiles because he built the first internal combustion engine which was powered by gasoline and the vehicle could go with ten miles per hour, the name was Siegfried Marcus. In 1876 Nikolaus August Otto produced the first four-stroke combustion engine. After these inventors other great ones came such as Nicolaus Otto, Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler who will be explained later in this essay.
Gottlieb Daimler worked with a partner whose name was Wilhelm Maybach who helped him designing and building the vehicles and engines. Daimler worked in August Otto’s co-owned company which gave him access to the inventions of Otto such as his prototype engine. Daimler raised the stakes by experimenting and taking the engine a step further to the current ones we use nowadays and patented it into his self-designed automobile. From 1885 to 1886 Daimler and Maybach designed a new smaller engine which led to a revolution in car design and Daimler adapted a stagecoach to the new engine creating the first four-wheeled automobile. In 1889 Daimler and Maybach built a car which could obtain a speed of ten miles per hour and had a four gear transmission. The inventions of Daimler made people to consider that he is the first inventor of a practical combustion engine.
Nicolaus Otto is one of the most important engineers in the automobile history because invented a very effective gasoline engine which was called the “Otto Cycle Engine” and was built into a motorcycle which was adapted to the engine.
Karl Benz was a mechanical engineer in Germany and he was the builder of the “first practical automobile” which was powered by an internal combustion engine. In 1886 he received the first patent for his gasoline fueled car which was a three wheeled automobile. Later in 1891 Benz produced his first four-wheeler car. Although he started a company which grew into one of the greatest automobile manufacturers of the 1900, the name of the company was ‘Benz & Cie’. The company is still producing automobiles under the name of Mercedes-Benz.
The History of Electric Power and Electric Vehicles or Hybrid automobiles
Between the years of 1832 and 1839 Scotland’s Robert Anderson produced the first carriage powered by an electric engine. A bite size electric vehicle was built by Christopher Becker who was the assistant of Professor Stratingh who produced the plans for the vehicle. Around 1839 Moritz von Jacobi built an electric boat which he tried to sail on the Neva. The engine was powered by an electromagnet carrying current from a battery consisting Grove cells which gave the engine one horsepower to go with and creating one of the first electric powered vehicles and electric engine. In the year 1839 Robert Anderson built the first carriage powered by an electric engine.
In 1870 David Salomon designed and built an automobile powered by an electric engine but due to the big and heavy batteries in the engine the performance was poor.
Dr. Werner von Siemens was the builder of the first electric railway in the year 1879. The electric engine was drawing power from the rails which were insulated and were linked to a generator.
In 1897 the first electric powered vehicle was used in a taxi company, the Bersey Cab built by a designer called Walter Bersey.
In the year 1899 Dr. Ferdinand Porche and a young person called Jacob Lohner built and designed a hybrid car using a petrol engine to recharge the batteries of the car. It appeared at the ‘World Exhibition of Paris’ in the year 1900.
In 1903 another hybrid vehicle was built which was named the Krieger hybrid which was looked and worked nearly on the same way as the Lohner Porche.
By the 1920’s manufacturers realized that hybrid cars can be sold to many people so the hybrid vehicle production started. Some great automobiles were produced such as the ‘Auto-mixte’ made in Belgium in 1907-1908 which had no gearbox and the batteries regenerated themselves using and engine and a dynamo, the technology used in the vehicle was called the ‘Henri-Piper system’. Another ‘petrol-electric hybrid vehicle’ was built in 1905 by H. Piper whose idea was to power an internal combustion engine by an electric engine so the ice can be augmented so the vehicle can accelerate to twenty-five miles per hour in ten seconds which was less than half of the usual thirty seconds. Advances using petrol and ice were made by Henry Ford which ‘gradually killed’ the Hybrid automobiles until the 1960 because Henry Ford’s automobile was cheaper than any hybrid automobile of the time.
Hybrid cars appeared in the 1960’s such as the GM512 in 1965 and the VW Taxi in 1973 which were produced when the ‘Arab Oil embargo’ was awakened.
Solar Powered vehicles
Solar powered cars are a type of hybrid vehicles because it does not use gasoline as a fuel and its power source does not damage the environment. There are solar powered car races in different states and their top speed is sixty-nine kilometers per hour. The solar power is also used by the vehicles gone to outer space to investigate and see the layers of Mars.
Conclusion
Automobiles developed further and nowadays there are many automobile producer companies such as BMW or Mercedes-Benz and many others. Now nearly every family has a car to travel with but this mass production of automobiles is causing damage to the planet so the hybrid powered automobiles are coming back such as the new Lexus hybrid drives and the solar powered cars so the damage to the planet and the ozone layer can be cured and the harm of fossil fuels will not come back if every person will use hybrid cars or solar powered ones.