page_title: History of the internal combustion engine
section_title: Prior to 1860
hierarchical_section_title: History of the internal combustion engine / Prior to 1860
caption_attribution_description: Water raising device
context_page_description: Various scientists and engineers contributed to the development of internal combustion engines. In 1791, John Barber developed a turbine. In 1794 Thomas Mead patented a gas engine. Also in 1794 Robert Street patented an internal-combustion engine, which was also the first to use the liquid fuel and built an engine around that time. In 1798, John Stevens designed the first American internal combustion engine. In 1807, French engineers Nicéphore and Claude Niépce ran a prototype internal combustion engine, using controlled dust explosions, the Pyréolophore. This engine powered a boat on the Saône river, France. The same year, the Swiss engineer François Isaac de Rivaz built and patented a hydrogen and oxygen powered internal-combustion engine. The fuel was stored in a balloon and the spark was electrically ignited by a hand-operated trigger. Fitted to a crude four-wheeled wagon, François Isaac de Rivaz first drove it 100 meters in 1813, thus making history as the first car-like vehicle known to have been powered by an internal-combustion engine.
context_section_description: 202 BCE–220 CE: The earliest hand-operated cranks appeared in China during the Han Dynasty.
  3rd century CE: Evidence of a crank and connecting rod mechanism dates to the Hierapolis sawmill in Byzantine Asia Minor , then part of the Roman Empire.
  6th century: Several sawmills use a crank and connecting rod mechanism in Asia Minor and Syria, then part of the Byzantine Empire.
  9th century: The crank appears in the mid-9th century in several of the hydraulic devices described by the Banū Mūsā brothers in their Book of Ingenious Devices.
  1206: Al-Jazari invented an early crankshaft, which he incorporated with a crank-connecting rod mechanism in his twin-cylinder pump. Like the modern crankshaft, Al-Jazari's mechanism consisted of a wheel setting several crank pins into motion, with the wheel's motion being circular and the pins moving back-and-forth in a straight line. The crankshaft described by al-Jazari transforms continuous rotary motion into a linear reciprocating motion.
  17th century: Samuel Morland experiments with using gunpowder to drive water pumps.
  17th century: Christiaan Huygens designs gunpowder to drive water pumps, to supply 3000 cubic meters of water/day for the Versailles palace gardens, essentially creating the first idea of a rudimentary internal combustion piston engine.
  1780s: Alessandro Volta built a toy electric pistol in which an electric spark exploded a mixture of air and hydrogen, firing a cork from the end of the gun.
  1791: John Barber receives British patent #1833 for A Method for Rising Inflammable Air for the Purposes of Producing Motion and Facilitating Metallurgical Operations. In it he describes a turbine.
  1794: Robert Street built a compressionless engine. He was also the first to use liquid fuel in an internal combustion engine.
  1794: Thomas Mead patents a gas engine.
  1798: John Stevens builds the first double-acting, crankshaft-using internal combustion engine.
  1801: Philippe LeBon D'Humberstein comes up with the use of compression in a two-stroke engine.
  1807: Nicéphore Niépce installed his "moss, coal-dust and resin" fueled Pyréolophore internal combustion engine in a boat and powered up the river Saône in France. A patent was subsequently granted by Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte on 20 July 1807.
  1807: Swiss engineer François Isaac de Rivaz built an internal combustion engine powered by a hydrogen and oxygen mixture, and ignited by electric spark. (See 1780s: Alessandro Volta above.)
  1823: Samuel Brown patented the first internal combustion engine to be applied industrially, the gas vacuum engine. The design used atmospheric pressure, and was demonstrated in a carriage and a boat, and in 1830 commercially to pump water to the upper level of the Croydon Canal.
  1824: French physicist Sadi Carnot established the thermodynamic theory of idealized heat engines.
  1826 April 1: American Samuel Morey received a patent for a compressionless "Gas or Vapor Engine." This is also the first recorded example of a carburetor.
  1833: Lemuel Wellman Wright, UK patent no. 6525, table-type gas engine. Double-acting gas engine, first record of water-jacketed cylinder.
  1838: A patent was granted to William Barnett, UK patent no. 7615 April 1838. According to Dugald Clerk, this was the first recorded use of in-cylinder compression.
  1853–1857: Eugenio Barsanti and Felice Matteucci invented and patented the Barsanti-Matteucci engine, an internal combustion engine using the free-piston principle in an atmospheric two cycle engine.
  1856: in Florence at Fonderia del Pignone (now Nuovo Pignone, later a subsidiary of General Electric), Pietro Benini realized a working prototype of the Italian engine supplying 5 HP. In subsequent years he developed more powerful engines—with one or two pistons—which served as steady power sources, replacing steam engines.
  1857: Eugenio Barsanti and Felice Matteucci describe the principles of the free piston engine where the vacuum after the explosion allows atmospheric pressure to deliver the power stroke (British patent no. 1625).
caption: al-Jazari's hydropowered saqiya chain pump device
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