Hippomobile

The **Hippomobile** is an automobile invented by Étienne Lenoir in 1863 which carried its own internal combustion engine. It was based on his 1860 invention, the Lenoir gas engine.

# History

In 1863 the Hippomobile, powered by one cylinder internal combustion engine, made a test drive from Paris to Joinville-le-Pont, covering about eleven miles in less than three hours. This was a fair achievement at the time.

By 1859, Lenoir's experimentation with electricity led him to develop the first internal combustion engine which burned a mixture of coal gas and air ignited by a "jumping sparks" ignition system by Ruhmkorff coil, and which he patented in 1860. The engine was a steam engine converted to burn gaseous fuel and thus pushed in both directions. The fuel mixture was not compressed before ignition (a system invented in 1801 by Philippe LeBon who developed the use of illuminating gas to light Paris), and the engine was quiet but inefficient, with a power stroke at each end of the cylinder. In 1863, the Hippomobile, with a coal gas fueled, one cylinder, internal combustion engine, made a test drive from Paris to Joinville-le-Pont, covering 18 km in 3 hours.

Lenoir was an engineer at Petiene et Cie (Petiene & Company), who supported him in his founding of the companies of *Corporation Lenoir-Gautier et Cie engines Paris* and *Société des Moteurs Lenoir* in Paris in 1859, with a capitalization of two million *franc*s and a factory in the *Rue de la Roquette*, to develop the engine, and a three-wheeled carriage constructed to use it. Although it ran reasonably well, the engine was fuel inefficient, extremely noisy, tended to overheat, and, if sufficient cooling water was not applied, seize up. German engineer H. Boetius describes in an 1861 essay that the Lenoir engine's fuel consumption was falsely advertised. Instead of the promised 0.5 m3/PSh (0.68 m3/kWh), the fuel consumption (in a Kuhn-built Lenoir engine) was rather in the 1.2–5.4 m3/PSh (1.63–7.34 m3/kWh) range.

Nevertheless, *Scientific American* reported in September 1860 that the Parisian newspaper *Cosmos* had pronounced the steam age over. By 1865, 143 had been sold in Paris alone, and production of Lenoir Gas Engines, by Reading Gas Works in London, had begun.

Lenoir had completed work on his engine in 1859 and had a grand unveiling on 23 January 1860, for twenty guests. In his speech he said, "If it works, I will add carburetor heating, at a constant level, which will allow the use of petrol, or gasoline, or tar, or any resin". He turned on the illuminating gas valve, pushed the flywheel, and the engine came to life. In 1860, Lenoir received a patent for "an air motor expanded by gas combustion" from Conservatoire national des arts et métiers, no. N.43624

Dates vary from 1860 to 1863 on when Lenoir built his automobiles. It is apparent that he built a small carriage with his engine around 1860. His automobile of 1862 was capable of 3 kilometers per hour.

In 1861, he put one of his engines in a boat. In 1863, Lenoir demonstrated a second three-wheeled carriage, the **Hippomobile**, little more than a wagon body set atop a tricycle platform. It was powered by a 2543 cc (155 in3; 180×100 mm, 7.1×3.9in) 1.5 hp, "liquid hydrocarbon" (petroleum) engine with a primitive carburettor which was patented in 1886. It successfully covered the 11 km (7 mi) from Paris to Joinville-le-Pont and back in about ninety minutes each way, an average speed less than that of a walking man (though doubtless there were breakdowns). This succeeded in attracting the attention of Tsar Alexander II, and one was sent to Russia, where it vanished; Lenoir was not pleased. In 1863, he sold his patents to Compagnie parisienne de gaz and turned to motorboats instead, building the first naptha-fueled four-cycle, fueled by ligroin (heavy naptha), in 1888. Jules Verne wrote in his 1863 novel Paris in the Twentieth Century of boulevards crowded with horseless carriages, "the Lenoir machine applied to locomotion."