1600 to 1860

1600 to 1860

• 17th century: Christiaan Huygens used gunpowder to drive water pumps, to supply 3000 cubic meters of water/day for the Versailles palace gardens, essentially creating the first rudimentary internal combustion piston engine.
• 1780's: Alessandro Volta built a toy electric pistol^[2] 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 Steele built a compressionless engine whose principle of operation would dominate for nearly a century.
• 1798: Tippu Sultan, the ruler of the city-state of Mysore in India, uses the first iron rockets against the British Army.
• 1807: Nicéphore Niépce installed his 'moss, coal-dust and resin' fuelled 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 1780's: Alessandro Volta above.) ^[3]

• 1823: Samuel Brown patented the first internal combustion engine to be applied industrially. It was compressionless and based on what Hardenberg calls the "Leonardo cycle," which, as the name implies, was already out of date at that time.

• 1824: French physicist Sadi Carnot established the thermodynamic theory of idealized heat engines. This scientifically established the need for compression to increase the difference between the upper and lower working temperatures.
• 1826 April 1: American Samuel Morey received a patent for a compressionless "Gas or Vapor Engine."

• 1838: a patent was granted to William Barnett (English). This was the first recorded suggestion of in-cylinder compression.

• 1854-57: Eugenio Barsanti & Felice Matteucci invented an engine that was rumored to be the first 4-cycle engine, but the patent was lost.^{[note 1]}

Early internal combustion engines were used to power farm equipment similar to these models.

This internal combustion engine was an integral aspect of the patent for the first patented automobile, made by Karl Benz on January 29, 1886

Karl Benz

• 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.

1860-1910

1860-1910

• 1860: Belgian Jean Joseph Etienne Lenoir (1822–1900) produced a gas-fired internal combustion engine similar in appearance to a horizontal double-acting steam beam engine, with cylinders, pistons, connecting rods, and flywheel in which the gas essentially took the place of the steam. This was the first internal combustion engine to be produced in numbers.
• 1861 The earliest confirmed patent of the 4-cycle engine, by Alphonse Beau de Rochas. A year earlier, Christian Reithmann made an engine which may have been the same, but it's unknown since he didn't clearly patent it.
• 1862: German inventor Nikolaus Otto was the first to build and sell the engine. He designed an indirect-acting free-piston compressionless engine whose greater efficiency won the support of Eugen Langen and then most of the market, which at that time was mostly for small stationary engines fueled by lighting gas.
• 1870: In Vienna, Siegfried Marcus put the first mobile gasoline engine on a handcart.
• 1876: Nikolaus Otto, working with Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach, improved the four-cycle engine. The German courts, however, did not hold his patent to cover all in-cylinder compression engines or even the four-stroke cycle, and after this decision, in-cylinder compression became universal.
• 1878 Dugald Clerk designed the first two-stroke engine. He patented it in England in 1881.
• 1879: Karl Benz, working independently, was granted a patent for his internal combustion engine, a reliable two-stroke gas engine, based on the same technology as De Rochas's design of the four-stroke engine. Later, Benz designed and built his own four-stroke engine that was used in his automobiles, which were developed in 1885, patented in 1886, and became the first automobiles in production.
• 1882: James Atkinson invented the Atkinson cycle engine. Atkinson’s engine had one power phase per revolution together with different intake and expansion volumes, making it more efficient than the Otto cycle.

1910-1960

1910-1960

• 1916: Auguste Rateau suggests using exhaust-powered compressors to improve high-altitude performance, the first example of the turbocharger.
• 1920: William Joseph Stern reports to the Royal Air Force that there is no future for the turbine engine in aircraft. He bases his argument on the extremely low efficiency of existing compressor designs. Due to Stern's eminence, his paper is so convincing there is little official interest in gas turbine engines anywhere, although this does not last long.
• 1921: Maxime Guillaume patents the axial-flow gas turbine engine. It uses multiple stages in both the compressor and turbine, combined with a single very large combustion chamber.
• 1923: Edgar Buckingham at the United States National Bureau of Standards publishes a report on jets, coming to the same conclusion as W.J. Stern, that the turbine engine is not efficient enough. In particular he notes that a jet would use five times as much fuel as a piston engine.^[8]
• 1925: The Hesselman engine is introduced by Swedish engineer Jonas Hesselman represented the first use of direct gasoline injection on a spark-ignition engine.^[9][10]
• 1925: Wilhelm Pape patents a constant-volume engine design.
• 1926: Alan Arnold Griffith publishes his groundbreaking paper Aerodynamic Theory of Turbine Design, changing the low confidence in jet engines. In it he demonstrates that existing compressors are "flying stalled", and that major improvements can be made by redesigning the blades from a flat profile into an airfoil, going on to mathematically demonstrate that a practical engine is definitely possible and showing how to build a turboprop.
• 1926 - Robert Goddard launches the first liquid fueled rocket
• 1927: Aurel Stodola publishes his "Steam and Gas Turbines" - basic reference for jet propulsion engineers in the USA.
• 1927: A testbed single-shaft turbo-compressor based on Griffith's blade design is tested at the Royal Aircraft Establishment.
• 1929: Frank Whittle's thesis on jet engines is published
• 1930: Schmidt patents a pulse-jet engine in Germany.
• 1936: French engineer René Leduc, having independently re-discovered René Lorin's design, successfully demonstrates the world's first operating ramjet.
• 1937: The first successful run of Sir Frank Whittle's gas turbine for jet propulsion.
• March, 1937: The Heinkel HeS 1 experimental hydrogen fueled centrifugal jet engine is tested at Hirth.
• July 18, 1942: The Messerschmitt Me 262 first jet engine flight
• 1954: Felix Wankel's first working prototype DKM 54 of the Wankel engine

Twentieth century

Twentieth century

• 1909, the Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes develops the concept of enthalpy for the measure of the "useful" work that can be obtained from a closed thermodynamic system at a constant pressure.
• 1913 - Nikola Tesla patents the Tesla turbine based on the Boundary layer effect.
• 1926 - Robert Goddard of the USA launches the first liquid fuel rocket.
• 1929 - Felix Wankel patents the Wankel rotary engine (U.S. Patent 2,988,008)
• 1933 - French physicist Georges J. Ranque invents the Vortex tube , a fluid flow device without moving parts, that can separate a compressed gas into hot and cold streams.
• 1937 - Hans von Ohain builds a gas turbine
• 1940 - Hungarian Bela Karlovitz working for the Westinghouse company in the USA files the first patent for a magnetohydrodynamic generator, which can generate electricity directly from a hot moving gas
• 1942 - R.S. Gaugler of General Motors patents the idea of the Heat pipe, a heat transfer mechanism that combines the principles of both thermal conductivity and phase transition to efficiently manage the transfer of heat between two solid interfaces.
• 1950s - The Philips company develop the Stirling-cycle Stirling Cryocooler which converts mechanical energy to a temperature difference.
• 1962 - William J. Buehler and Frederick Wang discover the Nickel titanium alloy known as Nitinol which has a shape memory dependent on its temperature.
• 1992 - The first practical magnetohydrodynamic generators are built in Serbia and the USA.

Nineteenth century

Nineteenth century

• 1802 - Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac develops his law which describes the relationship between a gas's pressure and temperature.
• 1807 - Nicéphore Niépce installed his 'moss, coal-dust and resin' fuelled Pyréolophore internal combustion engine in a boat and powered up the river Saone in France.
• 1807 - Franco/Swiss engineer François Isaac de Rivaz built an engine powered by the internal combustion of hydrogen and oxygen mixture and used it to power a wheeled vehicle.^[3]
• 1816 - Robert Stirling invented his hot air Stirling engine
• 1824 - Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot developed the Carnot cycle, a hypothetical engine that is the basic theoretical model for all heat engines. This gives the first early insight into the second law of thermodynamics.
• 1834 - Jacob Perkins, obtained the first patent for a vapor-compression refrigeration system.
• 1850s - Rudolf Clausius sets out the concept of the thermodynamic system and positioned entropy as being that in any irreversible process a small amount of heat energy δQ is incrementally dissipated across the system boundary
• 1859 - Etienne Lenoir developed the first commercially successful internal combustion engine, a single-cylinder, two-stroke engine with electric ignition of illumination gas (not gasoline).
• 1861 - Alphonse Beau de Rochas of France originates the concept of the four-stroke internal-combustion engine by emphasizing the previously unappreciated importance of compressing the fuel–air mixture before ignition.
• 1861 - Nikolaus Otto patents a two-stroke internal combustion engine building on Lenoir's.
• 1872 - Pulsometer steam pump, a pistonless pump, patented by Charles Henry Hall. It was inspired by the Savery steam pump.
• 1873 - The British chemist Sir William Crookes invents the light mill a device which turns the radiant heat of light dirrectly into rotary motion.
• 1877 - Theorist Ludwig Boltzmann visualized a probabilistic way to measure the entropy of an ensemble of ideal gas particles, in which he defined entropy to be proportional to the logarithm of the number of microstates such a gas could occupy.
• 1877 - Nikolaus Otto patents a practical four-stroke internal combustion engine (U.S. Patent 194,047)
• 1883 - Samuel Griffin of Bath UK patents a six-stroke internal combustion engine. ^[4]
• 1884 - Charles A. Parsons builds the first modern Steam turbine.
• 1886 - Herbert Akroyd Stuart builds the prototype Hot bulb engine, an oil fueled Homogeneous Charge Compression Ignition engine similar to the later diesel but with a lower compression ratio and running on a fuel air mixture.
• 1892 - Rudolf Diesel patents the Diesel engine (U.S. Patent 608,845) where a high compression ratio generates hot gas which then ignites an injected fuel.

Timeline of heat engine technology

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Thermodynamics

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This Timeline of heat engine technology describes how heat engines have been known since antiquity but have been made into increasingly useful devices since the seventeenth century as a better understanding of the processes involved was gained. They continue to be developed today.
In engineering and thermodynamics, a heat engine performs the conversion of heat energy to mechanical work by exploiting the temperature gradient between a hot "source" and a cold "sink". Heat is transferred to the sink from the source, and in this process some of the heat is converted into work.
A heat pump is a heat engine run in reverse. Work is used to create a heat differential. The timeline includes devices classed as both engines and pumps, as well as identifying significant leaps in human understanding.