The Decline of the Age of Steam, Part 1: Internal Combustion

<< Before this: Steam revolution: turbine

Now, in the first decades of the 21st century, steam turbines can still be found (although they are almost never seen), but steam piston engines are an archaic relic. Almost all the moving machines we see—cars, trucks, lawn mowers, planes in the sky, and boats on the water—get their energy directly from the combustion of a fuel (such as gasoline) inside a cylinder: internal combustion, as opposed to external combustion, which produces steam. from fuel burned outside the boiler.

The internal combustion engine requires a separate chapter in the story of the age of steam for two reasons. More obvious is the role that the first engine played in the death of the second. The internal combustion engine can, with some justice, be accused of killing the steam engine. Another, less obvious reason is that internal combustion developed in response to and under the shadow of steam. Throughout the nineteenth century, the internal combustion engine remained a newcomer, searching for its place in a world where steam had become the default choice for anyone needing mechanical power.[1].

Early internal combustion: a motive without means

The history of the internal combustion engine is extremely complex and goes back centuries; it branches, converges, and branches again as engineers rethink and rework design ideas to solve new problems and fill new niches.[2] It can, of course, be traced back at least to Huygens's 17th-century gunpowder engine; The modern internal combustion engine can be seen as a revenge of the gunpowder engine, just as the modern water turbine was a revenge of the horizontal water wheel. To tell the full story in detail would require another article at least as long as this one, so I will present only a kaleidoscope of the most significant moments and trends, as they relate to our main story.

A thorough history of the internal combustion engine (which I will henceforth abbreviate to “ICE” to spare the reader long words [в английском языке двигатель внутреннего сгорания, internal combustion engine, сокращается до аббревиатуры ICE, что означает «лёд», поэтому автор оригинала считает её нелепой / прим. перев.]) includes a list of inventors and inventions stretching back to the 18th century or even earlier. Almost all of them disappeared into obscurity along with their cars. This picture should already be familiar to you: a steam engine, a steamship, a locomotive; In each case, you can find decades of history of inventors pursuing the same idea, but not creating anything that they could convince others to use.

In the case of the internal combustion engine, the likely motivation for improvement for most early inventors was simplicity and ease of use: the steam engine was large, complex, consisting of many parts that required careful maintenance. The boiler, in particular, had a dangerous tendency to explode under high pressure. The ability to dispense with a furnace and boiler and simply burn fuel inside the working cylinder seemed a very attractive prospect[3]. In addition, the boilers were not only large and potentially dangerous, but also had a peculiar inertia. You couldn't just turn on a steam engine and start using it, you first had to create a steam pressure, and while this pressure was building, you burned excess fuel. Thus, steam engines required constant use: this was fine for factory owners who wanted to keep their expensive investments running day and night, but small craftsmen and workshops that needed power occasionally were less happy in the age of steam.

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, there was another reason to look for a source of energy elsewhere than in steam: the advent of gas lighting. Gas, quite obviously, burned easily, and by mid-century it was available at will from city gas systems in every major urban center in Europe and the United States. What if you could give up not only the furnace and boiler, but also the coal warehouse, and the transportation costs of delivering fuel to the place of work, and the labor costs of lighting the engine?

Volta's electric pistol, developed in the 1770s and demonstrated throughout Europe, may have played the same role in the early development of internal combustion engines as the vacuum pump did for the steam engine: a spectacular demonstration that inspired new inventive ideas. The gun used a spark at two electrodes to detonate a charge of hydrogen gas in a glass container with a stopper, causing the stopper to fly across the room. An inquisitive mind could figure out that if you quickly filled a vessel with gas and repeated the spark, you would get a machine that generated a continuous series of mechanical impulses, like a steam engine. Issac de Rivas, a Swiss inventor who dreamed of replacing horses with self-propelled vehicles, used the Volta's spark mechanism to power the engine of his gas-powered carriage.[4].

The concept and advantages were quite obvious, but getting the internal combustion engine to work was another matter. This required mastering a number of new technologies: correctly mixing fuel and air before or during their addition to the combustion chamber, igniting the mixture inside the chamber and, most difficult, timing the ignition to the engine operating cycle so that each explosion occurs exactly at the right moment of movement. piston Unlike a steam engine, which functioned to some extent even with leaky valves, poor timing and other shortcomings, a poorly tuned internal combustion engine was useless. Existing engineering experience provided no guidance in these matters, and so everyone searched blindly – quite literally, in the sense that future inventors could not observe the combustion hidden inside the cylinder that they were trying to control[5].

Thermodynamics and internal combustion

The emergence of thermodynamics in the middle of the century and its gradual spread in the engineering community increased interest in internal combustion because it revealed the weaknesses of steam. The elasticity of steam, which was considered the key to the success of the steam engine as a pressure engine, became a liability when it came to be considered as a heat engine. As Carnot noted, to maximize engine power, the working fluid had to be made as hot as possible (and then cooled as much as possible), but turning water into steam at high temperatures created enormous pressure that even iron and steel could not withstand.

Thermodynamics made it possible to measure the efficiency of steam engines in comparison with an ideal heat engine, and it turned out to be extremely unsatisfactory. To some extent, this forced engineers, who had not fully learned the lessons of Carnot and Rankine, to chase pipe dreams. Believing that a large amount of heat was “wasted” in the evaporation of water, they led themselves into a dead end by creating engines that ran on other liquids without as much latent heat, such as ether, alcohol, carbon disulfide and ammonia. As engine historian Linwood Bryant sympathized, “to a man living in a world of pressures and volumes,” such substitutions seemed reasonable because “for a given input of heat he could reach a higher pressure with ammonia than with steam.” It took a mind more deeply immersed in the new abstractions describing energy to understand that the latent heat was not actually wasted, since energy cannot be destroyed; all of that energy still existed in the hot steam, making it a more energy-dense working fluid than most of its potential competitors[6].

What then to do with the air engine, the advantages of which Rankin spoke about back in the 1850s? Ordinary atmospheric air, when heated, did not create the same enormous pressure as steam, so why not simply replace steam with air as the working fluid of an external combustion engine? Some inventors tried this too, but the approach failed for two reasons. First, because of air's poor thermal conductivity: huge conductive surfaces were required to transfer heat from the fuel source to the air, making air engines larger, heavier, and more expensive to build than a similar steam engine. Secondly, extremely high temperatures still could not be achieved due to the mechanical limitations of the iron, which had to conduct heat from the fuel to the air. If the temperature exceeded approximately 700°C, the iron weakened and became unusable[7].

However, air can be used in another way, as the insightful Carnot noted back in 1824 (emphasis added by the author of the article):

Water vapor can only be generated with the help of a boiler, while atmospheric air can be heated directly due to the combustion that occurs in its own mass. In this way, significant losses can be prevented not only in the amount of heat, but also in its temperature. This advantage belongs exclusively to atmospheric air. Other gases do not have it[8].

In other words, the fact that air contains oxygen means that it can be mixed directly with fuel and then burned inside the engine without any heat loss in between. It was this thermodynamic promise that prompted the intense search for a workable internal combustion engine in the second half of the nineteenth century. Combustion can create temperatures as high as 1480°C inside the cylinder, allowing for a greater temperature drop and greater efficiency, and those hot gases are produced exactly where they are needed; there is no need to transport them through channels and valves, which inevitably lose heat, releasing it into the environment. In this case, the poor conductivity of the air becomes an advantage: relatively little heat is transferred to the surrounding metal, and this metal, which does not need to transfer heat to another part of the engine, can remain cool enough to prevent mechanical failure[9].

German mechanical engineering

In the 1860s, the internal combustion engine, given new purpose by the science of thermodynamics and the ever-increasing precision of machine tools, finally moved from experimentation to industry. It became a classic “disruptive innovation,” as Clayton Christensen describes it, starting with small, low-cost engines at the bottom of the market. It could not yet compete with large industrial steam engines in textile or flour mills; Instead, he found buyers in small workshops and industries with modest power needs. The internal combustion engine's closest competitors were derivatives of Maudslay's tabletop engine of 1807, a small steam engine of only 1.5 horsepower that could stand (as the name suggests) on a table[10]. The internal combustion engine could start and stop faster without the need to continuously burn fuel, draw fuel directly from the city gas pipeline, and be even smaller, producing half or a third of horsepower.

Most of the early developments in the field of internal combustion engines took place in continental Europe. The promising work of the Tuscan couple, Eugenio Barsanti and Felice Matteucci, was interrupted by the death of one of them. The honor of achieving the first (albeit modest) success of a commercial internal combustion engine went to Jean Joseph Etienne Lenoir, who was born in Luxembourg (later part of Belgium) but worked in Paris. His 1860 gas engine was the most conservative design, taking the form of the double-acting steam engine but with a burning gas pushing the piston and a water jacket to cool the cylinder. It performed poorly under load, knocked constantly and very loudly, its electric ignition system required constant attention, and it did not achieve the improvements in fuel economy that Lenoir expected (and, indeed, promised). However, the engine's small size and plug-in fuel availability were enough to attract some buyers. Lenoir sold five hundred or so engines, almost all of them producing no more than three horsepower[11].

Shortly thereafter, Nikolaus Otto, a traveling tea trader from the Duchy of Nassau in West Germany, learned of the Lenoir engine and became obsessed with improving it. For several decades, the most famous names in the field of internal combustion will be German: Otto, Diesel, Maybach, Benz, Daimler. The reasons why the steam engine first appeared in Great Britain can be traced with some certainty to several geographical and economic factors. The German penchant for internal combustion is more difficult to explain. One factor may have been the later onset of industrial growth in Germany, based less on textiles and more on chemicals, mining and metallurgy. Small craftsmen, heirs to ancient guild traditions, operating workshops with a small number of workers, remained the main economic force in German industry throughout the 19th century.[12] Such enterprises represented precisely the market for which internal combustion engines were best suited.

However, this explanation is not entirely satisfactory. There were still small workshops and many tradesmen in Britain and other countries who could benefit from the compact and convenient engine.[13]. But in Germany, the internal combustion engine also had ideological implications, and perhaps this is where the key to the solution lies. In the middle of the century in Germany there continued to be an active struggle to protect the traditional rights of artisans, and many traditionalists perceived the interests of capital-intensive business as a new and predatory force. Conservatives in a number of states, having suppressed the liberal revolutions of 1848-1849, introduced industrial regulations to revive the traditional rights of artisans[14].

In this context, the internal combustion engine acquired special significance as a weapon of the weak; a means by which small people could fight back against big business. This is especially noticeable in the work of Franz Reuleaux, an academic mechanical engineer from Prussia. In 1875 he wrote a treatise on kinematics, which, under the title “The Significance of the Machine for Society”, contains a lengthy text that speaks in terms reminiscent of Marx of the evils of industrial society, but proposes that these evils can be cured by a return to traditional values ​​rather than proletarian values. revolution.

Reuleaux laments the dominance of centralized capital, before which the small artisan prostrates himself, replaced by the gloomy and alienated monotony of factory labor. He argues that the point is not the high cost of production equipment, but that “only capital is capable of building and operating powerful steam engines around which all other enterprises are grouped.” Its solution lies in new driving forces, such as the internal combustion engine:

To combat most of the evil, engineers must create cheap, small engines, or in other words, small engines with low operating costs. If we provide the little craftsman with energy as cheap as the great powerful steam engines that capital can obtain, and thus support this important class of society, we will strengthen it where it happily still exists, and revive it where it has disappeared .

…Air and gas engines… can be used almost everywhere and are constantly being improved. These little engines are the real movers of the people. [Volk]; They can be purchased at reasonable prices and are very inexpensive to operate.”[15].

Severing the bonds that bind the worker to capital would allow the former to seize the means of production and restore the traditional moral order of craft labor: a hierarchical but harmonious economy of family, apprentices and assistants, guided by the hand of the artisan[16].

It is significant that the English translation of the same section by the British scientist engineer Alex Kenedy is more of a summary than an authentic translation. Kennedy devotes only four pages to the machine and society, rather than seventeen, devoid of all the ideological fire of the original. Apparently he did not consider this plea for conservative industrial democracy to be of interest to his British readers[17].

Otto engines

Whatever the true reasons for Germany's enormous contribution to the development of internal combustion, it was Otto who started it. Full of ideas and entrepreneurial energy, he plunged headlong into working to improve the Lenoir engine. However, as a clerk and salesman without formal technical training, he made little progress. He needed the guidance of someone with a strong engineering background and good business sense. He found it in the person of Eugen Langen, who studied at the Polytechnic Institute in Karlsruhe and rose to become a partner in his father's sugar business, while simultaneously producing equipment for gas companies. Striving for a new business, in 1864 he somehow came across Otto’s works and decided that they were promising (the exact circumstances of their acquaintance are unknown, although both worked in Cologne)[18].

Even with Langen's talent and money, and with advice from Reilo (an old school friend of Langen's), it took Otto and Langen another three years to create a commercially useful engine, which debuted at the 1867 Paris Exposition. With the help of Reylo, who was on the judging panel, it took home the top prize thanks to its efficiency: it used half as much gas as competing engines to do the same job. This first machine of Otto and Langen was a naturally aspirated engine, a direct descendant of the Newcomen engine and also of the Huygens gunpowder engine. The cylinder was mounted vertically, and the explosion of burning gas drove the piston freely (that is, without any connection with the drive mechanism). The power stroke occurred as the piston moved downward, pressed by the weight of the atmosphere into the cylinder just released by the explosion. The complexities – the attributes that made it a viable propulsion machine and not just a showpiece like Huygens' machine – lay in the timing of regular ignitions, valve control and the complex design of the clutch, which was engaged on the downstroke to turn the drive shaft[19].

In 1872, overwhelmed with orders for Otto and Langen engines and receiving new capital from the Langen brothers and other interested businessmen, the company was reorganized and renamed Gasmotoren-Fabrik Deutz (after the suburb of Cologne where their new headquarters were located). Langen hired Gottlieb Daimler to run the plant efficiently, and Daimler brought with him the young Wilhelm Maybach, hired as a design engineer[20].

A new company, a new team, additional advice and support from Reilo and four more years of work led to the fact that in 1876 Otto released the car that immortalized his name: the so-called “Silent Otto”. Although it was not much more efficient than its naturally aspirated predecessor, “Silent Otto” weighed 3 times less, and its cylinder volume was 15 times less for the same power. This made it possible to scale it to large sizes: due to the large cylinder required to obtain energy from the atmosphere, Otto and Langen could practically not increase the power to more than one or two horsepower. Working with its own factory and British and American licensees, Deutz sold tens of thousands of engines of this type by 1890[21].

As usual, practice was ahead of theory: Otto achieved great success, but did not have a clear idea of ​​​​the reasons. He believed that he had created a stratified charge which, by gradually increasing the mixture of fuel and air along the entire length of the cylinder, softened the impact of the explosion, allowing the engine to operate much more smoothly and quietly than the rumbling engine of Otto and Langen. However, this was not an accurate model of what actually happened when the cylinder exploded. The real key to the silent Otto's success lay in its four-stroke cycle, in which the first stroke draws the air-fuel mixture into the cylinder, the second stroke compresses it, the third provides power as the mixture explodes, and the fourth pushes exhaust gases out of the cylinder. Compressing the gas in the cylinder before ignition produced a much more powerful and efficient explosion, and this was much easier to achieve with a four-stroke cycle than with fewer strokes. [22].

The four-stroke cycle was completely contrary to what most of Otto's contemporaries (including Daimler) were trying to do: they hoped to repeat the history of Watt's engine by turning a single-stroke naturally aspirated engine into a two-stroke engine that received power on every stroke. But an internal combustion engine is not a steam engine: explosive combustion is very powerful and fast, and with hundreds of cycles per minute, one stroke out of every four is enough to drive many types of machines[23].

Otto's engines provided energy for many small workshops and traders, but did not turn the tide, and did not lead it away from capital towards industrial democracy, as Reuleaux had hoped. His assertion that the economics of large-scale factory work rested solely on the need to share a large engine was simply incorrect; perhaps this is a mistake, an attempt at wishful thinking.

The industrial democracy of mechanized craft farms has not replaced factory labor, but many businesses have found use for smaller, more convenient engines, from bakeries and printing plants to sawmills and soda plants.[24]. Internal combustion engines also moved up the market as engines producing tens of horsepower became available, taking more and more of the steam engine's traditional territory.

If Otto's engine failed to bring about a political revolution, it did bring about a different kind of revolution, creating the basis for two entirely new modes of transport: the automobile and, soon after, the airplane. Before this could happen, however, the internal combustion engine had to free itself from city gas and find a way to run freely on its own fuel.

Notes

[1] The advent of the automobile in the first decade of the twentieth century completely changed the situation: steam engines began to play a secondary role, and internal combustion technology came to the fore.

[2] The diesel engine, for example, had to be virtually reinvented separately for use in cars, ships and trains. Lynwood Bryant, “The Development of the Diesel Engine,” Technology and Culture 17, 3 (July 1976), 444-446.

[3] Lynwood Bryant, “The Role of Thermodynamics in the Evolution of Heat Engines,” Technology and Culture 14, 2 (April 1973), 164.

[4] Lyle Cummins, Internal Fire: The Internal Combustion Engine, 1673-1900 (Lake Oswego, Oregon: Carnot Press, 1976), 60-62.

[5] Bryant, “The Role of Thermodynamics in the Evolution of Heat Engines”, 165.

[6] Bryant, “The Role of Thermodynamics in the Evolution of Heat Engines”, 160-161.

[7] Dugald Clerk, The Gas, Petrol, and Oil Engine, v. 1 (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1909), 51-55.

[8] Carnot, Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat, 120. Carnot even then drew attention to the fundamental thermodynamic limitation imposed by steam: “One of the most serious disadvantages of steam is that it cannot be used at high temperatures without recourse to vessels of extreme strength “The same cannot be said of air, for which there is no necessary relationship between elastic force and temperature. Air, therefore, seems more suitable than steam to realize the driving force of the fall of calories from high temperatures.” Ibid., 121.

[9] Clerk, The Gas, Petrol, and Oil Engine, v. 1, 54.

[10] David Waller, Iron Men: How One London Factory Powered the Industrial Revolution and Shaped the Modern World (London: Anthem Press, 2016), 35.

[11] Cummins, Internal Fire, 104-109.

[12] J. H. Clapman, The Economic Development of France and Germany, 1815-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921), 288-289.

[13] A. E. Musson, “Industrial Motive Power in the United Kingdom, 1800-70,” The Economic History Review 29, 3 (August 1976), 429, 435.

[14] Theodore S. Hamerow, Restoration, Revolution, Reaction: Economics and Politics in Germany, 1815-1871 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958), 21, 191-192.

[15] Franz Reuleaux, Theoretische Kinematik (Braunschweig: Druck und Verlag, 1875), 525, 527, 529. Translation by the author of the article using Google translate. See also a translation of some of these passages in Friedrich Klemm, Dorothy Waley Singer, trans., A History of Western Technology (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1964), 340-341.

[16] Reuleaux, Theoretische Kinematik, 526.

[17] Franz Reuleaux, Alex. B. W. Kennedy, trans., The Kinematics of Machinery: Outlines of a Theory of Machines (London: Macmillan, 1876), 524. Kennedy appends a note indicating the abbreviation, stating that “the circumstances of the case, as he describes them, differ in some in very important respects from the circumstances attending similar proceedings in this country”, 610.

[18] Cummins, Internal Fire, 136-137.

[19] Cummins, Internal Fire, 138-143.

[20] Cummins, Internal Fire, 143-144.

[21] Cummins, Internal Fire, 160; Lynwood Bryant, “The Silent Otto,” Technology and Culture 7, 2 (Spring 1966), 193.

[22] Bryant, “The Silent Otto”, 194-198. The reason the four-stroke engine was so much quieter than the naturally aspirated engine was almost certainly the elimination of a free piston whose movement could not be perfectly timed to ignition.

[23] Cummins, Internal Fire, 161-162; Bryant, “The Silent Otto”, 198.

[24] Museum of Science and Industry, “Crossley Brothers: 'World Famous for Gas Engines'”, October 13, 2023 (https://www.scienceandindustrymuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/crossley-brothers).