omobile is credited to Lenoir. Interesting to note is that the only invention he made was a two-cycle internal combustion engine. The automobile today has items that are critical to have. If a major car company were to produce a car powered only by Lenoirs engine it would never sell because of the essentials.THE ESSENTIALSThe essentials are the necessary parts for an automobile to be an automobile in todays world. If someone were to build an automobile like that of Lenoirs today it would be nothing more than a go-kart. No one would call it an automobile. Automobiles need certain things other than just an engine and a horse carriage to be considered an automobile today for two reasons. One reason is so someone will actually buy it and another is because its the item is required by law.In 1861 a German engineer named Nikolaus August Otto built his first gasoline-powered engine. Three years later he would team up with Eugen Langen to form the Deutz Gas Engine Factory. Ottos engine was based on the same principles of Lenoirs. It was also a two-stroke engine with one cylinder but it used the different type of fuel, gasoline rather than coal gas. Otto and Langen learned of a way to gain more efficiency by compressing the gas before combustion in 1867. This led them to production of the first four-stroke engine.FOUR-STROKE ENGINEBy the year of 1876 Otto created his most famous invention. A gasoline powered four-stroke internal combustion engine. The patent for the four-stroke engine was not Ottos however. French engineer Alphonse Beau de Rochas patented it in 1862 but because Otto built the first working engine the cycle was often called the Otto Cycle.In a four-stroke engine, the piston moves up twice and down twice creating four strokes. The piston will first move down, this is the intake, or induction, stroke, in which the air and gas are drawn into the chamber called the cylinder. The next stroke, the compression stroke, o...
