Asked which motor they preferred in a car, visitors to the first-ever
National Automobile Show in New York city made the electric their
overwhelming choice. Steam engines came in second. and trailing the field
with less than 5 percent of the vote was the gas engine, which one critic
predicted would never last.
"Noxious, noisy, unreliable, and elephantine, it vibrates so violently as to
loosen one's dentures. The automobile industry will surely burgeon in
America, but this motor will not be a factor," he wrote.
Others attending the show cited an additional reason for their displeasure --
fear that these multifuel powerplants (they ran on stove gas, kerosene,
naphtha, lamp oil, benzine, mineral spirits, alcohol, and a relatively new
fuel called gasoline) would explode and shower them with shrapnel and
flame. Show officials increased the public's anxiety by summoning a
standby bucket brigade whenever an engine was cranked. The year was
1900.
In 1903, to the surprise of most automobile observers (except those directly
involved in engineering), a sharp rise occurred in the number of new cars
outfitted with four-stroke internal combustion gasoline engines. By 1910,
steam engines virtually disappeared as a vehicle powering agent. Electric
motors hung on until 1915.
Forty years before and 20 years after the turn of the twentieth century are
now known to have been the Golden Era in the development of the
automobile gas engine. During this 60-year span, most concepts relative to
gasoline engine development were conceived. Engines that have come
along since have been refinements of those concepts, which awaited some
technological break-through -- either in fuel technology, metallurgy or
machine tooling -- to attain reality.
In 1860, Etienne Lenoir of France invented the first four-wheeled vehicle
to be powered by a gas engine. It was a two-stroker that employed two
concepts which are considered by some today as new -- stratified charging
of the fuel mixture by introducing air and gas separately into the
combustion chamber, and water injection. Both methods were employed by
Lenoir to keep his one-cylinder engine from knocking.
In 1906, Cosmopolitan magazine published a complete guide to the
new "Gasoline Motor Cars." Thirteen models had one-cylinder engines. 54
had two-cylinder engines, five were equipped with three-cylinder engines,
and 59 sported four-cylinder engines.. The remaining vehicles included one
with a V8 engine built in Redondo Beach California (it was called The
Coyote), and a 40-hp, six-cylinder engine in a five-passenger car. The latter
vehicle which sold for $2500, was manufactured by a motor company out
of Detroit called Ford. It did not sell and was abandoned after two
years.
Although the typical gas engine at the turn of the century was quite
different from today's engines, most modern powerplant technology had
been tried by 1906. For example, the first en-bloc engine (one-piece
cylinder block) had been made in 1896 by Charles B. King, but not even
by 1906 had machining techniques reached a level that allowed such an
engine to be manufactured inexpensively. Therefore, combustion chambers
in the typical multicylinder engines were cast individually and bolted to the
crankcase.
In 1906, science had not yet perfected a gasket capable of forming a seal
between cylinders and cylinder heads. Thus, each cylinder had to have its
head cast integrally, with intake and exhaust valves set in caps that were
screwed into each head. They named this setup T-head, because the valves
straddled the piston.
Each set of valves was operated by its own camshaft. The two shafts -- one
for intake valves and one fore exhaust valves -- were located in the
crankcase. They pushed up on long stems that lifted the valves off their
seats. As the cam lobes moved off the valve stem tips, heavy springs
caused the valve to slam shut.
Since the material that the valves were made of was relatively soft, this
gave rise to a particularly bothersome situation. Valve life was numbered
in hundreds of miles. But car manufacturers had a way around this -- they
equipped new vehicles with a spare set of valves! When a person got stuck
at the side of the road, he unscrewed the valve caps from the cylinder
heads to replace the damaged valves.
The T-head engine gave way to the L-head (also called the flat-head or
side-valve) engine in which valves were placed on one side of the engine.
The L-head dominated the scene for years. Ford used it on V8s until 1953.
But waiting in the wings was another design, introduced in 1898 by
Wilkinson Motor Car Co. -- an engine that had the camshaft and valves in
the cylinder heads. You know it as the overhead-cam (ohc) or
overhead-valve (ohv).
During this Golden Era, other notable innovations bearing on the
development of the gasoline engine took place. Then engine in the 1905
Knox was a horizontally opposed powerplant similar in makeup to one
adopted 30 years later by Volkswagen for use in the Beetle. Like the
Beetle engine, the Knox engine was aircooled. Corrugated pins surrounding
the cylinders made it possible to obtain 32 square inches of heat radiating
surface per square inch of outside cylinder surface.
Another noteworthy car was the 1906 Premier, with a four-cylinder vertical
engine. It had a 4.25 x 4.25 inch (108 mm x 108 mm) bore and stroke,
making it one of the earliest "square" engines.
As late as 1953, C. F. Kettering, automotive genius and inventor of the
electric self-starter, wrote: "The so-called square engine with the bore more
nearly equal to the stroke in order to reduce piston speed brought us a
considerable way down the path to the modern engine." He was referring
to engines in the 1949 Cadillac and Oldsmobile.
The early innovators were not adverse to shifting the engine from place to
place. At first, it was put under the front seat. Then, it was moved under
the hood. Some think it was not placed in the rear until VW did it with the
Beetle. Surprise! in 1896, a car called the Hertel had an engine back
there.
Most people today are familiar with front-wheel-drive (fwd) cars. Many
probably think it is a new concept. Wrong! In 1900, the Pennington Car
co. came out with a vehicle that had a gas engine driving the front wheels.
This was not even the first fwd car. Electrics and steamers had been using
fwd for years.
Coverage of this period would be incomplete without mentioning the 1908
Ford Model T, or Tin Lizzie. Its four-cylinder 20-hp engine was the first
mass-produced, inexpensive powerplant to be en-bloc with an individual
cylinder head. Perfection of a copper-asbestos head gasket was one of the
key developments making this possible.
Engineers knew for a long time that they could theoretically design more
efficient engines by increasing compression ratios. By squeezing the fuel
mixture into a smaller combustion space before it was ignited, smaller,
more powerful engines could be used. However, every time this was tried,
engines reacted violently, knocking terribly. The problem was not the
engine, but inadequacy of the fuel. So, until the mid-1920s, compression
ratios of engines in cars sold to the public ran no higher than
4.3:1.
That limitation ended in 1923 when tetraethyl lead and improved refining
methods gave gasoline antiknock qualities. This development allowed
engineers to try certain mechanical improvements that increased engine
efficiency still further without fear of knocking. Some of these
improvements included redesigning combustion chambers, using differently
shaped pistons, and bringing spark and valve timing into greater focus to
attain maximum fuel combustion.
The search for better materials to withstand the increasing stress of higher
speed engines became critical as more paved roads became
available.
In the early days, when there were a limited number of dirt roads, heavy
iron engines that lumbered along were met with little resistance by the
automobile buyer. However, as more roads were opened to drivers and
road conditions improved, driving became more popular and demand
increased for lightweight engines that could take travellers longer distances
economically.
The man who had most to do with the start of an automotive metallurgical
industry in the United States was Elwood Haynes. Among his
accomplishments were the development of cobalt, chromium and tungsten
alloys; discovery of stainless steel; and introduction of aluminum into
automobile engines.
In 1893, Haynes invented and built a rotary gas engine. Did you really
think Felix Wankel was the first to do this in 1955?
In 1912, an ad for the Type 35 Mercer, which sported an in-line
six-cylinder engine, made mention of a "large and perfectly balanced
crankshaft to make the engine practically vibrationless." The Mercer
Automobile Co. recognized that as low-speed engines gave way to
high-speed engines, vibration caused by crankshaft rotation was going to become
troublesome.
Balancing the crankshaft became even more of a factor as the number of
cylinders increased. In 1916, Packard introduced the first production 12-
cylinder engine. To quell the effect of crankshaft vibration, Packard placed
a small flywheel on the front end of the crankshaft that "slipped," as
necessary, to help smother torsional vibration produced by the shaft. This
we now call a vibration dampener.
Cadillac refined crankshaft balancing still further. On its 1923 V8 engine,
the company arranged the four crankshaft pins in two planes to balance out
the vibration effects of the reciprocating pistons and connecting rods. The
four-crankpin arrangement, like the vibration dampener, is still with us
today, but they probably played their most important antivibration roles in
the early 1930s, when some car companies strived to have an engine with
the most cylinders. For example, there were the Cadillac, Marmon and
Packard V16 engines and the Lincoln V12.
By 1934, public interest in these massive powerplants started to wane,
leaving six- and eight-cylinder engines to reign for almost 50 years. Today,
the Four has returned and now it looks like two- and three-cylinder engines
may make a comeback. In other words, we've gone from the one-cylinder
gasoline engine to 16 cylinders and back to four. Is the return of the one-
cylinder only a matter of time?
"Firm offers two models of high-speed motor with twin intakes and
exhausts." This is not an ad for a modern Toyota 16-valve engine, but the
way Automobile Topics described the four-cylinder, four-valve car engine
made by Linthwaite-Hussey Motor Co. of Los Angeles. The year was
1916.
"The most marvelous automobile improvement yet invented," another ad
says. "Pull the little lever -- your 12 is a 6; push the little lever, your 6 is
a 12." This was the way the Enger Motor Car Co. of Cincinnati described
the 1917 Twin-Unit Twelve. By means of a small lever on the steering
column, the driver was able to cut out six of the engine's 12 cylinders to
attain maximum fuel economy, and cut them back in just as quickly for
maximum power.
The lever pulled the exhaust valves off their seats, so there was no
compression in the cylinders. It also allowed a shutter to close the intake
manifold feeding fuel to those six cylinders.
Are you surprised to learn that the 1981 Cadillac V8-6-4 engine wasn't the
first that could have the number of its cylinders regulated? If so, get ready
for another surprise. Neither was the 1917 Enger. The distinction belongs
to the Sturtevant 38- to 45-hp six-cylinder engine of 1905. Three of its
cylinders could be shut down.
Another gasoline engine development worthy of mention is the 1924
Chrysler six-cylinder L-head, which incorporated a hemispherically domed
combustion chamber designed to combat detonation, and the first
replaceable cartridge oil filter. But don't get the idea that this was the first
hemihead engine. It wasn't. As far as we've been able to determine, that
distinction is reserved for the 1904 Welch Four.
Another car of the 1920s worthy of mention was the 1926 Cadillac V8,
which introduced crankcase ventilation to get rid of contaminating agents
that caused engine wear. This vent system, open to the atmosphere,
continued until 1963 when positive crankcase ventilation (PCV), a closed
system came into use.
Many engines of the 1930s introduced exhaust-valve seat inserts to
overcome burning and pitting, hydraulic valve lifters and lightweight
Babbitt metal bearings that were able to handle loads imposed by higher
and higher engine speeds. And 1949 saw the introduction of lightweight,
square bore-and-stroke, ohv, high-compression V8 engines by Caddy and
Olds.
What of the future? What will gasoline engines be like? Let's quote one of
the most renowned auto experts: "With higher compression ratios,
improved
transmissions, new materials, new manufacturing techniques and so on, you
can practically draw your own picture of the engine of tomorrow: smaller,
lighter, more reliable, smoother and 50 percent more economical."
The expert was Kettering. The year he made his prophecy was 1953. And
if he were alive now to speak about the engine of the future, he would
probably say the same thing.
Books on automobiles
Books on motorcycles