One of the many ironies in the history of technology is that at the very beginning, electric propulsion was competing more seriously with liquid fossils than it is today. And the fact that almost always someone else was the real inventor, from the lightbulb to the telephone to the roller skater, is their common thread, so to speak.
In the early 1960s, this thread ran through the inventor’s hands of the Belgian Étienne Lenoir. On the one hand, he invents a gas engine, which he presented for the first time 163 years ago, on January 23, 1860, and on the other hand, he then builds automobiles that are powered by it. However, he did not use city gas for his car engines as he did in the beginning, but a petroleum-air mixture produced by a primitive carburetor.
Lenoir was early, Otto was better
Even Nikolaus Otto, inventor of the gasoline-powered internal combustion engine named after him, initially built gas piston engines. And the petrol engine, which is still widespread today, is only a further development of that design from 1867 and uses a fuel-air mixture that comes from the carburetor.
Lenoir ungrudgingly recognized the superiority of Otto’s development. He is said to have even described his own engine as a “monstrosity” in comparison.
Then just tan leather
However, Lenoir did not invent the gas engine itself. As early as the late 18th century, two gentlemen named John Barber and Robert Street applied for patents on machines that used the explosive power of previously gasified solid or liquid fuel.
Lenoir came from a poor background and made his first inventions – such as a process for enamelling dials – as a simple worker. Unlike many others who historically lost out with their ideas, Lenoir was successful and enterprising enough to be able to spend a carefree old age in Paris.
Numerous other inventions and further developments – from telegraph systems to processes for tanning leather – helped him. He is said to have liked to go fly-fishing on the Seine. The industrialization he himself had fueled and the contamination associated with it had evidently not progressed far enough.
Incidentally, before the gas engine, as you can probably already guess, he had unsuccessfully tried to build an electric motor.
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