Piston engines are the heart of many machines we use today, from cars and airplanes to industrial machinery and motorcycles.

Nearly every vehicle on the road today is powered by some version of the four-stroke internal-combustion engine patented by Nikolaus Otto in 1876. Otto exploited the findings of French physicist ...

Over time, the Otto engine would be used to power automobiles, motorcycles and motorboats. Also, the diesel engine, invented by Rudolf Diesel, would be based on internal combustion, employing a ...

Internal combustion engines aren’t very efficient. Most modern gasoline engines only convert about 35% of fuel energy into work. Diesels can do over 40%, but need expensive emission systems to stay ...

Geniuses like Nikolaus Otto and Rudolf Diesel came up with the bases of internal combustion and industrialists like Soichiro Honda built whole companies on brilliant engine designs. Still ...

The earliest internal-combustion engines were also inefficient ... A German engineer by the name of Nikolaus August Otto (1832-1891) wanted to build an engine using both principals.

AMONG the names of the hundreds of inventors through whose individual efforts the internal combustion engine has reached its present state of efficiency, that of Nikolaus August Otto will always ...

Unarguably, Nikolaus Otto’s four-stroke internal combustion engine (ICE) is a first-rate staple in the automobile engineering industry. With its invention, a real transition from time and ...

Bang. Blow. There’s no joke to be made there—you’re looking at the DNA of the four-stroke internal combustion engine, virtually unchanged since Dr. Nikolaus Otto first built it in Germany ...

A decade or so ago, a team of German university scientists settled on 500 cubic centimeters as the ideal per-cylinder displacement for internal ... of Nikolaus Otto’s 139-year-old engine ...