Nikolaus Otto

Nikolaus August Otto had quit his office job in order to construct small gas engines, starting out by seeking to improve on the existing design of Belgina Étienne Lenoir.

Otto had served an apprenticeship in commerce and following his apprenticeship, had worked as a businessman in Frankfurt am Main and in Cologne before relocating to Cologne.

Eugen Langen, after an extensive technical training at the Polytechnic institute in Karlsruhe, has worked in his father's sugar factory, JJ Langen & Söhne, from 1857.

In 1864, he meets Otto, the son of a farmer: his father also runs the local post office.

The technically trained Langen recognizes the potential of Otto's development, and one month after the meeting, founds the first engine factory in the world, NA Otto & Cie.

Nkolaus Otto, aided by Eugen Langen, had developed the noisy but well-received Otto and Langen engine in 1866, a free piston atmospheric engine (the explosion of gas is used to create a vacuum and the power comes from atmospheric pressure returning the piston).

The principle of operation had been described by the Italian inventors Eugenio Barsanti and Felice Matteucci in their British Patent no. 1625 of 1857, although they had never produced a marketable example.

Their improved engine is awarded the Grand Prize at the 1867 Paris World Exhibition.

It consumes less than half the gas of the Lenoir and Hugon engines and so is a commercial success.

The Otto and Langen engine, for all its commercial success, with the company producing six hundred and thirty-four engines a year by 1875, has hit a technical dead end: it produces only three horsepower (2.2 kW; 3.0 PS), yet requires ten to thirteen feet (three to four meters) headroom to operate.

The Rings-Schumm engine, a pioneering internal-combustion engine, appears in autumn 1876 and is immediately successful, its thermodynamic efficiency far surpassing that of steam engines.

Nikolaus Otto, the son of a farmer who also ran the local post office, had served an apprenticeship in commerce and subsequently worked as a businessman in Frankfurt am Main and in Cologne.

After relocating to Cologne, he had quit his office job in order to construct small gas engines, starting out by seeking to improve on the existing design of Étienne Lenoir.

Otto had met another engineer, Eugen Langen, in 1864.

The technically trained Langen had recognized the potential of Otto's development, and one month after the meeting, founded the first engine factory in the world, NA Otto & Cie.

Their improved engine had been awarded the Grand Prize at the 1867 Paris World Exhibition.

The Otto & Langen engine, a free piston atmospheric engine (the explosion of gas is used to create a vacuum and the power comes from atmospheric pressure returning the piston), consumes less than half the gas of the Lenoir and Hugon engines and so is a commercial success.

The principle of operation had been described by the Italian inventors Eugenio Barsanti and Felice Matteucci in their British Patent no. 1625 of 1857, though they never produced a marketable example.

For all its success, with the company producing six hundred and thirty-four engines a year by 1875, the Otto and Langen engine had hit a technical dead end: it produces only 3 hp (2.2 kW; 3.0 PS), yet requires ten to thirteen feet (three to four meters) of headroom to operate, and is noisy besides.

Otto had turned his attention to the four-stroke cycle (as described in a pamphlet by Alphonse Beau de Rochas in 1862).

This was largely due to the efforts of Franz Rings and Herman Schumm, brought into the company by Gottlieb Daimler.

It is this engine (the Otto Silent Engine), and not the Otto & Langen engine, to which the Otto cycle refers.

This is the first commercially successful engine to use in-cylinder compression (as patented by William Barnett in 1838).

Otto's engine is patented in 1877, but the patent will soon be challenged and overturned.

The Otto engine is designed as a stationary engine and in the action of the engine, the stroke is an upward or downward movement of a piston in a cylinder.

Used later in an adapted form as an automobile engine, four strokes are involved: (1) downward intake stroke—coal-gas and air enter the piston chamber, (2) upward compression stroke—the piston compresses the mixture, (3) downward power stroke—ignites the fuel mixture by electric spark, and (4) upward exhaust stroke—releases exhaust gas from the piston chamber.

Otto only sells his engine as a stationary motor.

Otto intends his invention to replace the steam engines predominant in these years, even though his engine is still primitive and inefficient.

 

Gotttlieb Wilhelm Daimler's Reitwagen ("riding wagon") or Einspur ("single track") is a motor vehicle made by Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach in 1885, is widely recognized as the first motorcycle.

Daimler was the son of a baker named Johannes Däumler (Daimler) and his wife Frederika, from the town of Schorndorf near Stuttgart, Württemberg.

By the age of thirteen (1847), he had completed six years of primary studies in Lateinschule and became interested in engineering.

The next year, he began an apprenticeship with a carbine maker, Raithel.

He graduated in 1852, passing the craft test with a pair of engraved double-barreled pistols.

The same year, at eighteen, Daimler decided to take up mechanical engineering, abandoning gunsmithing, and left his hometown.

Signing up at Stuttgart's School for Advanced Training in the Industrial Arts, under the tutelage of Ferdinand Steinbeis, Daimler was studious, even taking extra Sunday morning classes.

With Steinbeis' assistance, Daimler got work in 1853 at "the factory college", F. Rollé und Schwilque in Grafenstaden, so-called because its manager, Friedrich Messmer, had been an instructor at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.

Daimler performed well, and when Rollé und Schwilque began making railway locomotives in 1856, the twenty-two-year-old Daimler was named foreman.

Instead of staying, Daimler took two years at Stuttgart Polytechnical Institute to hone his skills, gaining an in-depth grasp of steam locomotives, as well as "a profound conviction" steam that was destined to be superseded.

He conceived small, cheap, simple engines for light industrial use, possibly inspired by the newly developed gas engines of that era.

Therefore, in 1861, he resigned from Rollé und Schwilque, visiting Paris, and going on to England, where he worked with the country's top engineering firms, becoming knowledgeable with machine tools.

He spent from autumn 1861 to summer 1863 at Beyer, Peacock and Company of Gorton, Manchester. (Beyer was from Saxony.)

While in London, he visited the 1862 World Fair, where one of the exhibits was a steam carriage.

These carriages did not evidently inspire him, however, for his wish was to produce machine tools and woodworking machinery.

Daimler next went to work for Maschinenfabrik Staub, Geislingen, where he designed tools, mills, and turbines.

In 1863, he joined the Bruderhaus Reutlingen, a Christian Socialist toolmaker, as inspector and later executive.

While there, he met Wilhelm Maybach, a fifteen-year old orphan.

Thanks to Daimler's organizational skills, the factory had managed to show a profit, but he quit in frustration in 1869, joining Maschinenbau Gesellschaft Karlsruhe in July.

Daimler and Maybach had moved in August 1872, to work at the world's largest manufacturer of stationary engines at the time, the Deutz-AG-Gasmotorenfabrik in Cologne.

It was half-owned by Nikolaus Otto, who was looking for a new technical director.

As directors, both Daimler and Otto had focused on gas-engine development while Maybach is chief designer.