__ 1877: __The U.S. Patent Office grants German engineer Nicolaus August Otto a patent for an "improvement in gas-motor engines." Internal combustion's time — and timing — have come.

More than a century-and-a-quarter later, we have whole economies, musical subgenres and sports based around what Herr Otto, he of the macaronically ironic name, created.

The first engines (as we know the term today) were steam engines. Boil some water, make some steam, and use that to move a piston back and forth. It worked great for trains (with trained engineers and firemen) and for the stationary engines of the industrial revolution.

For personal mobility, however, the steam engine lacked some crucial refinements. For one, it was an external combustion engine: The fire was applied to the outside.

Belgian inventor Jean Joseph Etienne Lenoir produced a gas-fired internal combustion engine in 1860. Introduce ignitable gas and air into a cylinder, add a spark ... and BOOM, the piston moves. Maybe not very efficiently, yet it moves.

The original two-stroke design was less than optimal, until along came Nicolaus Otto, who was that most dangerous of men: a tinkerer. His official business was being a traveling salesman, but he started poking around with these newfangled power sources in the 1860s.

Otto invented a whole new scheme for the inner workings of an internal combustion engine. He created an engine that used a four-stroke cycle. Instead of just putting the fuel into the cylinder with the piston at the top of its travel, Otto's engine sucked the fuel-air mixture in on the downstroke, closed the valves, and ingeniously used the piston's own upstroke to compress the mixture before igniting it.

This is the suck-squeeze-bang-blow design that all motorheads, grease monkeys, knucklebusters and the like worship to this day. Otto's big contribution was in the "squeeze" portion of the cycle. Compressing the mixture of fuel and air made his engine much more efficient than its predecessors.

He had a tabletop model of the thing running by 1862, but didn't get it thrumming to his Teutonic satisfaction until 1876. Otto was awarded U.S. Patent No. 194,047 on Aug. 14, 1877.

And the next thing you know, there were highways and drive-ins and necker knobs and Beach Boys songs and the Indy 500. Getting from point A to point B was no longer dependent on a finicky horse or a predetermined train schedule. It was when you wanted to go, and as far as you wanted to go.

Source: Various

*Photo: Otto's 1870 version of the internal combustion engine

Courtesy Auction Team Breker

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