Javaman hijacked!

[darkcool]

Well, sort of. In the same vein as his post.
This is something I’ve always wondered about:
Which was ‘invented’ first, internal combustion engines or gasoline. It would seem to have to be gas but if so what was it used for before I.C.E.'s?

[friedo]

*Originally posted by darkcool *
**Well, sort of. In the same vein as his post.
This is something I’ve always wondered about:
Which was ‘invented’ first, internal combustion engines or gasoline. It would seem to have to be gas but if so what was it used for before I.C.E.'s? **

Well according to this page, it seems Gasoline came before the first successful ICE. I don’t know what it was used for, maybe things like oil lamps? Or simple mechanical things that needed fuel.

Evolution of the Internal-Combustion Engine
The first person to experiment with an internal-combustion engine was the
Dutch physicist Christian Huygens, about 1680. But no effective
gasoline-powered engine was developed until 1859, when the French engineer
J. J. Étienne Lenoir built a double-acting, spark-ignition engine that could be
operated continuously. In 1862 Alphonse Beau de Rochas, a French scientist,
patented but did not build a four-stroke engine; sixteen years later, when
Nikolaus A. Otto built a successful four-stroke engine, it became known as the
“Otto cycle.” The first successful two-stroke engine was completed in the same
year by Sir Dougald Clerk, in a form which (simplified somewhat by Joseph
Day in 1891) remains in use today. George Brayton, an American engineer, had
developed a two-stroke kerosene engine in 1873, but it was too large and too
slow to be commercially successful.
16
In 1885 Gottlieb Daimler constructed what is generally recognized as the
prototype of the modern gas engine: small and fast, with a vertical cylinder, it
used gasoline injected through a carburetor. In 1889 Daimler introduced a
four-stroke engine with mushroom-shaped valves and two cylinders arranged in
a V, having a much higher power-to-weight ratio; with the exception of electric
starting, which would not be introduced until 1924, all modern gasoline engines
are descended from Daimler’s engines.

[scr4]

According to Encyclopedia Britannica:

Originally a by-product of the petroleum industry (kerosene being the principal product), gasoline became the preferred automobile fuel because of its high energy of combustion and capacity to mix readily with air in a carburetor.

I guess gasoline is the stuff that’s too volatile to put in your lamp or heater.