In the later chapters of The Quest, Daniel Yergin summarizes the history of the internal combustion engine. He begins by recounting a meeting of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison at a convention in August 1896, at which they sat together. Ford had just built his first gasoline-powered “quadricycle.” He sketched out his design to Edison. Edison told him that the problem with electric-powered vehicles is that they “must keep near a power station.” Edison told Ford to stick with the internal combustion engine.
The internal combustion engine was invented by Nikolaus Otto. His “Otto cycle” engine, developed in 1876, is still recognizable in our engines today: valves, a crankshaft, spark plugs, and a single cylinder. Otto teamed with Karl Benz to produce automobiles, and Gottlieb Daimler was in close competition. (In the twentieth century, the two companies merged, though Benz and Daimler never met each other.) By the 1890’s Daimler was distributing his cars in America.
Germany competed with France — with the French engineers Armand Peugeot and Louis Renault — for supremacy in the development of the automobile. Britain was initially left behind because its railway industry, fearing competition, got Parliament to pass the Red Flag Acts that limited “road locomotives” to four miles an hour in the country and two miles an hour in cities — as well as requiring a man carrying a red flag to walk in front of road vehicles hauling multiple wagons.
