Timeline of Heat Engine Technology - Nineteenth Century

Nineteenth Century

  • 1802 - Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac develops Gay-Lussac's law which describes the relationship between a gas's pressure and temperature.
  • 1807 - Nicéphore Niépce installed his 'moss, coal-dust and resin' fuelled Pyréolophore internal combustion engine in a boat and powered up the river Saone in France.
  • 1807 - Franco/Swiss engineer François Isaac de Rivaz built the De Rivaz engine, powered by the internal combustion of hydrogen and oxygen mixture and used it to power a wheeled vehicle.
  • 1816 - Robert Stirling invented Stirling engine, a type of hot air engine.
  • 1824 - Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot developed the Carnot cycle and the associated hypothetical Carnot heat engine that is the basic theoretical model for all heat engines. This gives the first early insight into the second law of thermodynamics.
  • 1834 - Jacob Perkins, obtained the first patent for a vapor-compression refrigeration system.
  • 1850s - Rudolf Clausius sets out the concept of the thermodynamic system and positioned entropy as being that in any irreversible process a small amount of heat energy δQ is incrementally dissipated across the system boundary
  • 1859 - Etienne Lenoir developed the first commercially successful internal combustion engine, a single-cylinder, two-stroke engine with electric ignition of illumination gas (not gasoline).
  • 1861 - Alphonse Beau de Rochas of France originates the concept of the four-stroke internal-combustion engine by emphasizing the previously unappreciated importance of compressing the fuel–air mixture before ignition.
  • 1861 - Nikolaus Otto patents a two-stroke internal combustion engine building on Lenoir's.
  • 1872 - Pulsometer steam pump, a pistonless pump, patented by Charles Henry Hall. It was inspired by the Savery steam pump.
  • 1873 - The British chemist Sir William Crookes invents the light mill a device which turns the radiant heat of light directly into rotary motion.
  • 1877 - Theorist Ludwig Boltzmann visualized a probabilistic way to measure the entropy of an ensemble of ideal gas particles, in which he defined entropy to be proportional to the logarithm of the number of microstates such a gas could occupy.
  • 1877 - Nikolaus Otto patents a practical four-stroke internal combustion engine (U.S. Patent 194,047)
  • 1883 - Samuel Griffin of Bath UK patents a six-stroke internal combustion engine.
  • 1884 - Charles A. Parsons builds the first modern Steam turbine.
  • 1886 - Herbert Akroyd Stuart builds the prototype Hot bulb engine, an oil fueled Homogeneous Charge Compression Ignition engine similar to the later diesel but with a lower compression ratio and running on a fuel air mixture.
  • 1892 - Rudolf Diesel patents the Diesel engine (U.S. Patent 608,845) where a high compression ratio generates hot gas which then ignites an injected fuel.

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Famous quotes related to nineteenth century:

    “In the nineteenth century ... explanations of who and what women were focused primarily on reproductive events—marriage, children, the empty nest, menopause. You could explain what was happening in a woman’s life, it was believed, if you knew where she was in this reproductive cycle.”
    —Grace Baruch (20th century)

    “We have now traced the history of women from Paradise to the nineteenth century and have heard nothing through the long roll of the ages but the clank of their fetters.”
    —Jane, Lady Wilde (1821–1896)

    “The nineteenth century was completely lacking in logic, it had cosmic terms and hopes, and aspirations, and discoveries, and ideals but it had no logic.”
    —Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)

    “Well, well, Henry James is pretty good, though he is of the nineteenth century, and that glaringly.”
    —Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894)

    “The secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power’s sake ... but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy. It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one’s own rules.”
    —Joan Didion (b. 1934)