Engines | Britannica.com
Engines
This general category includes a selection of more specific topics.
Displaying Featured Engines Articles
James Watt
Scottish instrument maker and inventor whose steam engine contributed substantially to the Industrial Revolution. He was elected fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1785. Education and training Watt’s father, the treasurer and magistrate of Greenock, ran a successful ship- and house-building business. A delicate child, Watt was taught for a time...
internal-combustion engine
any of a group of devices in which the reactants of combustion (oxidizer and fuel) and the products of combustion serve as the working fluids of the engine. Such an engine gains its energy from heat released during the combustion of the nonreacted working fluids, the oxidizer-fuel mixture. This process occurs within the engine and is part of the thermodynamic...
steam engine
machine using steam power to perform mechanical work through the agency of heat. A brief treatment of steam engines follows. For full treatment of steam power and production and of steam engines and turbines, see Energy Conversion: Steam engines. In a steam engine, hot steam, usually supplied by a boiler, expands under pressure, and part of the heat...
Karl Benz
German mechanical engineer who designed and in 1885 built the world’s first practical automobile to be powered by an internal-combustion engine. Although the original Benz car (a three-wheeled vehicle, the Motorwagen, now preserved in Munich) first ran early in 1885, its design was not patented until January 29, 1886. Benz & Co. was founded in...
turbine
any of various devices that convert the energy in a stream of fluid into mechanical energy. The conversion is generally accomplished by passing the fluid through a system of stationary passages or vanes that alternate with passages consisting of finlike blades attached to a rotor. By arranging the flow so that a tangential force, or torque, is exerted...
Rolls-Royce PLC
major British manufacturer of aircraft engines, marine propulsion systems, and power-generation systems. Noted for much of the 20th century as a maker of luxury automobiles, the company was separated from its car-making operations and nationalized following bankruptcy in 1971. It returned to the private sector in 1987. Headquarters are in London. Rolls-Royce...
George Stephenson
English engineer and principal inventor of the railroad locomotive. Stephenson was the son of a mechanic who operated a Newcomen atmospheric-steam engine that was used to pump out a coal mine at Newcastle upon Tyne. The boy went to work at an early age and without formal schooling; by age 19 he was operating a Newcomen engine. His curiosity aroused...
Robert Fulton
American inventor, engineer, and artist who brought steamboating from the experimental stage to commercial success. He also designed a system of inland waterways, a submarine, and a steam warship. Fulton was the son of Irish immigrants. When their unproductive farm was lost by mortgage foreclosure in 1771, the family moved to Lancaster, where Fulton’s...
Richard Trevithick
British mechanical engineer and inventor who successfully harnessed high-pressure steam and constructed the world’s first steam railway locomotive (1803). In 1805 he adapted his high-pressure engine to driving an iron-rolling mill and to propelling a barge with the aid of paddle wheels. Trevithick spent his youth at Illogan in the tin-mining district...
Robert Stephenson
outstanding English Victorian civil engineer and builder of many long-span railroad bridges, most notably the Britannia Bridge over the Menai Strait, North Wales. He was the only son of George Stephenson, inventor of the railroad locomotive. He was educated at Bruce’s Academy, Newcastle upon Tyne, and at the University of Edinburgh. He assisted his...
Glenn Hammond Curtiss
pioneer aviator and leading American manufacturer of aircraft by the time of the United States’s entry into World War I. Curtiss began his career in the bicycle business, earning fame as one of the leading cycle racers in western New York state. Fascinated by speed, he began to build lightweight internal-combustion engines for motorcycles. He became...
Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot
French military engineer who designed and built the world’s first true automobile —a huge, heavy, steam-powered tricycle. After serving in the Austrian army in the Seven Years’ War, Cugnot returned to Paris in 1763 to devote his time to writing military treatises and tinkering with a number of inventions he had conceived while campaigning. He built...
Matthew Boulton
English manufacturer and engineer who financed and introduced James Watt ’s steam engine. After managing his father’s hardware business, in 1762 Boulton built the Soho manufactory near Birmingham. The factory produced small metal articles such as gilt and silver buttons and buckles, Sheffield plate, and a variety of other items. In 1768 Boulton made...
Peter Cooper
American inventor, manufacturer, and philanthropist who built the “Tom Thumb” locomotive and founded The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York City. Son of a Revolutionary War army officer who went into a succession of businesses in New York, Cooper learned an array of trades at an early age, despite having had only a single...
Thomas Savery
English engineer and inventor who built the first steam engine. A military engineer by profession, Savery was drawn in the 1690s to the difficult problem of pumping water out of coal mines. Using principles adduced by the French physicist Denis Papin and others, Savery patented (1698) a machine consisting of a closed vessel filled with water into which...
Sir Henry Royce, Baronet
English industrialist who was one of the founders of Rolls-Royce Ltd., manufacturer of luxury automobiles and airplane engines. At age 15 Royce was an engineer apprenticed to the Great Northern Railway company at Peterborough, and by 1882 he was chief electrical engineer for Liverpool’s first electric street-lighting system. Two years later he moved...
Oliver Evans
American inventor who pioneered the high-pressure steam engine (U.S. patent, 1790) and created the first continuous production line (1784). Evans was apprenticed to a wheelwright at the age of 16. Observing the trick of a blacksmith’s boy who used the propellant force of steam in a gun, he began to investigate ways to harness steam for propulsion....
William Murdock
Scottish inventor, the first to make extensive use of coal gas for illumination and a pioneer in the development of steam power. In 1777 Murdock entered the engineering firm of Matthew Boulton and James Watt in their Soho works at Birmingham and about two years later was sent to Cornwall to superintend the fitting of Watt’s steam engines. At his home...
Étienne Lenoir
Belgian inventor who devised the first commercially successful internal-combustion engine. Lenoir’s engine was a converted double-acting steam engine with slide valves to admit the air-fuel mixture and to discharge exhaust products. A two-stroke cycle engine, it used a mixture of coal gas and air. Though only about 4 percent efficient in fuel consumption,...
James Nasmyth
British engineer known primarily for his invention of the steam hammer. Nasmyth showed an extraordinary mechanical inclination while still a schoolboy in Edinburgh, building successful model steam engines. For two years he worked in Henry Maudslay’s machine shop in London and subsequently moved to Manchester, where rapid industrialization was in progress....
United Technologies Corporation (UTC)
UTC American multi-industry company with significant business concentrations in aerospace products and services, including jet engines. Formed in 1934 as United Aircraft Corporation, it adopted its present name in 1975. Headquarters are in Hartford, Connecticut. UTC incorporates two major aerospace business units— Pratt & Whitney and UTC Aerospace...
John Stevens
American lawyer, inventor, and promoter of the development of steam power for transportation. His petition to the U.S. Congress resulted in the Patent Law of 1790, the foundation of the present U.S. patent system. In 1776 Stevens became a captain in the American Revolutionary army and later was promoted to colonel. Afterward, he became interested in...
Matthias William Baldwin
manufacturer whose significant improvements of the steam locomotive included a steam-tight metal joint that permitted his engines to use steam at double the pressure of others. Originally trained as a jeweler but experienced in industrial design and manufacture, Baldwin was approached in 1832 by the Philadelphia and Germantown Railroad, which needed...
Eugène Schneider
one of the great industrialists of the 19th century and a prominent figure in French politics. Schneider lost his father when quite young and, left penniless, started working in the banking house of Baron Seillière. He proved to be bright, capable, and energetic and in 1830 was made director of the Bazeilles ironworks. In 1836, with his older brother...
Matthew Murray
English engineer. With little formal education, Murray went to work for a flax spinner in Leeds, where he introduced innovations in flax-spinning machinery. He established his own factory and was soon patenting various improvements to the steam engine. The locomotives he built for local collieries in 1812 were the first regularly employed for commercial...
Ole Evinrude
Norwegian-American inventor of the first commercially successful outboard marine internal-combustion engine. Evinrude began work on this project in 1906 and by 1909 had developed a one-cylinder power plant rated at 1.5 horsepower. Subsequent outboard motors followed his transmission design, which used a vertical drive shaft with bevel gears (a set...
Samuel Morey
American inventor. With support from Robert R. Livingston, Morey experimented with steamboats in the 1790s; though none was commercially successful, he later claimed that Robert Fulton had stolen his ideas. In 1826 he received the first U.S. patent for an internal-combustion engine. His many other patents included his American Water Burner (1818),...
William Symington
British engineer who developed (1801) a successful steam-driven paddle wheel and used it the following year to propel one of the first practical steamboats, the Charlotte Dundas. Although Symington was educated for the ministry at Glasgow and Edinburgh, his inclinations led him to become a civil engineer. His working model of a steam-driven road carriage...
Eugen Langen
German engineer who pioneered in building internal-combustion engines. In 1864 Langen formed a partnership with Nikolaus A. Otto, with whom he collaborated for the rest of his life. In 1867 they designed their first internal-combustion engine. Later, recognizing the theoretical advantages of a four-stroke cycle, they incorporated it in their “silent...
William Hedley
English coal-mine official and inventor who built probably the first commercially useful steam locomotive of the adhesion type (i.e., dependent on friction between wheels and rails, as are almost all modern railway engines). He patented his design on March 13, 1813, and in that year his locomotive “Puffing Billy” began to pull coal trucks about five...