The Quest - By Daniel Yergin Page 0,307

three horsepower.

The engineers were very much at odds as to which way to go. Otto wanted to work on a new kind of engine, an internal combustion engine. Daimler was highly skeptical. Meanwhile, competing inventors and engineers were busily trying to find their own breakthroughs. A friend of Langen’s, a professor named Franz Reulleaux, warned him that while they dithered among themselves, competitors were moving ahead. Reulleaux argued that they should pursue Otto’s idea for an internal combustion engine. “Get with it,” he declared. “Herr Otto must get off of his hind legs, and Herr Daimler must get off his front.”

Otto’s mechanism would draw air and fuel into a cylinder through a valve, compress it, combust that charge, and exhaust the spent charge in four stokes. Daimler, now the chief technologist of the tiny company, continued to object. He dismissed Otto’s ideas as “a waste of time.”

But Langen placed his bet on Otto. Daimler had missed the significance of the increased power and efficiency offered by Otto’s design. Within six months they had prototyped an engine that not only exceeded the performance of any engine currently available, but could also shatter the three-horsepower barrier. The device was a commercial success.4

The development of the “Otto cycle” engine in 1876 marked the introduction of the modern internal combustion engine. It combined valves, a crankshaft, spark plugs, and a single cylinder in a way that allowed the fuel and gases to harness the energy of combustion with dramatically fewer energy losses, and thus with greater efficiency. On top of all of that, it was also more reliable.

By 1890 a German auto industry, founded on the internal combustion engine, had been born. Otto and Karl Benz, who used Otto’s patent for his first three-wheeler, were among the pioneers of the German auto industry. And so was Gottlieb Daimler, who had split off from Otto and founded his own company. By the middle-1890s, Daimler was even distributing his cars in America through the piano maker William Steinway. Daimler’s and Benz’s firms were to be merged in the twentieth century into one company, Daimler-Benz. But Daimler and Benz apparently never met each other.

THE RACE

For at least a decade, Germany and France—the latter with such engineers as Armand Peugeot and Louis Renault—led the world in motor transportation.

The auto industry was much slower to develop in Britain, despite its preeminence in engineering. “Friends” of the railway industry pushed through Parliament the Red Flag Act, which aimed to protect the transportation franchise of the railways. Under the Red Flag Act “road locomotives”—that is, cars—could go no faster than two miles an hour in cities. (A walker, at three miles an hour, could beat that.) In rural areas, drivers could accelerate their cars up to all of four miles an hour. And to add extra safety, drivers had to be preceded by someone walking sixty yards in front who would wave a red flag during daylight hours and carry a lantern after dark. The Red Flag Act meant less incentive to use autos, as their speed and utility were severely constrained.

On the other side of the Atlantic, in the United States, cars were starting to appear on the street, but they were mainly steamers or electrics. In 1892 one newspaper reported that “a novelty in the way of a wagon propelled by electricity was seen on the streets of Chicago yesterday... The run was made in 22 minutes. The owners found this time respectable—given traffic and the difficulty of negotiating large crowds drawn to the vehicle.”5

It was not until 1893 that the first successful gasoline-powered car was built in the United States, based on an article in Scientific American describing one of Daimler’s vehicles. Thereafter, an increasing number of innovators were attracted to the internal combustion engine, many of them in the Great Lakes region, particularly around Detroit. Among the more obsessed was a farm boy from Dearborn, Michigan, who had a fascination with machinery and a natural intuition for how things worked—and could work. This was that youthful chief engineer of the Edison Illuminating Company of Detroit, Henry Ford.6

ELECTRIC OR GASOLINE?

In 1899, Edison’s blessing still ringing in his ears, Ford left Edison Detroit to work full time on automobiles powered by internal combustion engines.

But the steamer and the electric car still held the lead. The first police car in America, which took to the road in Akron, Ohio, in 1899, was an electric vehicle. (The Akron police chief had decided it would be cheaper than paying for horse teams