A travelling grocery salesman gave his name to the four-stroke engine
Nicolaus Otto spent his twenties selling coffee, tea, rice and sugar across western Germany. Then he heard about a new gas engine in Paris and started tinkering. His 1876 design, which squeezes fuel and air before lighting it, is why petrol engines are still officially called Otto engines.
Otto, the last of six children, was a native of Holzhausen an der Haide, born 10 June 1832; his father died the year he was born. He loved science at school but left without finishing, trained in business and became a salesman of colonial goods. In late 1860 he and his brother learned of Etienne Lenoir's engine, which burned the gas used for street lighting, and built a copy. Their patent application was rejected in 1861.
Otto already sensed that compressing the fuel charge was the key, but his first try at a compression engine ran only a few minutes before breaking, and his brother quit. In 1864 he found a backer, Eugen Langen, son of a sugar industrialist, and together they founded N.A. Otto and Cie in Cologne, the first company devoted entirely to internal combustion engines. Their atmospheric engine used an explosion to create a vacuum and let air pressure drive the piston back. It burned under half the gas of rival designs and won gold at the 1867 Paris exhibition.
By 1875 the firm was building 634 a year, but the design had hit a wall: just 3 horsepower from a machine needing up to 4 metres of headroom. Otto returned to compression, and with engineers Franz Rings and Hermann Schumm, brought in by manager Gottlieb Daimler, produced the four-stroke Silent Engine in 1876: intake, compression, power, exhaust. More than 50,000 were built in the next 17 years.
Otto sold only stationary engines and showed no interest when Daimler wanted small motors for vehicles, so Daimler left with Wilhelm Maybach. Daimler's lawyer then found an 1862 French patent by Beau de Rochas describing the four-stroke idea, and Otto lost a key patent, though Rochas never built an engine. Otto died on 26 January 1891. In 1936 German engineers made Ottomotor the standard term for spark-ignited engines.
Source: Nicolaus Otto
