Otto

NAME: Otto, Nikolaus August

ACHIEVEMENT(S):  The first commercially successful four-stroke internal combustion engine (the Otto Cycle).

NICKNAME/ALIAS: None

DATE/PLACE OF BIRTH: 10 June 1832, at Holzhausen, Nassau (now in Germany)

DATE/PLACE/AGE AT DEATH: 26 January 1891, at Cologne, Germany.  Aged 58

DISCIPLINE: Engineer

FIELD: Engineering

LANGUAGE: German

PARENTS: Philipp Wilhelm (1777-1832) and Anna Katharina (1794-1860)

SIBLINGS: ?

SPOUSE: Anna Gossi, married 1868

CHILDREN: Three sons and four daughters - including Gustav (1883-1926,

aviator)

EDUCATION: Langenschwalbach Realschule, 1846-48

MAJOR WORK:  None

LIFE AND TIMES:

Around 1860  Otto's interest was greatly aroused by the coal-gas internal combustion engine currently being developed by the Belgian inventor Etienne Lenoir. In 1861, with the aid of the Cologne mechanic Michael Joseph Zons, Otto constructed his first gas-air internal combustion engine with an electric ignition, and three years later his experiments came to the attention of Eugen Langen, a German industrialist trained at the Karlsruhe Polytechnic.

Langen successfully raised the capital to establish the world's first engine company in Cologne: N.A. Otto & Company, in order to build and market Otto's engines. Assisted by a former fellow student, Franz Reuleaux, Otto and Langen then built an improved free-piston internal combustion engine shown at the Paris Exhibition of 1867, where it won the gold medal. More capital was then raised, and in 1869 a new company the Gasmotoren Fabrik, opened at a new factory at Deutz near Cologne.  

From this point, Otto began to concentrate on administering the business, leaving Langen and his team (which now included the engineers <employed> Daimler* and <employed> Maybach*) to develop the engines.   In 1876 Otto conceived the idea which would make his name: the <first practical version of> internal-combustion engine* utilizing the four-stroke cycle (i.e. four strokes of the piston for each explosion).

In the first stroke of the Otto four-stroke cylinder cycle (known as the induction stroke), the piston moves towards the crankshaft, and the explosive mixture is drawn into the cylinder; on the second (compression), return stroke, the mixture is then compressed; at or about the top dead centre position, ignition is then effected and the burning mixture then drives the piston during the third (combustion) stroke; and finally, on the fourth (exhaust) stroke of the cycle, the burnt gas are expelled from the cylinder, and the entire cycle is then repeated.

One major feature of Otto's four-stroke engine was this compression of the fuel-air mixture before ignition, and improving performance. 

The four-stroke engine was immediately popular, and more than 30,000 were manufactured by Otto and Langen and installed throughout the world over the next decade. Although other types of engine were still made, such as the low-power vertical Bischop engine (in which expansion of the exploded gases raised the piston, which was then driven downwards by atmospheric pressure during its downward stroke - in accordance with the ideas of the Dutch physicist <influenced by> Christiaan Huyghens*), but the reliability, efficiency and relative quietness of Otto's engine the most successful machine of the late 1870s and 1880s.  

In 1886 Otto's patent was revoked when his competitors discovered that the French engineer Alphonse Beau de Rochas had described the principle of the four-stroke cycle in an obscure pamphlet, for which he received a patent in 1862. Almost certainly, however, Otto had developed his machine entirely independently of Rochas, and he was undoubtedly the first to build an engine based on this principle, commonly known as the 'Otto cycle'.

Meanwhile, in the early 1880s both Daimler and Maybach had left the Gasmotoren Fabrik in order to develop lightweight high-speed, petrol-fuelled internal combustion engines for the <helped development of> automobile* at Stuttgart, and by 1883 the pair had constructed and patented a machine which (owing to Maybach's invention of the prototype carburettor) ran at 900 rpm, three times faster than Otto's gas engine.

By Otto's death in 1891  Daimler and Maybach had perfected the petrol-fuelled engine and the days of Otto's gas engines were already numbered.

ASSESSMENT: A pioneer in the development of the automobile.

EXTRA CONNECTIONS: He inspired <inspired> Diesel*

ONELINER:  Nickolaus Otto, inventor of the four-stroke engine

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

EB

History of the Internal Combustion Engine, Detroit: Society of Automotive

Engineers, 1989