On This Day In History: Samuel Morey Patents The Internal Combustion Engine – On April 1, 1826

AncientPages.com -  On April 1, 1826, American Samuel Morey patented his "Gas or Vapor Engine" — the first internal combustion engine patent in the United States.

Morey was the son of a Revolutionary War officer interested in mechanical things. Morey secured several conventional patents before his 30th birthday, then turned his attention to building an entirely new engine type. He began working on steam engines in the 1790s.

There have been many earlier ideas for designing a similar engine; one belonged to Dutch mathematician Christiaan Huygens in 1673, and another was that of English inventor Robert Street in 1794.

But the idea of internal combustion did not take hold until the 1820s. At the time, most machines were driven by steam power.

During the early 1820s, several significant advancements were made in combustion technology. Most importantly, Samuel Brown, working at his laboratories in England, received a patent for creating a partial vacuum in the combustion chamber.

Based on the painter's descriptions, his version of the so-called "Leonardo cycle" showed tremendous promise for application in industry.

Morey's experiments were somewhat different.

He built a two-chamber design, placing valves and cams near the top to allow air intake and exhaust expulsion before injecting water for cooling, not unlike modern iterations of his idea.

Before he patented his invention, Morey conducted lab tests to see if the concept would produce a working model.

He attached it to a wagon and climbed aboard to see if it could drive the wheels. Cranking up the engine, he was thrown to the ground as his rudimentary, driverless automobile puttered down the street and into a ditch. Pleased with the results, he hoped again to find legions of willing buyers for his engine as he had with his steamboat modifications years before.

Unfortunately, sales were nearly non-existent.

Frustrated, he lamented the lack of interest in his notes with a vision for the future: "There is a good reason I trust to conclude that transportation on good roads or railroad may be done much cheaper as well as quicker than by locks and canals."

Fifty years later, German engineers, including Gottlieb Daimler, Wilhelm Maybach, and Karl Benz, started producing their internal combustion engines.

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