342 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 3 4 



being Bollee and Serpollet of France, the latter becoming, toward 

 the close of the century, one of the greatest steam automobile manu- 

 facturers in Europe. In America, interest lagged somewhat, and 

 following the early efforts of Dudgeon, Reed, and Roper, few contri- 

 butions were made until the last decade of the century, when Whitney 

 patented his steam car in 1895 and sold the rights to the Stanley 

 Brothers. The Stanley Steamers which they made and sold in the 

 next few years, together with the low-price Locomobiles subsequently 

 produced under their patents by Barber, played a very definite part 

 in making America automobile conscious. But, hardly had the 

 steamers obtained a foothold in the public regard when they were 

 pushed aside for good and all as far as highway travel was concerned 

 by the gasoline-engined automobile. 



During the time that the exponents of the steam-engined carriages 

 were devoting their attention to utilizing the heating qualities of 

 the liquid fuels to raise steam for such vehicles, another group of 

 inventors was working on the perfection of engines which could 

 utilize the explosive properties of the fuels. The general idea was 

 not new, for as early as 1794 an English inventor, Robert Street, 

 had patented an explosive engine using gases distilled from turpen- 

 tine, and in 1799 LeBon, in France, produced a similar engine using 

 ordinary illuminating gas ignited by an electric spark. Sixty years 

 later another Frenchman, J. J. E. Lenoir, made the first practical 

 engine of this type and inaugurated a prosperous gas-engine indus- 

 try in Europe. Then, in 1876, N. A. Otto, of Germany, patented 

 and introduced the greatest improvement in the internal-combustion 

 engine, that of compressing the gas before exploding it. This is 

 the type of engine universally used in automobiles today. 



The gas engines made during this 16-year period of development 

 (1860-76) were bought and used for stationary power work, and 

 apparently but little thought was given to applying them to self- 

 propelled vehicles. Historians have been of the opinion, too, that 

 it was not until after Otto invented the four-cycle engine and after 

 gasoline became more plentiful that experimental work was under- 

 taken looking toward the use of gasoline instead of illuminating 

 gas in explosive engines. It has recently been brought to light in 

 Austria, however, that as early as 1864 Siegfried Marcus, a pioneer 

 electrical engineer and inventor of Vienna, devised a free piston, 

 two-cycle internal-combustion engine using benzine for fuel, and 

 that he first used the engine to propel a small wagon. Furthermore, 

 in 1875 Marcus built a second automobile in which he and his friends 

 made many trips in and about Vienna. The machine had a four- 

 cycle gasoline engine and many other advantages of the modern car. 



