90 Fun Facts About Engines

The word 'engine' descends from which Latin word, meaning inborn talent or cleverness?

Ingenium, Latin for inborn talent, reached English as Old French 'engin', so an engine was at first any clever contrivance; 'ingenious' grew from the same root.

What became of Rudolf Diesel in September 1913, on his way to a business meeting in London?

Diesel vanished from a steamship, the Dresden, on an overnight crossing from Antwerp; ten days later a Dutch pilot boat found a body whose pockets held his pill case and pocketknife.

James Watt's horsepower, devised to compare steam engines with draft horses, equals about how many watts?

One horsepower is about 746 watts, yet Watt's benchmark of 33,000 foot-pounds a minute is more than most horses can keep up through a working day.

Which fuel lets a Top Fuel dragster's supercharged V8 produce more than 11,000 horsepower?

Nitromethane carries oxygen in its own molecule, so a cylinder can burn about eight times as much of it as petrol with each charge of air; NHRA rules cap the blend at 90 per cent.

Which Scottish minister's 1816 engine, run by external heat, is fitted to Sweden's Gotland-class submarines?

Robert Stirling's closed-cycle engine heats and cools a sealed gas instead of burning fuel inside, which is why submarines use it: it runs exceptionally quietly.

The 14-cylinder Wärtsilä-Sulzer RTA96-C, the world's largest reciprocating engine, is designed to drive what?

Container ships such as the Emma Mærsk carry the 14-cylinder version, which stands 13.5 metres tall, weighs over 2,300 tonnes and puts out 80 megawatts, about 107,000 horsepower.

Which streamlined LNER locomotive set the steam speed record of 126 mph in 1938, a mark that still stands?

Mallard hit 126 mph (203 km/h) on 3 July 1938 during a trial of a new quick-acting brake, and no steam locomotive has officially beaten it since.

Which Rolls-Royce engine, one of its bird-of-prey series, powered the Spitfire, Hurricane and Lancaster?

Merlin is a small falcon: Rolls-Royce named its piston aero engines after birds of prey, and the Merlin went on to power the Mustang too, built in America by Packard as the V-1650.

Which engine, five per Saturn V first stage, remains the most powerful single-chamber liquid-fuel engine?

The F-1 gave about 1.5 million pounds of thrust; to cure its combustion instability, engineers set off small bombs inside the firing chamber until the flame recovered in a tenth of a second.

Which fuel did the Space Shuttle's three main engines burn, fed from the external tank along with oxygen?

Liquid hydrogen, stored cryogenically, fed the three RS-25 engines at the orbiter's tail, each producing around 418,000 pounds of thrust at liftoff.

Which engine type is usually lubricated by oil mixed into its petrol?

Two-stroke engines finish their whole cycle in one crankshaft turn and use the crankcase to pump in the fuel mixture, so the oil is blended into the petrol and burned with it.

Which part helps a diesel engine, which has no spark ignition, to start in cold weather?

A glow plug warms the air in the cylinder so the fuel lights from compression alone; a diesel relies solely on compression heat to ignite its charge.

At a 1900 exhibition, on the French government's suggestion, a small diesel engine was run on which fuel?

Peanut oil ran the engine so smoothly that, as Diesel himself wrote, 'very few people were aware of the fact' — an early biofuel demonstration.

Which aero-engine layout, used on the B-25's Wright Cyclones, fixes its cylinders in a star around a turning crankshaft?

Radial engines are short and air-cooled, which suited warplanes: the 14-cylinder Twin Cyclone powered the B-25 Mitchell and the Grumman Avenger.

Which lubricant did WWI rotary aero engines like the Gnome burn through in a total-loss system?

Castor oil kept lubricating even when mixed with the fuel, so rotaries — whose cylinders spun with the propeller — sprayed it out with the exhaust.

Which nine-cylinder air-cooled engine of 1925, the R-1340, was the very first built by Pratt & Whitney?

The Wasp first ran on 29 December 1925 and founded a famous series; its 1,344 cubic inches gave it its number, R-1340, in the American naming style.

What nickname did the 28-cylinder, four-row Pratt & Whitney R-4360 earn from its staggered cylinder rows?

Corncob fitted: each row of seven cylinders was offset slightly from the one before, a spiral that let cooling air reach the rear rows of a 4,360-cubic-inch monster.

RP-1, the fuel burned by the Saturn V's first stage and the Falcon 9, is a refined form of what?

Kerosene refined to rocket grade, RP-1, resembles the Jet A burned by airliners but is made to stricter standards, since impurities would break down and clog an engine's narrow cooling passages.

Whose experimental turbine vessel Turbinia turned up unannounced at the 1897 Spithead naval review?

Charles Parsons had invented the steam turbine in 1884 and built Turbinia in 1894; easily the fastest ship afloat, it set the pattern for the next generation of liners and warships.

Whose giant beam engine powered nearly every exhibit at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia?

Corliss's Centennial Engine was started by President Grant and Emperor Pedro II of Brazil, then drove the fair's machinery through more than a mile of shafting.

Which locomotive, built by Peter Cooper for the Baltimore and Ohio, lost a race to a horse-drawn car?

Tom Thumb suffered a mechanical failure mid-race and the horse won, yet Cooper had built it precisely to convince the B&O's owners that steam could do the job.

Which Union Pacific locomotives, built for freight over the Wasatch Range, alone used a 4-8-8-4 layout?

Big Boy No. 4014 was restored to steam in 2019 and is the only one of the eight survivors still running; just 25 were ever built.

In which country did the world's first diesel-powered locomotive run in 1912, on a line out of Winterthur?

Switzerland's Winterthur–Romanshorn line saw the test runs; the diesel-mechanical machine was delivered to Berlin in September 1912, was not a commercial success, and the outbreak of war in 1914 ended its trials.

In a diesel-electric locomotive, the diesel engine only spins a generator; what actually turns the wheels?

Traction motors, fed by the generator, drive the axles; with no mechanical link between the diesel engine and the wheels, the locomotive needs no gearbox.

Which Napier opposed-piston diesel, two per locomotive, powered British Rail's Class 55?

Deltic means 'in the form of the Greek letter delta', the triangle its three cylinder banks make; each 18-cylinder engine gave 1,650 bhp from 88 litres, and a Class 55 carried two.

Which company's 1932 flathead, cast as a single block, was the first V8 ordinary buyers could afford?

Ford's flathead was an automotive milestone, ranked among the company's most important developments; monobloc V8 castings existed before but had never been mass-produced.

Which GM division's small-block V8, launched for 1955, passed 100 million units built by 2011?

Chevrolet's small-block began at 265 cubic inches and grew to 400; the 350-cubic-inch, 5.7-litre version became GM's corporate standard V8 across its sibling brands.

Which 1964 Chrysler V8, the 'elephant engine', takes its name from its dome-shaped combustion chambers?

The 426 Hemi got its 'elephant' tag for its high power, heavy weight and sheer size; 'Hemi' is short for hemispherical, the half-sphere shape of its cylinder heads.

Which Honda engine technology of 1975 met US emissions rules without needing a catalytic converter?

CVCC, Compound Vortex Controlled Combustion, lights a rich mixture in a small pre-chamber to burn a lean main charge; Honda licensed it to four rival carmakers, Toyota among them.

Which cycle, its expansion stroke longer than its compression, runs the petrol engine in Toyota hybrids?

Atkinson's design trades power for thermal efficiency, a bargain that made little sense until hybrids such as the early Prius could add an electric motor to supply the missing punch.

Which 1962 Oldsmobile, among the first turbocharged production cars, needed methanol-water to curb knock?

The Jetfire's turbocharged 215 V8, the 'Turbo-Rocket', was prone to spark-knock, and without modern engine management the only fix was a 50/50 dose of methanol and distilled water.

Which Indiana brothers' 1860 air pump for blast furnaces lent its name to the classic dragster supercharger?

Roots blowers were patented by Philander and Francis Marion Roots of Connersville, Indiana; the huge ones on Top Fuel cars descend from GM's blowers for industrial diesels.

In an oil grade such as 10W-40, the W is often read as 'weight', but what does it actually stand for?

Winter: the first number rates how the oil flows when cold and the second at running temperature, so a 10W-40 behaves like a thin oil on a frosty morning and a thicker one once hot.

Which heavy disc bolted to the crankshaft stores momentum to carry the pistons between firings?

A flywheel smooths the lumpy output of a reciprocating engine; the same idea stores energy in flywheel power banks and keeps satellites pointed, as reaction wheels.

Which layout, BMW's signature, has perfect primary and secondary balance and vibrates less than a V6?

Straight-six engines cancel their own shaking forces because the front three pistons mirror the rear three, one reason BMW kept the layout while most rivals switched to the V6.

The carmaker Tesla is named after Nikola Tesla, whose 1888 patents covered which machine used in its first cars?

The AC induction motor won Tesla his patents in May 1888, though Italy's Galileo Ferraris had independently shown a similar machine; the first Roadsters ran on a three-phase version.

Which Englishman patented a pistonless steam pump in 1698 and described it as 'The Miner's Friend'?

Thomas Savery's pump had no moving parts except its taps and could not cope with high-pressure steam; Newcomen's 1712 engine borrowed Papin's piston idea to lift water from deep mines.

Which French officer's 1824 essay on the motive power of fire made him the 'father of thermodynamics'?

Sadi Carnot died in relative obscurity at 36, yet his ideal heat-engine cycle sets the efficiency ceiling that no real engine can beat.

At what rpm do an engine's horsepower and torque curves always cross when torque is in pound-feet?

5,252 is the constant in the formula horsepower = torque × rpm ÷ 5,252, so at that speed the two numbers are equal; below it torque is the larger figure, above it horsepower.

Which additive, phased out of road fuel from the 1970s, is still in the '100LL' avgas burned by piston aircraft?

Lead, as tetraethyl lead, remains in the most common avgas grades to prevent engine knock, even though road petrol began losing it in the 1970s to protect catalytic converters; the 'LL' means low lead.

Which birds' carcasses are most often fired from a compressed-air cannon at jet engines in bird-strike tests?

Chickens are the usual ammunition because they are so easy to obtain, which earned the cannon its nickname, the chicken gun. The first one was built in the United States in 1942.

At what kind of shop in Wiesloch did Bertha Benz buy fuel during the first long-distance car journey?

A pharmacy sold ligroin, the petroleum solvent the Benz Patent-Motorwagen ran on, so the Wiesloch shop has since been dubbed the first filling station in the world. She set off in 1888 without telling her husband.

Which metal, applied as a thin foil, lines the engine bay of the McLaren F1 supercar to reflect heat?

Gold is such an efficient heat reflector that designer Gordon Murray chose it to protect the carbon-fibre body from the BMW V12. Each car carries about 16 grams of it.

Which name did car dealer Emil Jellinek give the 35 hp Daimler model he commissioned in 1900, after his own daughter?

Mercedes was also the pseudonym Jellinek raced under, and the cars he ordered carried an engine that officially bore her name. Wilhelm Maybach built the model to his specifications.

What powered La Jamais Contente, the torpedo-shaped Belgian car that first passed 100 km/h in 1899?

Electric batteries drove the rear axle of Camille Jenatzy's record car through chains. Its French name means The Never Contented.

Which carmaker admitted in 2015 that software in about 11 million diesel cars cheated emissions tests?

Volkswagen had programmed its diesel engines to activate full emissions controls only during laboratory testing. The scandal became known as Dieselgate.

Rolls-Royce jet engines such as the Trent, Avon and Spey follow a tradition of being named after British what?

Rivers have named the firm's jets for decades. The Trent, which flows through the English Midlands, first lent its name to the company's earliest working turboprop.

Which gas do racers inject into an engine, where heat splits it to release extra oxygen for burning fuel?

Nitrous oxide breaks down into nitrogen and oxygen in the hot cylinder, so more fuel can be burned on each stroke. Racers often call the system NOS.

Which former grocery salesman's four-stroke engine of 1876 gave the working cycle of petrol engines its name?

Nicolaus Otto once travelled western Germany selling coffee, tea, rice and sugar. He turned to engines after testing a copy of a Lenoir gas engine in 1861.

Which German engineer gave his name to the rotary engine that won Le Mans for Mazda in 1991?

Felix Wankel first ran a working prototype of his rotary engine in 1957 at the German firm NSU. Mazda's four-rotor 787B was the first Le Mans winner without a piston engine.

Which British car of 1959 mounted its engine sideways, leaving 80% of its floor for passengers and luggage?

Mini engineers also put the gearbox in the engine's sump and drove the front wheels. Sideways engines driving the front wheels later became the norm for small cars, from the Honda N360 to the Fiat 127.

Which addition did James Watt make to the Newcomen steam engine so its cylinder could stay hot between strokes?

A separate condenser let the steam be cooled in a second vessel while the main cylinder stayed hot. That ended the waste of reheating the cylinder on every stroke and slashed the engine's coal bill.

Stephenson's Rocket won the Rainhill Trials of 1829, staged by a new railway built to link which two places?

Liverpool and Manchester Railway directors staged the trials to decide whether locomotives could pull their trains. Rocket was the only entrant to complete them and took the £500 prize.

Which Cornish engineer's steam locomotive made the first railway journey, hauling iron in Wales in 1804?

Richard Trevithick's unnamed engine hauled ten tons of iron and 70 men to settle a 500-guinea bet between two ironmasters. It averaged about 2.4 mph.

Which LNER locomotive, which later toured North America and Australia, was the first officially timed at 100 mph?

Flying Scotsman hit the mark in November 1934. Its American tour required a cowcatcher and a bell, and in Australia it ran a record 422 miles non-stop.

The aeolipile, a sphere spun by steam jets in the first century AD, is also called which Greek engineer's engine?

Hero of Alexandria gave instructions for making one, though nobody knows whether it was ever more than a novelty. It is considered the first recorded steam engine.

Which jet engine add-on, used by Concorde at takeoff, injects extra fuel behind the turbine for a burst of thrust?

Afterburner use sharply raises fuel consumption, so pilots light it only for short periods. British engineers call the same device reheat.

Which type of jet engine has almost no moving parts and makes no thrust until a booster gets it moving?

Ramjet engines use their own forward motion to squeeze air for combustion, with a shaped intake doing a compressor's job. One burning solid fuel lacks even a fuel pump.

Which German weapon of 1944 got its characteristic buzz from an Argus pulsejet engine firing 50 times a second?

V-1 flying bomb engines made such a distinctive drone that the Allies nicknamed the weapon the buzz bomb or doodlebug. It is classed as an early cruise missile.

Which noble gas is the propellant in the ion engines of NASA's Deep Space 1 and Dawn probes?

Xenon atoms are turned into ions and accelerated using electricity to create thrust. Dawn changed its velocity by 11.5 km/s on just 425 kg of the gas.

Which fuel does SpaceX's Raptor, the first full-flow staged combustion engine to fly, burn with oxygen?

Methane was chosen partly because it could be synthesized on Mars from underground water and carbon dioxide. Raptor engines are also designed for reuse with little maintenance.

Which Toyota, launched in 1997, was the first mass-produced car to pair a petrol engine with an electric motor?

Prius is a Latin word meaning 'first' or 'to go before', a fitting badge for a model developed as the car for the 21st century.

Which American marque's Model Thirty of 1912 introduced the electric starter that ended dangerous hand cranking?

Cadillac got there first, and Lanchester adopted the same system later that year. Its co-inventor, Kettering, had earlier swapped the hand crank on cash registers for an electric motor.

Which shaft in a four-stroke engine opens the valves and is geared to turn at half the crankshaft's speed?

Camshaft lobes push each valve open and a spring closes it again. In a four-stroke the valves open only half as often as the crank turns, hence the half-speed gearing.

Which device mixed air and fuel in most petrol car engines until fuel injection largely replaced it in the 1990s?

Carburetor designs rely on the Venturi effect to draw fuel into the incoming air. NASCAR's top series, one of the last users in motorsport, switched to fuel injection after its 2011 season.

Which American main battle tank is powered by a 1,500-horsepower gas turbine rather than a diesel engine?

M1 Abrams tanks use a multifuel turbine, originally made by Lycoming, that delivers its full power while spinning at 30,000 rpm.

Which dashboard gauge, its name taken from the Greek for speed, shows how fast an engine is turning?

Tachometer dials usually mark the top of their range in red, which is where the expression 'redlining' an engine comes from.

In an engine size such as 1,500 cc, the volume swept by all of its pistons, what does cc stand for?

Cubic centimetres are the usual metric unit for displacement, and 1,000 of them make a litre, so a 1,500 cc engine is a 1.5-litre. American makers have traditionally quoted cubic inches.

Which Bugatti hypercar, launched in 2005, used an 8.0-litre W16 engine fed by four turbochargers?

Veyron engineers needed ten radiators to keep the car cool, three of them for the engine's water alone. The '16.4' in its full name counts the cylinders and the turbochargers.

Which nickname is given to the flat engines used by Subaru and in the Porsche 911, with opposed pairs of pistons?

Boxer pistons in each opposed pair move inwards and outwards at the same time, the most common arrangement for a flat engine. Porsche also raced flat-eight versions in the 1960s.

Which toothed rubber part keeps an engine's valves in step with its pistons and can wreck both if it snaps?

Timing belt failure in an interference engine lets the valves collide with the pistons. Other engines do the same job with a metal chain or a set of gears.

Which British firm built the DFV, the V8 that won 155 Formula One world championship races after its 1967 debut?

Cosworth takes its name from founders Mike Costin and Keith Duckworth. DFV-powered cars won every world championship race in both 1969 and 1973.

Which device, which replaced the dynamo in cars from the 1960s, charges the battery while the engine runs?

Alternator designs took over once silicon-diode rectifiers became widely available and affordable. The first production car to carry one as standard was a 1960 Valiant.

Which Italian motorcycle maker is known for desmodromic valves, closed mechanically rather than by a spring?

Ducati engineer Fabio Taglioni developed the system for the 125 Grand Prix racer in 1956, and the firm went on to hold a number of patents on it.

Which American motorcycle maker's 45-degree V-twin fires unevenly, giving its choppy 'potato-potato' sound?

Harley-Davidson showed a prototype with the 45-degree engine at the 1907 Chicago Automobile Show. Its rear cylinder fires 315 degrees after the front one, then comes a 405-degree gap.

Which metal was the engine body of the 1903 Wright Flyer cast from, helping keep its weight to 180 pounds?

Aluminium kept the 12-horsepower engine light enough to fly. No car engine suited the job, so the Wrights had their employee Charlie Taylor build one from scratch.

Which fuel fired the 29 boilers that raised steam for RMS Titanic's engines on its 1912 maiden voyage?

Coal went into the 159 furnaces by hand, more than 600 tonnes of it a day, shovelled by 176 firemen working around the clock.

Which airliner, with four Ghost turbojets buried in its wings, flew the first fare-paying jet passengers in 1952?

De Havilland Comet G-ALYP opened scheduled jet service from London to Johannesburg on 2 May 1952. The prototype had first flown in 1949.

Which precious metal, used with palladium and rhodium, makes a car's catalytic converter a target for thieves?

Platinum is the most active catalyst for turning engine pollutants into less harmful gases. Converters that are welded on are at risk because they can easily be cut off.

Which RAF officer patented a turbojet design in 1930 and saw it fly in the Gloster E.28/39 in 1941?

Frank Whittle worked out the idea in a thesis while in his early twenties, yet Germany's Hans von Ohain got a jet aircraft into the air first, in 1939.

Which Honda system, first seen in the 1989 Integra, switches valve-lift profiles to add power at high revs?

VTEC was the first production system to vary both when an engine's valves open and how far they lift by switching profiles. One suits low-rpm economy, the other high-rpm power.

Which Swedish maker's 99 Turbo of the late 1970s was among the first family cars with a turbocharged engine?

Saab had tried a Triumph V8 in the 99 before dropping it in favour of the turbocharged unit. The very first 99 body shell was disguised with Daihatsu badges.

Which German marque's five-cylinder turbo coupé was the first rally car to use newly legal four-wheel drive?

Audi named the car the Quattro and raised its turbocharged five to around 350 horsepower for Group B rallying. The road version stayed in production from 1980 to 1991.

Which British car used two Rolls-Royce Spey jet engines to break the sound barrier on land in 1997?

ThrustSSC was driven across Nevada's Black Rock Desert at 763 mph by RAF fighter pilot Andy Green, 50 years and a day after Chuck Yeager first broke the barrier in the air.

Which engine, built for Wylam Colliery around 1813, is the world's oldest surviving steam locomotive?

Puffing Billy worked until 1862, when the colliery's owner lent it to the South Kensington museum that later became London's Science Museum.

Which locomotive, stolen by Union spies in the Great Locomotive Chase, gave its name to a Buster Keaton film?

The General was chased by conductor William Fuller aboard another engine, the Texas, and abandoned north of Ringgold, Georgia. Disney retold the raid in a 1956 film.

Which Japanese motorcycle maker co-developed the Lexus LFA's V10 engine and tuned its intake sound?

Yamaha channelled two octaves of engine sound into the cabin, tuned in the manner of an Ovation guitar. A television advert later used the V10's note to shatter a champagne glass.

Which country's carmakers introduced 'flex' engines in 2003 that run on any blend of petrol and sugarcane ethanol?

Brazil had already spent decades building a fuel programme around cane alcohol. Within five years of launch, flex models were taking more than four in five new car sales there.

Which jump jet's single Pegasus engine directs its thrust through four swivelling nozzles for vertical takeoff?

Harrier nozzles come in two pairs, one carrying bypass air and the other the hot jet exhaust. Small reaction jets in the nose, tail and wingtips keep it balanced in vertical flight.

Which German firm flew the world's first turbojet aircraft in August 1939, powered by Hans von Ohain's engine?

Heinkel flew the He 178 on 27 August 1939 with Erich Warsitz at the controls. Founder Ernst had agreed to back von Ohain after the young engineer presented his idea in person.