Étienne Lenoir

Jean Joseph Étienne Lenoir (1822 to 1900) was a Belgian-born engineer who worked in France and built the first internal combustion engine to be sold in useful numbers. Born at Mussy-la-Ville, then part of Luxembourg, he settled in Paris by the early 1850s and took up electroplating, which led him to electrical inventions including an improved telegraph. In 1859 that work produced a single-cylinder, double-acting engine that burned a mixture of coal gas and air, fired by a spark from a Ruhmkorff coil, and he patented it in 1860. Because the charge was not compressed before ignition the engine ran smoothly but was fuel hungry, noisy and prone to overheating. Grace's Guide records that 143 had been sold in Paris by 1865 and that fewer than 500 were built in all, mostly to drive printing presses, pumps and machine tools. In 1863 he showed a three-wheeled carriage, the Hippomobile, powered by a petroleum engine. He became a French citizen in 1870, received the Legion of Honour in 1881 for his telegraph work, and died at La Varenne-Sainte-Hilaire in 1900.