Nicolaus Otto

• 1. Introduction

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  Nicolaus August Otto was born on the 10th of June 1832 in Holzhausen an der Haide, Germany, and he died in 1891 having transformed how the world moves. By the time he was done, his name had been written into industrial law: a German engineering standard bearing his name defines what an internal combustion engine actually is. But for most of his working life, he was just a grocery salesman traveling the roads of Western Germany with sacks of coffee, tea, rice, and sugar. How does a man like that end up inventing an engine that every car, motorcycle, and generator in the world still relies on? What did he see that trained engineers missed? And what did it cost him to get there?

• 2. The Salesman's Detour

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  Otto left school in Langenschwalbach in 1848 without finishing his studies, though his teachers noted his good performance. Science and technology were his passions, but what followed was a three-year business apprenticeship in a small merchandise company. He went to Frankfurt, took a job with Philipp Jakob Lindheimer selling colonial goods, and then moved on to IC Alpeter and later Carl Mertens. His routes covered Western Germany, and his cargo was coffee, tea, rice, and sugar. None of it had anything to do with engines. Then, in late autumn of 1860, everything changed. Otto and his brother heard about a novel gas engine that Jean Joseph Etienne Lenoir had built in Paris. The brothers built a copy of it themselves and filed a patent in January 1861 for a liquid-fueled version with the Prussian Ministry of Commerce. The patent was rejected.

• 3. The Engine That Broke

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  Otto was already thinking beyond the Lenoir design. He was aware of the idea of compressing the fuel charge inside the cylinder before igniting it, and in 1861 he tried to build an engine on that principle. It ran for only a few minutes before breaking. His brother gave up. Otto did not. From 1862 to 1863 he experimented with the help of a Cologne mechanic named Michael J. Zons, trying to improve what he had. Money was running out, and to keep working he returned to his old employer Carl Mertens. The 1861 broken engine and the failed Prussian patent were frustrating setbacks, but they were also clarifying ones: Otto now knew that compressed charge ignition was the direction, even if he could not yet make it work.

• 4. A Factory Built on Partnership

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  Early in 1864, Otto went looking for investors. He found Eugen Langen, whose father ran a sugar business. The two entered into a formal partnership on the 31st of March 1864 and named their venture NA Otto & Cie, based in Cologne. It was the first company in the world built entirely around designing and producing internal combustion engines. Their first commercial product was a free piston atmospheric engine: the explosion of gas created a vacuum, and the piston was driven back by atmospheric pressure. It consumed less than half the fuel of the rival Lenoir and Hugon engines, and that efficiency made it a commercial success. By 1875 the company was producing 634 engines a year. The 1864 atmospheric engine also won the gold medal at the 1867 World Exhibition in Paris.

• 5. The Dead End and the Breakthrough

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  Six hundred and thirty-four engines a year sounds impressive, but the atmospheric engine had a hard ceiling. It produced only 3 horsepower and required 10 to 13 feet of headroom just to operate. That was the ceiling, and Otto knew it. He turned back to the four-stroke compressed charge idea he had failed with in 1861. Two men inside the company, Franz Rings and Herman Schumm, were brought in by Gottlieb Daimler, and they were central to solving the problem. The result appeared in autumn 1876: the four-stroke compressed charge engine, later called the Otto Silent Engine. It was the first commercially successful engine to use in-cylinder compression. The "Otto cycle" that engineers still refer to today describes this engine, not the earlier atmospheric design. Within 17 years of its introduction, over 50,000 units had been produced.

• 6. The Patent That Unraveled

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  Gottlieb Daimler had worked inside Otto's company and eventually wanted to build small engines for transportation. Otto was not interested in that direction. Daimler left, and he took Wilhelm Maybach with him. Daimler had no intention of paying royalties to Otto's company, by then operating as Deutz AG, so he hired a lawyer to find a way out. The lawyer found one: a patent issued to a French engineer named Beau De Rochas in 1862, covering the concept of a four-cycle engine. Neither Otto nor Daimler had known about the Rochas patent. Rochas had never built an engine, and sources suggest he likely could not have. But the patent existed on paper, and that was enough. Otto lost one of his key patents, and Daimler was free to sell his engines in Germany without paying royalties. Otto had also invented electric ignition in 1884, a fact that often gets overlooked in the shadow of the patent dispute.

• 7. Legacy in a Standard

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  In 1882 the University of Wurzburg gave Otto an honorary doctorate. That same year, production of the original atmospheric engine was discontinued after 2,649 had been built. Otto died on the 26th of January 1891. His home was later turned into a museum, promoted by the local government. The most durable marker of his work came in 1936, long after his death, when Professor Nagel, head of the Association of German Engineers, decreed that DIN Standard 1940 define the "Ottomotor" as any engine that draws in a fuel mix, compresses it, and ignites it by a special device. The standard replaced a jumble of competing terms: explosion motor, detonation engine, benzine engine, ignition engine. His son Gustav grew up to become an aircraft builder, and the engine Otto spent decades refining went on to power both the automobiles that Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler built in 1885 and, in adapted form, the aircraft age that followed.