Friday, August 14, 2009

Happy Birthday... UPDATE!!!

Internal Combustion Engine. Or, actually, Nicolaus Otto's Four-Stroke Internal Combustion Engine, which was granted a US Patent on August 14, 1877.
Wikipedia:
Nikolaus August Otto (14 June 1832, Holzhausen an der Haide, Nassau - 26 January 1891,Cologne) was the German inventor of the first internal-combustion engine to efficiently burn fuel directly in a piston chamber. Although other internal combustion engines had been invented (e.g. by Étienne Lenoir) these were not based on four separate strokes. The concept of four strokes is likely to have been around at the time of Otto's invention but he was the first to make it practical.
Also in Wired.

today is also the birthday of Hans Christian Ørsted,
who (to over-simplify) discovered that electric current can create magnetic fields, thus making just about everything possible. Okay, I over-simplified again...

(Apparently some Italian had noticed the whole electric current/magnetic field thing, but had failed to get published.)

Aaaaannd (most importantly): Happy Birthday Jean!

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