40 Fun Facts About Engines

The word 'engine' descends from which Latin word, the same root that gives English 'ingenious'?

Ingenium, Latin for inborn talent, reached English as Old French 'engin', so an engine was at first any clever contrivance rather than a motor.

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

Diesel vanished from a steamship, the Dresden, overnight between Antwerp and London; 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, so a 100-horsepower car engine is a 75-kilowatt machine; Watt pegged a horse at 33,000 foot-pounds per minute.

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

Nitromethane blends, capped at 90 percent by NHRA rules with the rest mostly methanol, were measured at over 11,000 horsepower in 2015 sensor tests on a Top Fuel engine.

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 produced about 1.5 million pounds of thrust apiece, so the five on the first stage gave the Saturn V some 7.5 million pounds at liftoff.

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.

A two-stroke engine completes its entire working cycle in how many turns of the crankshaft?

One revolution, one up-stroke and one down, completes a two-stroke's cycle; small ones are lubricated by oil mixed into the petrol and burned along with it.

Which heating element helps a diesel engine, which has no spark plugs, 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 engine layout, on the B-25's Wright Cyclones, sets cylinders around the crankcase like wheel spokes?

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 highly refined form of what?

Kerosene refined to rocket grade, RP-1, is outwardly similar to the Jet A burned by airliners but made to stricter standards; the Saturn V's first stage carried 810,700 litres of it.

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 drove the fair's machinery through shafts totalling over a mile in length; George Corliss's patented valve gear of 1849 was the basis of the design.

Which tiny 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, restored to running order, regained the title of largest and most powerful operational steam locomotive in the world; only 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 or alternator, drive the axles; there is no mechanical connection at all between the diesel engine and the wheels.

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 two-stroke 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, is a stratified-charge design; Honda licensed it to four rival carmakers before it debuted in the 1975 ED1 engine.

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 a multigrade motor oil such as 10W-40, what does the letter W before the hyphen 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 have always powered BMW's six-cylinder cars, an exception to the industry's drift toward the V6.

Whose 1888 induction-motor patents are honoured in the name of the electric-car maker founded in 2003?

Nikola Tesla was granted induction-motor patents in May 1888, though Italian Galileo Ferraris had demonstrated a similar motor independently; the carmaker's name is a tribute to him.

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 suffered four serious problems; 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 obscurity at 36, and his ideal heat-engine cycle sets the efficiency ceiling no real engine can beat, which is why it is still taught first.

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, gone from road fuel since the 1970s, is still in the '100LL' avgas burned by piston aircraft?

Lead, as tetraethyl lead, remains in the most common avgas grades even though road petrol lost it in the 1970s to allow catalytic converters; the 'LL' in 100LL stands for low lead.