science · 09 April 1815 · 210 years ago
birth
Born 9 Apr 1815; died 27 Mar 1893 at age 77.
French railway engineer who originated the theoretical principle of the four-stroke internal-combustion engine and provide a theoretical pressure diagram (1862). His achievement lay partly in his emphasizing the previously unappreciated importance of compressing the fuel-air mixture before ignition. (French patent #52,593, 16 Jan 1862). However, he never built such an engine, nor defended his patent when the German Nikolaus August Otto produced a four-stroke engine in 1876. Beau de Rochas proposed other ideas: a rail tunnel beneath the English Channel, a submarine telegraph, a new kind of drive for canal boats, the use of steel for high-pressure boilers, and a method of improving the adhesion of locomotive wheel on Alpine tracks.
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