Pyréolophore
internal combustion engine
The Pyréolophore (French: [piʁeɔlɔfɔʁ]) was an early internal combustion engine and the first made to power a boat. It was invented in the early 19th century in Chalon-sur-Saône, France, by the Niépce brothers: Nicéphore (who went on to invent photography) and Claude. In 1807 the brothers ran a prototype internal combustion engine, and on 20 July 1807 a patent was granted by Napoleon Bonaparte after it had successfully powered a boat upstream on the river Saône.
The Pyréolophore ran on what were believed to be "controlled dust explosions" of various experimental fuels. The fuels included mixtures of lycopodium powder (the spores of Lycopodium, or clubmoss), finely crushed coal dust, and resin.
Operating independently, in 1807 the Swiss engineer François Isaac de Rivaz built the de Rivaz engine, a hydrogen-powered internal combustion engine. These practical engineering projects may have followed the 1680 theoretical design of an internal combustion engine by the Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens. The separate, virtually contemporaneous implementations of this design in different modes of transport means that the de Rivaz engine may be correctly described as the first use of an internal combustion engine in an automobile (1808), whilst the Pyréolophore was the first use of an internal combustion engine in a boat (1807).
Preliminary research
The Niépce brothers were living in Nice when they conceived of a project to create an engine based on the newly defined principle of hot air expanding during an explosion; their challenge was to find a way to harness the energy released in a series of explosions.
In 1806 the Niépce brothers presented a paper on their research to the French National Commission of the Academy of Science (French: Institute National de Science).
The public source identifies “Pyréolophore” as internal combustion engine. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Pyréolophore, internal and combustion.
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This entry incorporates text from “Pyréolophore” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.