Tractor power made the mechanization of agricultural production possible just as the new country was developing. From the time of the California Gold rush in 1849, steam power's role expanded as a replacement for human and animal muscle on the farm. After 1892, there wasn't any stopping steam. Even as steam became king, the idea of power from internal combustion stayed alive. Steam power needed big machines with some portability ; engineers and users dreamed of little engines without steam's handicap. So work started anew, using other combustibles like coal gas.
Coal gas was not a perfect fuel, but it was relatively clean-burning. The fuel could be introduced in a controlled way into a combustion chamber and then ignited at the right instant to force the piston back and revolve the crank. Adding the inertia of a flywheel on the crankshaft produced a steady rotary motion.
The internal-combustion was on its way. In 1860 in Paris, France, Jean Lenoir made the 1st commercially produced internal-combustion engine. It burned city gas and worked sufficiently well, but its efficiency was poor since the fuel-air mixture wasn't compressed before ignition. Working with Lenoir's ideas, German Nicolaus August Otto granted a patent in 1876 an engine with a four-stroke, or four-cycle, idea. Otto's engine ran more effectively, compressing the fuel-air mixture, so charging each power stroke with more potential energy. The modern gas engine was born.
Concurrent developments in producing and harnessing electricity were keys to the further development of the gas engine. Trustworthy, exactly timed electrical sparks got the job done, while igniter tubes, hot bulbs, and other early ignition systems lacked precision for use worldwide . When his patents expired about 1890, many others started making gas engines. Otto's engine was called a gas engine, not a gasoline engine ; that came later. Otto's invention came along after oil was found in Pennsylvania in 1859, petrol was first valued for its early use as kerosene, or'coal oil,' burned in lamps and stoves. But the early refiners didn't know what to do with the stinky gas waste product that resulted from refining crude into kerosene and other heavier fuels and oils. Gasoline was regularly burned as waste or dumped into streams. It was Otto's engine that solved the refiner's dilemma, as gas became the preferred fuel for the internal-combustion engine.
