It was on a chilly January day, much like today, in 1860 that Etienne Lenoir patented the first practical engine to run on petroleum fuel, called illuminating gas, and air. Though the Belgian engineer’s nascent combustion engines were groundbreaking, they were not big sellers, proving to be too heavy and too prone to overheat to be of any real use in a vehicle. However, this did not keep Lenoir from trying. He did indeed fit his engines onto wheeled vehicles and boats, though the resulting vehicles were never a success.
Forty years later, in 1900, Lenoir died penniless. In the years since, many of his engines have made their ways into museums around the western world.
