You get in your car, start it up… and you’re off. It seems so simple; so natural that we can hardly imagine how life went on before the internal combustion engine. Yet if it had never been invented, would you have the originality of thought to dream it up yourself? The idea of gases under pressure driving pistons had been around since steam power, but actually making the gas within the engine itself was seen by many as the Holy Grail of engineering.

The idea behind internal combustion is actually pretty simple, yet putting it into practice proved extremely complicated. Thus its inception can’t be directly attributed to one man; it’s more a story of constant refinement and development over several centuries. At least 15 inventors and engineers – if they were alive today – would be squabbling over the title of its originator in at least eight different languages. As early as 1680, a Dutch physicist called Christian Huygens designed a closed-cylindered internal combustion engine that he (optimistically) hoped might be fuelled with gunpowder. He had the right principle – it would certainly produce an explosion – but possibly not as controlled as we might want, and the idea of stopping at a motorway service station for a tank load of gunpowder would probably be deemed impractical today.

By 1807, the Swiss inventor Francois Isaac de Rivaz had devised a slightly better plan, although his engine still could not be described by any right-thinking person as “safe”. His design used a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen to produce the necessary oomph (remember the Hindenberg?). Rivaz also developed a vehicle that he hoped would be propelled by his internal combustion engine. He went a little overboard and later modified his design to produce a six-metre-long Behemoth that weighed very nearly a ton.

Things went quiet for almost half a century, save for the plucky English engineer Samuel Brown, who shot up Shooter’s Hill in London on an old Newcomen steam engine which he’d converted to burn gas. But it was a Belgian, John Joseph Etienne Lenoir, who, in 1860, patented the first electric spark ignition internal combustion engine, which ran on coal gas. Three years later, Lenoir had refined his design still further by developing a primitive carburettor, the device that mixes air with a fine spray of petroleum to produce a combustible mixture. Lenoir’s engine is the first to come close to what we now think of as the internal combustion engine, and 500 were built and operated in Paris. It powered a three-wheeled wagon on a fifty-mile road trip.

Lest we forget, there was the French civil engineer Alphonse Beau de Rochas, who had the foresight to patent (but failed to build) a four-stroke engine in 1862. And then there was the American George Brayton, who produced a two-stroke engine that ran on kerosene – alas, it was too slow and cumbersome to be of any practical use. That honour went to Sir Dougald Clerk in 1891 – and the annoying little two-stroke mopeds that whine and buzz through our cities are still using pretty much the same technology today.

In the 1860s and 1870s, the German Nikolaus August Otto hit upon the first really practical four-stroke engine – despite a lack of formal training (economic pressures forced him to begin his career as a clerk in a grocery store). Even so, his four-stroke “Otto Cycle” is still the basis behind today’s modern engines. On the first “intake” stroke, the piston sucks in the explosive mixture of air and petrol from the carburettor. On the second “compression” stroke, the gas is compressed by the piston (which heats it) and it is ignited. The resulting explosion creates the third “power stroke” and on the fourth, the spent gas and fumes are expelled ready for the whole process to begin again.

A few years later in 1885, another German, Gottlieb Daimler, took Otto’s engine a stage further. Daimler was a technical director at Otto’s Gasmotorenfabrik Deutz works and, with his partner, the brilliant engineer Wilhelm Maybach, he patented the lightest, most efficient engine yet. All previous efforts had been wheezing Gargantuans compared to this small unit with its superior power-to-weight ratio. The following year, Daimler modified a stagecoach to use his engine. By 1889, Daimler had perfected his design, producing a V-slanted, two-cylinder, four-stroke engine. Instead of just strapping his powerplant to a stagecoach or whatever came to hand (as most previous inventors had done), Daimler actually made the effort to build a completely original four-speed automobile for the job. Daimler went on to set up Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft to produce his vehicles, and Maybach (a friend of Daimler’s up to his death in 1900) went on to design the first Mercedes in 1901 – a car which had a lower centre of gravity and truly revolutionary handling. The century of the internal combustion engine had truly begun.