Charles Yale Knight

To cover dairy activities during 1901–02, he bought an early Knox automobile, a three-wheeler with an air-cooled, single-cylinder engine whose noisy valves annoyed him.

His radically different motor was mocked by engineers and designers, who were mainly concerned by making their cars run, rather than optimizing for efficiency, comfort, silence and high power.

[5] Around 1907, he signed a deal with the Chairman of Daimler Motor Company, the oldest manufacturer in Great Britain, for the right to use his Silent-Knight engine technology in their cars.

[9] When they were presenting the cars in New York, with the latest Yale engines, they sold models to the King of Norway, Sweden, and Belgium, and another two to Henry Ford.

[15] As of 1913, 26 car manufacturers in total were using the Knight engine technology, 9 French, 4 American, 4 German, 3 British, 2 Austrian, 2 Belgium, 1 Swiss, and 1 Canadian automobile company.

[16] Walter Owen Bentley of Bentley Motors : In those Edwardian days it was the Daimler-Knight engine which was regarded as the nearest to perfection...its big sleeve valves provided the superlative silence so highly esteemed by the Edwardian chauffeur and his master and mistress and the ... Daimler performed quite as well as the Silver Ghost Rolls-Royce.

Later, the sleeve valve technology invented by Charles Yale Knight will be modified and used by the British to build aircraft engines.