Hornsby–Akroyd oil engine

Furthermore, the combustion of the fuel must be powerful, regular, and complete, to avoid deposits that will clog the valves and working parts of the engine.

[citation needed] The earliest mention of an oil engine was by Robert Street, in his English patent no.

[1][2] Other oil engines were subsequently built by Etienne Lenoir, Siegfried Marcus, Julius Hock of Vienna and George Brayton in the 19th century.

The patent was entitled: Improvements in Engines Operated by the Explosion of Mixtures of Combustible Vapour or Gas and Air.

As the engine's load increased, so did the temperature of the bulb, causing the ignition period to advance; to counteract pre-ignition, water was dripped into the air intake.

Just as compression is completed, the mixture is just right to support combustion and ignition occurs to push the piston during expansion stroke (3).

Some years later, Akroyd-Stuart's design was further developed in the United States by the German emigrants Mietz and Weiss, who combined the hot-bulb engine with the two-stroke scavenging principle, developed by Joseph Day to provide nearly twice the power, as compared to a four-stroke engine of same size.

They would provide electricity for lighting the Taj Mahal, the Rock of Gibraltar, the Statue of Liberty (chosen after Hornsby won the oil engine prize at the Chicago World's Fair of 1893), many lighthouses, and for powering Guglielmo Marconi's first transatlantic radio broadcast.