François Isaac de Rivaz (December 19, 1752, in Paris – July 30, 1828, in Sion) was a French-born Swiss inventor and a politician.

[1] It was powered by a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen manually ignited by electric spark, but the engine neither involved the in-cylinder compression, the crank, nor the connecting rod.

[1] Coincidentally, in 1807 Nicéphore Niépce installed his 'moss, coal-dust and resin'-fueled Pyréolophore internal combustion engine in a boat and powered up the river Saone in France to be granted a patent by the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte.

[citation needed] Although de Rivaz's early work is credited as the first use of the internal combustion engine in an automobile, the further development and mass production of the invention never truly began until the late nineteenth century.

In 1824, the French physicist Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot scientifically established the thermodynamic theory of idealized heat engines.