Remembering Nikolaus Otto
Nikolaus August Otto was born at Holzhausen, Germany on this day in 1832. In 1861 he patented a two-stroke gas powered (gas, not gasoline) internal combustion engine. The only previous internal combustion engine was best suited to converting fuel to waste heat and the destruction of its bearings. In 1876 he created the first four-stroke piston engine, the first engine able to compete with steam for powering vehicles and the design followed by almost every automobile since. Lacking quotes on the Otto-cycle engine, we'll go with Cars.
Telling the future by looking at the past assumes that conditions remain constant. This is like driving a car by looking in the rearview mirror.
- Herb Brody
If automobiles had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside.
- Robert X. Cringeley
A car can massage organs which no masseur can reach. It is the one remedy for the disorders of the great sympathetic nervous system.
- Jean Cocteau, 1889 - 1963
Admit it, sport-utility-vehicle owners! It's shaped a little differently, but it's a station wagon! And you do not drive it across rivers! You drive it across the Wal-Mart parking lot!
- Dave Barry
Like cars in amusement parks, our direction is often determined through collisions.
- Yahia Lababidi
An automobile goes nowhere efficiently unless it has a quick, hot spark to ignite things, to set the cogs of the machine in motion. So I try to make every player on my team feel he's the spark keeping our machine in motion. On him depends our successes.
- Knute Rockne, 1888 – 1931