Nikolaus Otto
German inventor (1832-1891) · Germany · Scientists · Died at 58
Nikolaus Otto is read about 314 times a day, in 63 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 15 October 2026
The middle day of the days counted, so one week of news cannot move it. The line under it is the last 390 days, one point a day.
Something wrong?The engine under the hood of nearly every car on earth still bears his design logic. Otto cracked the core problem: how to make fuel explode at exactly the right moment, in exactly the right space, and turn that violence into motion you could control.
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Child: Gustav OttoAbout this person
Nicolaus August Otto was born in Germany on 10 June 1832. He trained as an engineer and spent years wrestling with the problem of internal combustion - how to harness controlled explosions for practical work. His breakthrough came with the compressed charge engine that ran on petroleum gas, a design that timed a spark to ignite a fuel-air mixture at the precise moment of compression. The principle was so fundamental that the Association of German Engineers eventually codified it as DIN standard 1940, defining the "Otto Engine" as any internal combustion engine using timed spark ignition of a compressed charge. He died on 26 January 1891, decades before his architecture became the default heart of the automobile age.
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