Today's Notable Foreign Birthday

Nikolaus Otto - Inventor of the internal combustion engine.
U. S. Contemporaries: Civil War Cycle - Gilded Generation - Nomad (Reactive) (1822-1842) 

Nikolaus August Otto (14 June 1832 - 26 January 1891) was the German inventor of the first internal-combustion engine to efficiently burn fuel directly in a piston chamber. Although other internal combustion engines had been invented (e.g. by Étienne Lenoir) these were not based on four separate strokes. The concept of four strokes is likely to have been around at the time of Otto's invention but he was the first to make it practical.

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