October 1935: Harry Ricardo on the petrol engine

Ricardo first drove a car in 1898, he said — he’d have been 13 at the time. The engine — a horizontal single-cylinder job — had ‘all its working parts exposed to the winds of heaven and the dusts of the earth below — exposed to everything, in fact, apart from lubrication.’ The carburettor was particularly troublesome, he recalled: it was a wick carburettor, a technology which didn’t survive into the 20th century, being a large container a quarter-full of petrol in which several lengths of lamp-wick were suspended. Air was drawn past these wicks — where it would pick up petrol vapour — and into the engine, taking what was supposed to be a combustible mixture into the cylinders. ‘Seldom, if ever, did the engine and I agree as to the definition of a combustible mixture,’ Ricardo said. ‘It was an unfair debate, for the engine always had the last word, spat scornfully and then sulked.’ Eventually, he developed a technique for steering with one hand and feeding the engine with the other.