To really indulge in clichés for once, one could say that the Americans have perhaps can master the spread of mass production and the Japanese can develop mass-produced goods to perfection. But where are the Germans in this view?

They also aren't so much the ones with ideas or initial igniter, but manage, at least in the early days of the combustion engine, to turn an idea into reality with diligence and perseverance. For this thesis we would like to take the example of Otto's old engine.

It is the two-stroke engine with vertically working pistons, of whose uniqueness you are convinced, at the latest when you stand in front of it. And yet the author of this book gets a strange feeling when he visits the museum in Turin, for example.

With the exception of the Frenchman Lenoir, should the development of the internal combustion engine have been as German as it is consistently described? There are the two Italians who mention the aero piston engine in writing as early as 1853. In the case of the atmospheric gas engine, however, it is not primarily about the principle of the aero piston. It has existed before.

If you look at the engine, which was designed much earlier than the one by Nicolaus Otto, the main invention is that the torque is not transmitted in the power stroke when the piston moves upwards, but during return via atmospheric pressure and the gravity of the piston and rod.

In his book 'History of German Internal Combustion Engine Construction from 1860 to 1918', Professor Friedrich Sass strongly suspects that this engine 'served as a model for Otto'. The picture above shows it as a model with two vertical cylinders, because otherwise it probably wouldn't have had enough power, being significantly smaller than the Otto two-stroke engine.

As later with Otto, the piston with the toothed rack attached to it is moved upwards by the pressure of the combustion. This also meshes with a gear wheel, which is only positively connected to its own shaft by means of a freewheel when the piston moves downwards.

Below is a second piston, which, due to its mostly counter-rotating movement in the lower part of the cylinder, supplies the space between itself and the working piston with air and gas in sequence via a complicated control system and helps with the removal of the burnt gases. It is ignited electrically.

Independent testers have certified the engine's efficiency of up to 21 percent, depending on the composition of the illuminating gas, while Otto's had 15 percent. Nevertheless, the engine could not prevail. Both engineers suffered from poor health, Matteucci died at the age of 43.