Eugenio Barsanti

Italy, 1821-1864

Eugenio Barsanti was a gifted mathematician and physicist, who together with Felice Matteucci, a hydraulic engineer from Florence, invented the first version of the internal combustion engine in 1853. Their patent request was granted in London on June 12, 1857, and published in London’s Morning Journal under the title “Specification of Eugene Barsanti and Felix Matteucci, Obtaining Motive Power by the Explosion of Gasses”.

Barsanti was born in Pietrasanta, Tuscany. Lean and short of stature, he studied in a Catholic scientific-oriented institute near Lucca, in Tuscany, and became a novitiate of the Piarist Fathers or Scolopi, in Florence in 1838. In 1841 Barsanti began teaching in the Collegio San Michele, situated in Volterra. Here, during a lecture describing the explosion of mixed hydrogen and air in a new electric pistol invented by Alessandro Volta, he realised the potential for using the energy of the expansion of combusting gases within a motor.

He soon transferred to Ximeniano Institute in Florence. where he met Matteucci, who was engaged in a land reclamation project in Florence. Matteucci appreciated the idea for the engine, and the two men worked together on it for the rest of their lives. Together, they succeeded in design and producing a number of the first type of gas engines to produce a vacuum within a closed cylinder, atmopsheric pressure then being utitlized to produce the power stroke. The principle was demonstrated in 1820, was used by Samuel Brown in 1827, and much later by N.A. Otto in 1867. On 13 May 1852, Barsanti and Matteucci received British Provisional Patent no. 1072. The patent was created in London, as Italian law at that time could not guarantee sufficient international protection. The first prototype was built in 1856 as a two-cylinder 5 HP motor. They petitioned for a second British patent (no. 1655), which was granted on 12 June 1857. On 30 December 1857, the State of Piemonte granted the directive (Patent) No. 579 and in close succession came the French patent dated 9 January 1858, No. 35009, and the Belgian patent dated 10 February 1858, No. 5533. By 1858, they had built a counter-working two-piston engine. A third engine was made in 1860 for the first National Exhibition in Florence, Italy, in 1861.

The main advantage of the Barsanti-Matteucci engine was the use of the return force of the piston due to the cooling of the gas. Other approaches based on the propulsive force of the explosion, like the one developed by France’s Etienne Lenoir, were slower. The Barsanti-Matteucci engine was five times more efficient, and won a silver medal from the Lombardy Institute of Science. It was intended to provide mechanical energy in factories and for naval propulsion. It was not light enough for use as an automotive engine. Barsanti and Matteucci selected the John Cockerill foundry in Seraing, Belgium to mass-produce a 4 hp (3.0 kW; 4.1 PS) engine. Before leaving for Belgium, Barsanti addressed His Holiness to ask for the ‘Apostolic Blessing’. Pope Pius IX had been schooled by the Scolopi in precisely the same Volterra school where, many years later, Barsanti had his first teaching assignment. Orders for the engine soon followed from many countries within Europe. Unfortunately, 48 hours before supervising mass production was to start at Cockerill in Seraing, Belgium, Barsanti fell ill with typhoid. He died shortly after, on 19 April 1864. Matteucci, himself very ill, gave up the enterprise and eventually returned to engineering.