This short film offers an excellent 15 minute history lesson into one of the internal combustion engine’s simplest but most important parts: the humble spark plug.
The first patents for what we would today call a spark plug were filed in 1898 by Nikola Tesla, Robert Bosch, and Frederick Richard Simms, however the invention of the spark plug is widely attributed to Étienne Lenoir.
The name Étienne Lenoir is probably already familiar to you as he was the Belgian-French engineer who developed an internal combustion engine design that used a spark plug back in 1858.
The internal combustion engine itself was invented by the Franco-Swiss inventor Isaac de Rivaz back in 1804, however it was the Lenoir design that would develop the ancestor of the engines we use today.
This film does an excellent job of charting the history of the spark plug and tracking its development changes over the years.
Spark plugs themselves have outwardly looked quite similar for over 100 years, with early designs looking like short stubby versions of modern plugs, but internally the materials and construction has completely changed over that time.
If you’d like to read more about the spark plug you can click here to read the excellent Wikipedia article on it, and if you’d like to read more about Étienne Lenoir you can click here, and if you’d like to read more about Isaac de Rivaz you can click here.
Articles that Ben has written have been covered on CNN, Popular Mechanics, Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, Autoweek Magazine, Wired Magazine, Autoblog, Gear Patrol, Jalopnik, The Verge, and many more.
Silodrome was founded by Ben back in 2010, in the years since the site has grown to become a world leader in the alternative and vintage motoring sector, with well over a million monthly readers from around the world and many hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
