How the First Carburetor Was Manufactured in 1893

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]By the early 1890s, the gasoline engine existed. It could run.

[00:00:05]It could turn a crankshaft, move a piston, and in certain conditions propel a vehicle along a flat road at walking pace.

[00:00:14]But, it could [music] not be trusted.

[00:00:16]The machines built by Karl Benz in Mannheim and by Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach in Cannstatt were functional in the way that a prototype is functional, capable of demonstrating a principle without yet being capable of serving a purpose.

[00:00:31]The engine's fundamental weakness was not its ignition, not its lubrication, not its transmission.

[00:00:38]It was the way it was fed. A gasoline engine requires, for every [music] power stroke, a precise mixture of vaporized fuel and air delivered to the cylinder at exactly the right moment and in exactly the right proportion. Too much fuel and the mixture [music] will not ignite cleanly.

[00:00:57]The cylinder floods, the spark plug fouls, the exhaust blackens, and the engine loses power or stops entirely.

[00:01:06]Too little fuel and combustion is weak, irregular, and insufficient to sustain rotation [music] under load. The device responsible for preparing this mixture, transforming [music] a liquid fuel into a fine combustible mist, and delivering it to the engine in controlled quantities, is the carburetor.

[00:01:25]Without a reliable carburetor, the gasoline engine remained a laboratory curiosity.

[00:01:31]The invention that made it a machine was not the engine itself. It was the device that learned how to feed it. The problem had been present from the beginning.

[00:01:40]>> [music] >> Étienne Lenoir's gas engine of 1860 did not face it because illuminating gas mixes [music] naturally with air without any intermediate device.

[00:01:50]Opening a valve was sufficient.

[00:01:53]But, the moment engineers attempted to use liquid fuel >> [music] >> to make the engine portable, independent of a gas supply line, the problem of fuel delivery became immediate and severe.

[00:02:04]The first attempts were artisanal and [music] inadequate.

[00:02:08]Edouard Delamare de Boutteville, a French inventor who built a motorized vehicle as early [music] as 1884, used a wick carburetor based on the same principle as a kerosene lamp.

[00:02:21]A strip of fabric soaked in fuel, over which incoming air passed and picked up vapor by evaporation.

[00:02:28]The quantity of vapor depended on the temperature of the room, the age of the wick, the level of fuel in the reservoir, and the speed of air flow.

[00:02:38]None of these variables was controlled.

[00:02:40]The mixture drifted constantly.

[00:02:43]Karl Benz used a surface vaporizer on his 1885 Patent Motorwagen. A flat container [music] packed with absorbent fibers saturated in ligroin, over which the intake air passed.

[00:02:57]It was marginally more reliable than a wick, but it shared the same fundamental defect.

[00:03:03]The rate of vaporization was governed by ambient conditions, rather than by the engine's actual needs.

[00:03:10]In cold weather, the fuel evaporated sluggishly.

[00:03:15]At high engine speeds, the system could not deliver enough vapor to sustain combustion.

[00:03:20]At low speeds, it delivered too much.

[00:03:24]Benz's early drivers learned to compensate for these deficiencies through constant [music] attention and frequent stops, but compensation is not a solution.

[00:03:33]A machine that requires its operator to continuously correct for the failures of its own components >> [music] >> is not yet a machine that works.

[00:03:42]Daimler and Maybach, in their Cannstatt [music] workshop, used a surface vaporizer as well in their earliest engines, then moved to a float feed system in which the fuel level in a small chamber was maintained at [music] a roughly constant height by a simple valve.

[00:03:59]Air bubbled through or passed over the surface of this fuel.

[00:04:02]The results were better, >> [music] >> but still inconsistent.

[00:04:06]The mixture changed as the fuel level dropped, as the engine warmed up, as road conditions altered the vehicle's speed and load.

[00:04:15]What none of these systems could do was automatically adjust the fuel delivery rate in response to changes in engine demand.

[00:04:23]That [music] is what made them primitive.

[00:04:26]And that is precisely what Wilhelm Maybach set out to solve.

[00:04:30]Maybach was born on February 9th, 1846 [music] in Heilbronn in the Kingdom of Württemberg.

[00:04:38]Orphaned at 10, he was taken in by a philanthropic institution in Reutlingen run by the Bruderhaus organization where he received training as an industrial draftsman.

[00:04:49]It was there that he met Gottlieb [music] Daimler, then working as a workshop director, who recognized in the young Maybach an exceptional technical mind [music] and took him on as an assistant.

[00:05:02]The two men worked together for the next 37 years without significant interruption.

[00:05:08]Maybach followed Daimler to the Karlsruhe Machine Works, then to Deutz AG in [music] Cologne, where they collaborated with Nikolaus Otto on the development of the four-stroke engine, >> [music] >> and finally to Cannstatt, where they established their private workshop in 1882 [music] and built the world's first high-speed gasoline engine.

[00:05:28]In 1890, Daimler and Maybach founded the Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft.

[00:05:34]Within 3 years, conflicts with shareholders had forced both men out of the company they had created. Maybach, having left slightly ahead of Daimler, set up a temporary design studio, First in Daimler's house, then in the ballroom of the former Hotel Hermann in Cannstatt, rented and converted into a drawing office and machine shop.

[00:05:56]It was in this improvised space, funded quietly by Daimler from his personal assets, that Maybach conceived [music] and built the first spray jet carburetor.

[00:06:07]The principle Maybach applied was not invented for the carburetor.

[00:06:11]It had been described in the 18th century by the Italian physicist Giovanni [music] Battista Venturi, who observed that when a fluid passes through a constriction in a pipe, its velocity [music] increases and its pressure decreases proportionally.

[00:06:28]This relationship between [music] velocity and pressure, a consequence of the conservation of energy in a flowing [music] fluid, could be exploited mechanically without any moving parts.

[00:06:39]A fixed geometry [music] was sufficient to create a stable and repeatable zone of low pressure.

[00:06:45]This pressure drop, [music] now called the Venturi effect, could be used to draw another fluid into the stream without a pump, without electricity, [music] and without any components subject to wear or failure.

[00:06:58]Maybach's insight [music] was to apply this physical phenomenon to the problem of fuel delivery.

[00:07:03]Instead of waiting [music] for fuel to evaporate passively from a surface or bubble through a pool of liquid, he would use the engine's own suction, the partial vacuum created [music] by the descending piston during the intake stroke, to actively pull fuel into the intake air stream, [music] and the Venturi geometry to shatter that fuel into droplets fine enough to vaporize almost instantly on contact with moving air.

[00:07:29]The engine would feed itself.

[00:07:31]The faster it ran, [music] the more air it drew, the stronger the Venturi effect, the more fuel was metered in.

[00:07:39]The system was self-regulating [music] in proportion to demand.

[00:07:43]The carburetor Maybach built in [music] 1893 consisted of two main components working together.

[00:07:49]The first was a float [music] chamber, a small brass reservoir in which a float, made of sheet metal or cork, rested on the surface [music] of the fuel.

[00:07:59]The float was connected by a lever to a needle valve at the inlet of the chamber.

[00:08:03]When the fuel level dropped, the float descended [music] with it, opening the needle valve and admitting more fuel from the main tank.

[00:08:11]When the level rose, the float lifted and closed the valve. [music] The result was a fuel level that remained constant within a narrow range, regardless of how much fuel the engine was consuming.

[00:08:23]This was not new in isolation. [music] Fernand Forest in France had used a float chamber as early as 1885, but its integration into a complete spray system [music] was Maybach's contribution.

[00:08:36]The second component was the mixing tube, a precisely machined [music] brass conduit through which the intake air traveled on its way to the cylinder.

[00:08:44][music] At a specific point along this conduit, Maybach introduced a [music] narrowing, a Venturi section, machined with a smooth internal taper that constricted the air flow and then [music] widened again, shaped in cross-section like an hourglass.

[00:09:01]As air accelerated through this constriction, [music] its pressure dropped sharply.

[00:09:07]At the exact center of the narrowest point, Maybach positioned the jet, a small tube calibrated in diameter to within fractions of a millimeter, >> [music] >> connected by a channel to the float chamber below.

[00:09:20]The pressure inside [music] the mixing tube at that point was lower than the atmospheric pressure outside the float chamber.

[00:09:27]Fuel was therefore pushed upward through the jet by [music] the pressure differential, emerged as a thin stream at the center of the air flow, and was immediately shattered into microscopic droplets by the velocity of the passing air.

[00:09:41]>> [music] >> These droplets, each smaller than a tenth of a millimeter, presented an enormous surface area >> [music] >> relative to their volume and evaporated almost instantly, forming a homogeneous combustible [music] mist that traveled down the intake tract and into the cylinder.

[00:09:59]The calibration of the jet was the most demanding element of the work and the one that [music] most clearly separated Maybach's approach from improvisation.

[00:10:09]The hole drilled through the jet [music] body had to be sized precisely for the engine it served.

[00:10:15]A jet bored too wide would flood the mixture at moderate [music] engine speeds, producing a rich, combustion that fouled the spark plug and reduced power.

[00:10:26]A jet bored too narrow would [music] starve the engine at high load, causing misfires and overheating.

[00:10:32]Maybach's first jets were made by hand in the Wilhelm Maybach workshop, drilled into small [music] brass discs with the finest available tooling.

[00:10:41]Steel drill bits no thicker than a sewing needle turned at controlled [music] speeds in a precision lathe, then tested individually by measuring their flow rate under a controlled pressure head before installation.

[00:10:53][music] The acceptable tolerance on the jet diameter was measured in hundredths of a millimeter.

[00:10:59]A jet that [music] passed too much fuel by even that margin would produce a noticeably different [music] mixture.

[00:11:06]Each jet was a bespoke component matched [music] to the specific displacement and speed range of its engine.

[00:11:13]The float chamber maintained the fuel at constant height above the jet orifice, which meant the pressure differential driving fuel upward through the jet was stable and predictable.

[00:11:23]This constancy of head pressure was [music] the key to the system's reliability, not just the Venturi effect, not just the float, [music] but the combination of both in a single apparatus that produced a consistent, automatically regulated mixture across the full operating range of the engine.

[00:11:43]Maybach added one further element that completed the system, [music] a throttle valve, a circular plate mounted on a shaft inside the mixing tube >> [music] >> downstream of the venturi section.

[00:11:55]This butterfly disc, rotated by a [music] lever or a cable connected to a foot pedal, could be set to any position between fully open and nearly closed, varying the quantity of air-fuel mixture admitted to the engine.

[00:12:10]When the throttle was wide open, the engine received a maximum mixture and developed maximum power.

[00:12:17]When nearly closed, the engine idled on a minimal charge.

[00:12:21]This device, the throttle butterfly, is the direct mechanical ancestor of the accelerator pedal in every gasoline-powered vehicle built since 1893.

[00:12:33]The carburetor was incorporated into a new two-cylinder engine Maybach was developing in parallel, designated the Phoenix.

[00:12:41]The Phoenix engine had its two cylinders cast [music] in a single block, rather than bolted together as separate units, which improved rigidity, reduced weight, [music] and simplified both manufacture and maintenance.

[00:12:54]The firing intervals of the two cylinders were offset to smooth the delivery of power to the crankshaft, reducing the surge and vibration that plagued [music] single-cylinder designs at high speeds.

[00:13:06]It ran significantly smoother than any single-cylinder engine and at higher sustained speeds with less mechanical stress on the frame and transmission.

[00:13:16]Mounted in a vehicle in 1895, the Phoenix engine Daimler automobile was the first car the company could credibly describe as commercially viable.

[00:13:26]The throttle responded progressively to the driver's input.

[00:13:30]The idle was stable enough that the engine did not need to be hand cranked repeatedly [music] at stops.

[00:13:36]The engine did not stall when the vehicle slowed for a corner or descended a hill.

[00:13:41]Cold starting remained imperfect.

[00:13:44]The Venturi effect was weakest at low air flow, meaning the mixture tended toward lean at startup.

[00:13:51]But this was a manageable limitation compared to the complete unreliability of surface vaporizers in winter conditions.

[00:13:58]The Phoenix engine equipped with Maybach carburetor was adopted under license by [music] the French manufacturers Panhard et Levassor and Peugeot, who were building vehicles for customers willing to pay for [music] machines that function consistently.

[00:14:14]The speed with which French [music] manufacturers adopted the Daimler-Maybach engine, and with it the spray carburetor, reflected the practical superiority of the design over anything [music] else available.

[00:14:26]By the late 1890s, the float feed spray carburetor had become the standard approach to fuel delivery across Europe.

[00:14:34]Specialized manufacturers emerged to supply carburetors to the growing automotive industry.

[00:14:40]Zenith in France, Solex, founded in 1905, which would go on to equip tens of millions of vehicles over the following decades, and Weber in Italy, which developed high-performance variants for [music] racing and sports cars.

[00:14:55]The carburetor remained the universal fuel delivery mechanism for gasoline engines for nearly a century.

[00:15:01]It was not displaced until the 1980s, when electronic fuel injection systems, driven by increasingly [music] strict emissions regulations, demonstrated the ability to meter fuel with a precision that no mechanical device, >> [music] >> operating on physical principles alone, could match.

[00:15:19]A digital control unit sampling oxygen levels in the exhaust, calculating injection timing in milliseconds, and adjusting fuel delivery in real time could reduce unburned hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide emissions to fractions of what a carburetor produced.

[00:15:37]By the early 2000s, the carburetor had disappeared from new automobile production entirely, surviving only in small engines, lawnmowers, chainsaws, outboard motors, and simple motorcycles, where the cost and complexity of electronic [music] injection remained difficult to justify.

[00:15:56]What Maybach assembled in the converted ballroom of the Hotel Hermann in Cannstatt [music] in 1893, a float, a needle valve, a brass venturi section, and a calibrated [music] jet, all housed in a compact body no larger than a closed fist, was one of the most consequential pieces of engineering of the 19th century.

[00:16:17]It received no monument. [music] It has no anniversary celebrated in the press.

[00:16:23]It is not the kind of invention [music] that generates legends.

[00:16:26]But without it, the gasoline engine would have remained a difficult, unpredictable, [music] weather-sensitive machine, useful only in controlled conditions, impossible to manufacture for a general public.

[00:16:39]The carburetor made the engine obedient.

[00:16:42]And in doing so, it made the automobile possible.