Do you know WHO INVENTED THE V8 ENGINE?

Do you know who invented the V8 engine? Which country does it come from? It's got to be America right? It's the home of the v8 and the v8 is the heart of the muscle car, I mean it's common knowledge that the first ever V8 was brought down from heavens by a great bald eagle.
Well actually no. The first ever V8 comes from the country that could be called the national polar opposite of America: Le France! The first ever V8 engine was designed, patented and made functional by a Frenchman called Leon Levavaseur.

Mr. Leon levasseaur was a genius engineer and inventor. Born in 1863, Levavaseur initially studied fine arts, but later realized that he's a true engine head and switched to studying engineering.
And this was a decision with great timing, because by the time Levavasseur beame 37 and a well versed engineer something big started happening in the world. The dawn of the 20th century was also the dawn of powered flight. The first years of 1900s saw many different Pioneers of powered flight experimenting with countless different airplane designs, but for flight to be powered, you need, well, power and if you want serious power that's gonna keep you in the air for longer than a few seconds, then you need an engine.

And while many pioneers tried to make their engines as small as possible by sacrificing displacement and the number of cylinders with the goal ofreducing weight, Levasaseur had a different idea. He believed an airplane engine didn't have to be miserable and look like a toaster in order to be lightweight, Levassaeur was confident that he could build an engine that could do both, big power and light weight.
But to make that happen he of course needed money. So in 1902 he approached industrialist and money equipped person by the name of Jules Gastambide and presented his engineering vision.
Unlike some of the slightly pathetic engines in pioneer airplanes Levavasseur's idea was much more ambitious. Instead of using 1, 2 or three cylinders, Levavasseur envisioned a configuration of 8 cylinders split into two banks placed 90 degrees from each other. An immortal design that is still popular today, more than a century after it's inception. Needles to say Jules Gastambide was impressed with the idea and decided to finance the project. In a show of gratitude towards Gastambide, Levavasseur names the engine after his daughter Antoinette.
In the same year in 1902 Levavasseur filed for a secret patent and immediately established a workshop to start working on the engine. The next year his first v8 engine was already a functional prototype.

But if you think he stopped at v8, you're wrong. Just like memory card sizes nonchalantly doubled up from 8 to 16 GB, so too did the Antoinette engines, and our good friend Leon built V16 engines too. But even that wasn't enough, Levavasseur also built giant V24 engines for marine applications. some even say he built a v32 engine, while other sources disagree and claim the v32 never really made it past the design phase.
But what's more incredible than the number of cylinders is how ahead of their time these engines were. The engines Leon Levavasseur built weren't just the first v8 or first v16 engines, they were also the first ever engines produced in quantity to feature fuel injection. On top of that they were even liquid cooled. All of that in the first decade of the 1900s.

One of the most impressive Antoinette engines was the one developed for flight Pioneer Alberto Santos Dumont. It was a very small and very light engine whose power to weight ratio wouldn't be surpassed for a long time.
Using this engine Dumont completed the first ever European powered flight longer than 25 meters and became the first person ever to be filmed in an airplane in flight.

Another first powered by this engine was the first ever recorded flight in the UK, carried out by American Samuel Cody, flying a distance of 420m in October 1908

But Antoinette wasn't just a company that was ahead of it's time with engines. It was also the company the developed what could be called the first ever flight simulator. No it didn't have screen or any electronics, it was just a person sitting in a half barrel on a universal joint and "flight instructors" shaking him from the outside. But the pilot trainee in the barrel did have some rudimentary controls that he could use to counter the external forces applied to the barrel. So it might not have been high-tech but it was a design in the right direction.

A special thank you to my patrons:
Daniel
Peter Della Flora

#d4a #v8 #antoinette

[glenatgoogle]

Here's an additional "fun fact". Levavasseur was born in 1863, so was Henry Ford.

[whalesong]

Wow, you nailed it..! I did considerable research on the Antoinette story when I built a 8' wingspan, radio controlled model of a 1909 version of the monoplane and was faced with building a look-alike replica of it's engine. It was a show stopper when I competed with it for several years. What you've put together here is the finest gathering of information on them, great video and a noteworthy and colorful story.

[joecummings]

Ford's innovation to the V-8 was mostly in improvements in foundry casting the block. That made the V-8 affordable and able to be mass produced.

[jnieto]

Leon Levavasseur is my now my idol... hail Levavasseur! Hemi, fuel injection and water cooled!? What a damn genius!

[wmden]

As the dude hoped, to me, this was very interesting and educational. I was ignorant of much of the information presented, especially of who designed and built the first V8 engine. It was also very well produced and narrated. It was one of the best and easy to follow videos, on the subject, I have seen. Thank you.

[marcbjorg]

The problem with vacuum actuated intake valves is, that they rely on a pressure difference which drops with higher altitude. So the Antionette engine was never suited for altitudes over a 150m as it would quickly loose power.

[RickaramaTrama-lcys]

I can't tell you how interesting this video was to me~! I'm a 74 yr. old Hot Rodder from the 60's and I was under the impression that ole' Henry Ford had invented the Flat Head V-8 in 1932 for the Model B Option. I had one in a '33 Ford that I restored but sold it later to move to a different town. Thanks for all your work on this as it must have been quite a chore.

[elkvis]

"...in the talons of a bald eagle." Cleetus would be proud

[LectronCircuits]

After he developed and implemented his engine, the other folks collectively exclaimed, "We could have had a V-8." Cheers!

[johnmcclain]

I've been wrenching on engines since about eight, more than fifty years, and didn't know this fact, although I've seen many of the engines, not knowing what they were. This was a most enticing presentation, very interesting, fact filled, and I have enjoyed it tremendously. Thanks for a very professional video regarding this engine, the men, and the birds it flew in. I keep thinking, "I need to build an airplane". Been building motorcycles, race cars all my sixty odd years of life, and now I live in the country, where I could take off and land on the road. Very nice presentation, thanks!

[gordonwallin]

The genius of the Wright brothers was their emphasis on control surfaces; they'd already figured out lift/drag stuff. And they designed and made their own engines because there was nothing around that had a good enough power/weight ratio. And their planes were pretty sturdy for the time. All these early pilots, but the two American brothers ( My country Canada with J.A.D. McCurdy was in 1909-you try flying a plane with Hockey sticks, eh.) were the real actual inventors of the airplane. It's funny, how the Americans like to brag so much, that they don't make mythical type heroes out of the two American men that actually invented the airplane. (Maybe because there was no war about them.) Nice video.

[JP-ugxr]

Hp by itself is almost a useless measurement.
50hp sounds impressive until you realize it's only at 1100rpm!
That's 50hp, 239 lb ft tq, @ 1100 rpm!
That's insane!

[moisesezequielgutierrez]

Fuel Injection in the early 20th Century...

Sounds like some Sci-Fi stuff.

[larryplympton]

I never fail to learn from and enjoy your videos. Your presentation is absolutely engrossing and no matter what kind of day I'm having, watching one of your videos always makes my day better. Thank you for all of the time and effort you put into researching and creating your videos. Excellent video good sir, as always!

[martinkicks]

And it was a flat plane crankshaft V8 too.
The cross plane crankshaft V8 came nearly two decades later.

A Scottish engineer from Glasgow named D. McCall White who emigrated to the USA, where he was engaged on the design of the first Cadillac V8 engine, the Type 51, introduced in 1914. This engine was designed under the leadership of White as Cadillac's chief engineer 1914-1917, later a vice president of Cadillac. McCall White was hired by American, Henry Leland, Cadillac’s engineer, after Leland’s own flat plane crankshaft 60° V8 didn’t suppress the secondary harmonics he hoped for. Leland knew McCall White’s V-engine expertise from his employment as chief engineer at David Napier Ltd in Acton, London and previously Daimler Ltd in Coventry back in England. McCall White solved the balancing forces of second order harmonics of the V8 without resorting to using two pairs of Lanchester balance shafts per bank on flat plane crankshaft but by using a carefully counterweighted cross plane crankshaft, and so the world’s first cross plane crankshaft for a V8 was engineered by a Scottie. Perhaps we should call it the McCall White V8 architecture, and the flat plane crank V8 the Levavasseur V8 architecture.

The McCall White’s Cadillac V8 engine was made of five castings: one crankcase, two cylinder blocks and two cylinder heads. He became chief engineer and later vice-president of the Cadillac company.

Perhaps the next discussion could be the awkward and challenging design of the V6. A young engineering graduate, Francesco De Virgilio, was hired at Lancia in 1939 and put to routine tasks. He soon attracted management’s attention by improving and simplifying the suspension of a Lancia model. De Virgilio spent the summer of 1943 analyzing the vibration of alternative V-angles for a possible V6 engine. He devised flying arms to splay the crank pins apart by 60°, I’ve always called it the
De Virgilio V6 crankshaft arrangement to honour a great engineer.

[dwaynentinabunt]

It was the fuel injection that surprised me. An engine over 16 cylinders before 1910. Fuel injected! I'd love to see what it could do today. Modern metal torch specs. Modern oil pass and pressure. Not to mention fuel, And exhaust upgrades. Man they were so close! This explains it to me. A mere 25 to 30 years later we are building engines with 550 to 2500 hp? Today 5, 000 HP. Unbelievable!

[stuarthart]

I find it so satisfying that someone who academically swapped horses midstream and chose engineering as his passion turned into such a brilliant designer. Great piece of history many thanks Driving 4 answers

[piercehawke]

10:00 it's just weird how similar a modern OHV V8 is in appearance to the 1906 Antoinette OHV V8, down to the ignition and the port fuel injection.

[godfreyberry]

Say what you like about the French, they have undeniably been responsible for a great deal of the world's greatest innovations - tend to think 'out of the box' of conventional concepts.

[Garage]

I seriously knew almost none of this and it's totally amazing.
Ridiculous how advanced that V8 design was compared to engines to come for the next 50-70 years at least.
Last P.S. Samuel Franklin Cody looked like an absolute badass.