The development of the internal-combustion engine at the end of the nineteenth century was a long process, and hundreds of problems had to be overcome before a working engine actually appeared.
One of these problems was getting the fuel into the engine. Fuel, oxygen, and heat are needed for fire to happen, but producing the right mix inside the engine was difficult. The gas pump in the first engines vaporized the gas and mixed it with air, but the proportion of air to gas was not controlled, so the combustion was sometimes big, sometimes small, and this made the engine very unstable.
The solution to this problem was found by two Hungarian engine manufacturers, Donat Banki (1859- 1922) and Janos Csonka (1852-1939). Banki was responsible for a number of advancements in automobiles, and together with Csonka he eliminated the problem of mixing gas and air. Inspiration came, as inspiration often does, from an unlikely place. While passing a florist, the two men noticed the flower girl spraying water on plants. Seeing her force water through a glass blowpipe to produce a mist to freshen the flowers, they reasoned that a similar technology could do the same work in an engine.
So, in 1893, the carburetor was born. This vital engine part sprays a small but regulated amount of fuel into the air and this is sucked into the engine, where it is combusted. The spray keeps the mix of air and fuel constant, fixing the problem. Carburetors based on this theory ended up in almost everything with an engine—cars, airplanes, boats—and the breakthrough was all thanks to Banki and Csonka.
