Alphonse Eugène Beau de Rochas (9 April 1815, Digne-les-Bains

Digne-les-Bains

Digne-les-Bains or simply and historically Digne is a commune of France, capital of the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence department.-History:...

, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence

Alpes-de-Haute-Provence

Alpes-de-Haute-Provence is a French department in the south of France, it was formerly part of the province of Provence.- History :Nord-de-Provence was one of the 83 original departments created during the French Revolution on 4 March 1790...

 - 27 March 1893) was a French

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 engineer who originated the principle of the four-stroke internal-combustion engine. His achievement lay partly in his emphasizing the previously unappreciated importance of compressing the fuel–air mixture before ignition. He published his results in 1861, a year after Christian Reithmann was granted a patent in Germany

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 and 16 years before Nicolaus Otto

Nicolaus Otto

Nikolaus August Otto was the German inventor of the first internal-combustion engine to efficiently burn fuel directly in a piston chamber. Although other internal combustion engines had been invented these were not based on four separate strokes...

obtained his patent.