Performance trends and overall characteristics of internal combustion engines

While engines using high-temperature combustion have been studied and developed in antiquity and since the 17th century, the industrial era has focused priorities on economic objectives. Since S. Carnot's treatise on the motive power of fire, the scientific and technological focus has been on the efficiency, in the economic sense of the term, of driving machines. But with the advent of mass production and the unreasonable abundance of energy provided by oil, the development of engines has been driven almost exclusively by the imperatives of production cost. While virtually all the inventions that today make a modern engine "energy-efficient" were available on principle as early as the 1930s, it wasn't until the first oil shocks of the 1970s that an engine's fuel consumption became an audible selling point. In the meantime, the automotive and aeronautical industries relied on engines that...