DIESEL WORLD MAGAZINE BYJIMALLEN
VINTAGE SMOKET
he diesel engine didn’t just
appear from thin air—it was
an evolution of technology. In
the years immediately follow-
ing Rudolph Diesel’s 1895 patent, much of
that evolution was dictated by those patents
in Europe and the United States. Back then,
engines that ran on heavy fuel oils were called
“oil engines,” and it would be a few years until
Diesel went from a capitalized proper noun to
a lowercase common noun used to describe
the compression-ignition engine.Another category of oil engine coexisted with—
but predated—the diesel. Called a “surface
ignition” engine, it was a low-compression oil
engine that used the heat of compression for
ignition. It could only sustain compression igni-
tion when the combustion chamber was really
hot and there were hot spots to vaporize the
fuel that was injected at very low pressure. The
surface ignition engines were also divided into
several categories and by names that described
their ignition method.1923 FAIRBANKS-MORSE Y-V SEMI-DIESEL
SEMI-DIESEL
SPECIAL THANKS TO BILL HAZZARD, ANDREW MACKEY, AND CHUCK
MOSS FROM SMOKSTAK, JIM BASS, JASON HEIDEGGER, AND
NATHAN HIRSCHY FROM THE TRI-STATE ENGINE ASSOCIATION122 OCTOBER I 2019 • DIESEL WORLD http://www.dieselworldmag.com