Vroom, Vroom! Do you know about car engines? 🏎️

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Speaker 1: I'd like to give a special thanks to Jacob for this week's question about how car engines work. You're listening to sleep Tight Science. Did you know there are about one billion cars in the world today. Hm hmm. That's a lot of engines. So what is a car engine? Have you ever thought about how a car takes you from one place to another? Maybe you sit in your car to go to school, park, or even a friend's house. Every car has an engine under the hood. An engine is a machine that uses many different parts to change fuel into energy or power. The engine creates enough power to make the car move. The powerful internal combustion engine under the hood of your car is what makes this all happen. The secret to the engine is simply burning gasoline. Gasoline has molecules which were made up of atoms of hydrogen and carbon. When the gas is set on fire, it mixes with air. This makes the gasoline grow, and one molecule of gasoline becomes many molecules. This growth makes a large amount of heat and pressure. The pressure makes the pistons that are attached to a crankshaft move up and down with great force. This up and down movement makes the wheels of the car go and then you're on your way. So what are the parts of an engine and how do they work? Just like we need food to keep us going, most car engines need gasoline to work. If we look inside a car's engine, we can see round cylinder shapes. Each one of these cylinders has many parts, such as pistons and sparkplugs. Car engines are built around a set of cooking pots called cylinders. Usually there are four, and it is inside these pots or cylinders where the fuel burns. The cylinders or cooking pots are made of super strong metal and sealed, but at one end they open and close. The cylinders have tight fitting pistons that are like plungers inside them that can slide up and down. The piston's job is simply to move up and down. By moving up and down, the piston is able to pull a mixture of gasoline and air into the cylinder and then push it back up toward the spark plug At the top of each cylinder. There are two valves, which are kind of like gates that let things in or out. These gates can be opened and closed very quickly. The inlet valve or the entrance gate, allows fuel and air to enter the cylinder from a carburetor or electric fuel injector the outlet valve or the exit gate. Let's see exhaust gases escape at the top of the cylinder. There is also a spark plug, which is an electric device that makes a spark to set fire to the gas. The spark plug's function is to burn the mixture of gasoline and air when it reaches the spark plug. This burning makes the mixture expand or grow and push back down on the piston. The spark plug makes the mixture expand and it pushes down on the piston. The piston pushes back up again and sends the mixture out of the cylinder and into the engine. This up and down creates energy, which the engine uses to power the car. So who invented the first cars? In the early days, a lot of people tried to make a good car that would work well and sell well. Some people say that Carl Benz invented the modern automobile. He used a four stroke type of internal combustion engine to power his Benz In eighteen eighty six, he began to make cars in a factory and sell them in Germany. In eighteen eighty eight in North America. The first modern car was made by the Duria Brothers in Springfield, Massachusetts. They began making the first automobiles for everyday people to use in eighteen ninety six. They made only thirteen cars by hand that year. So people say that Benz may have invented the first modern car and that the Duria brothers may have made the first car to sell, but Henry Ford sold the most car to the most people. In nineteen ten, Henry Ford began making his Model T car, which was a huge success because a lot of people could afford this car. Henry Ford used something called mass production, which means that he made a lot of Model T cars in a short time in a factory. The Model T was the most popular car at that time because it was cheap, but it was still a good quality car that ordinary people could own. Fun facts about cars. The person who invented cruise control was blind. The Duria Brothers car won the first ever car race in eighteen ninety five, racing against cars made by Bens. The race was held in Chicago, Illinois, and it was fifty three miles long. Over twelve million cars are recycled in the United States every year, and about eighty five percent of a car's material can be recycled. The world record for the longest traffic jam was in Beijing, China, in August of two thousand and ten. It lasted for twelve days and was sixty two miles long. In eighteen ninety five, there were about three hundred cars on the road in the United States. Just fifteen years later, in nineteen ten, they were close to half a million. In eighteen ninety six, the first ever speeding ticket was issued to a driver and was driving a whooping thirteen kilometers an hour for eight miles per hour, which was actually four times over the speed limit. Thank you for listening to this episode of sleep Tight Science, where we investigate the questions you have about anything science related. Our podcast starts with a question like did you know, and throughout that episode we will try to answer the question. If you have a question or there is something you would like to know more about, send us your questions or comments at hello at sleep tightscience dot com. I look forward to hearing from you soon. Complication Bo