The good news is that you survived part one and the headache-inducing physics of cross-plane cranks, confusing firing orders and pulsating exhaust gases. Now we can kick back and leaf through the history books at our leisure.
So, who came up with the idea of the V8, and when? Well, it’s a little bit hazy. It seems to be one of those ideas that several people arrived at almost at once. The most common claim is that it was the French aircraft engine designer Léon Levavasseur, who produced in 1904 the delightfully named Antoinette 8V engine that powered the aircraft of the same name. Now, just to put that in context – we are just one year after the Wright brothers skimmed the sands of Kitty Hawk in the official world’s first powered flight. In the same year, the long-forgotten Buchet company designed another V8 aero-engine, and Renault seems to have dabbled with experimental V8 race car engine designs.
But there is a patent that pre-dates all of these, because in 1899 another French engineer-inventor, Clément Ader, filed a patent for a V8 aero engine – five years before the Wright brothers’ first flight. Ader’s name is not a household one, but there is a pretty defensible claim that in fact he beat the Wright brothers to the world’s first powered flight. In 1890, Ader succeeded in getting his ‘aircraft’, a bizarre bat-winged, steam-powered creation called l’Éole briefly off the deck in the grounds of a chateau in Armainvilliers, France. His V8 patent was clearly driven by his continuing search for compact, lightweight power.
