Harry+Ralph+Ricardo

Harry Ricardo was born in 1885 in London. He is the eldest of three kids. The only son of Hasley Ricardo who was an architect. Harry studied at Cambridge, where he designed and constructed many petrol engines, a petrol engine is an internal combustion engine with spark ignition, it was designed to run on petrol, which is gas. He had to work out problems that occurred with the ignition, combustion, and detonation. He realized the importance of different types of fuel so that detonation doesn't occur or "Knocking" as most would call it. That led to the use of octane numbers to determine the anti- knock numbers of the different fuels. His improved design of the combustion chamber in side valve engines has been universally adopted.

Here is a video on how a four cycle engine works. [|Internal Combustion Engine]

Here are some pictures of Harry..