Herbert Akroyd Stuart
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Herbert Akroyd-Stuart (January 28, 1864, Halifax Yorkshire, England - February 19, 1927, Western Australia)
Inventor of the hot bulb heavy oil engine.
He had lived in Australia in his early years. His first prototypes were built in 1886. His engines were built from 1891 by Richard Hornsby and Sons of Grantham, Lincolnshire, England under the title Hornsby Akroyd Patent Oil Engine under licence.
Similar engines were built by Bolinder in Sweden and some of these still survive in canal boats.
Richard Hornsby and Sons built the world's first oil-engined railway locomotive LACHESIS for the Royal Arsenal, Woolwich, England, in 1896. They also built the first compression-ignition powered automobile.
The modern Diesel engine is a hybrid incorporating the features of direct (airless) injection patented by Akroyd-Stuart in 1890 and compression ignition, patented by Rudolf Diesel in 1892. Diesel's injection system was not subsumed into later engines, with Akroyd-Stuart's injection system developed at Hornsbys being the blueprint for diesel engine ignition instead. Akroyd-Stuart's compression ignition engine (compared to spark-ignition) was invented two years earlier than Diesel's similar engine. Hornbys built a working high-compression version in 1892 for experimental purposes, some years before Diesel built his high-compression version in 1897.
The University of Nottingham has hosted the Akroyd-Stuart Memorial Lecture on occasional years in his memory since 1928. One was presented by Sir Frank Whittle in the 1940s (when the first jet planes were built). Akroyd Stuart had worked with Professor William Robinson of the university in the late 1800s.
