Do you know who invented the V8 engine? Which country does it come from? It's got to be America right? It's the home of the v8 and the v8 is the heart of the muscle car, I mean it's common knowledge that the first ever V8 was brought down from heavens by a great bald eagle.
Well actually no. The first ever V8 comes from the country that could be called the national polar opposite of America: Le France! The first ever V8 engine was designed, patented and made functional by a Frenchman called Leon Levavaseur.

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Mr. Leon levasseaur was a genius engineer and inventor. Born in 1863, Levavaseur initially studied fine arts, but later realized that he's a true engine head and switched to studying engineering.
And this was a decision with great timing, because by the time Levavasseur beame 37 and a well versed engineer something big started happening in the world. The dawn of the 20th century was also the dawn of powered flight. The first years of 1900s saw many different Pioneers of powered flight experimenting with countless different airplane designs, but for flight to be powered, you need, well, power and if you want serious power that's gonna keep you in the air for longer than a few seconds, then you need an engine.

And while many pioneers tried to make their engines as small as possible by sacrificing displacement and the number of cylinders with the goal ofreducing weight, Levasaseur had a different idea. He believed an airplane engine didn't have to be miserable and look like a toaster in order to be lightweight, Levassaeur was confident that he could build an engine that could do both, big power and light weight.
But to make that happen he of course needed money. So in 1902 he approached industrialist and money equipped person by the name of Jules Gastambide and presented his engineering vision.
Unlike some of the slightly pathetic engines in pioneer airplanes Levavasseur's idea was much more ambitious. Instead of using 1, 2 or three cylinders, Levavasseur envisioned a configuration of 8 cylinders split into two banks placed 90 degrees from each other. An immortal design that is still popular today, more than a century after it's inception. Needles to say Jules Gastambide was impressed with the idea and decided to finance the project. In a show of gratitude towards Gastambide, Levavasseur names the engine after his daughter Antoinette.
In the same year in 1902 Levavasseur filed for a secret patent and immediately established a workshop to start working on the engine. The next year his first v8 engine was already a functional prototype.

But if you think he stopped at v8, you're wrong. Just like memory card sizes nonchalantly doubled up from 8 to 16 GB, so too did the Antoinette engines, and our good friend Leon built V16 engines too. But even that wasn't enough, Levavasseur also built giant V24 engines for marine applications. some even say he built a v32 engine, while other sources disagree and claim the v32 never really made it past the design phase.
But what's more incredible than the number of cylinders is how ahead of their time these engines were. The engines Leon Levavasseur built weren't just the first v8 or first v16 engines, they were also the first ever engines produced in quantity to feature fuel injection. On top of that they were even liquid cooled. All of that in the first decade of the 1900s.

One of the most impressive Antoinette engines was the one developed for flight Pioneer Alberto Santos Dumont. It was a very small and very light engine whose power to weight ratio wouldn't be surpassed for a long time.
Using this engine Dumont completed the first ever European powered flight longer than 25 meters and became the first person ever to be filmed in an airplane in flight.

Another first powered by this engine was the first ever recorded flight in the UK, carried out by American Samuel Cody, flying a distance of 420m in October 1908

But Antoinette wasn't just a company that was ahead of it's time with engines. It was also the company the developed what could be called the first ever flight simulator. No it didn't have screen or any electronics, it was just a person sitting in a half barrel on a universal joint and "flight instructors" shaking him from the outside. But the pilot trainee in the barrel did have some rudimentary controls that he could use to counter the external forces applied to the barrel. So it might not have been high-tech but it was a design in the right direction.

A special thank you to my patrons:
Daniel
Peter Della Flora

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