François Isaac de Rivaz

François Isaac de Rivaz, 1752 to 1828, was a French-born Swiss inventor and politician from the Valais. He invented a hydrogen powered internal combustion engine with electric ignition and described it in a French patent published in 1807, and in 1808 he fitted it to a primitive working vehicle that Wikipedia calls the world's first internal combustion powered automobile. The article is careful about rivals: Nicéphore Niépce installed his Pyréolophore engine in a boat in 1807, so de Rivaz is credited with the first use of such an engine in an automobile and Niépce with the first in a ship. His engine lacked in-cylinder compression, a crank and a connecting rod, and mass development of the idea waited until the late nineteenth century.