32 Facts About Harry Ricardo

Sir Harry Ralph Ricardo was an English engineer who was one of the foremost engine designers and researchers in the early years of the development of the internal combustion engine.

Harry Ricardo was born at 13 Bedford Square, London, in 1885, the eldest of three children, and only son of Halsey Ricardo, the architect, and his wife Catherine Jane, daughter of Sir Alexander Meadows Rendel, a civil engineer.

Harry Ricardo was one of the first people in England to see an automobile when his grandfather purchased one in 1898.

Harry Ricardo was from a relatively wealthy family and educated at Rugby School.

Harry Ricardo had been using tools and building engines since the age of ten.

In 1911 Harry Ricardo married Beatrice Bertha Hale, an art student at the Slade School of Art, in London.

In 1904, at the end of his first year at Cambridge, Harry Ricardo decided to enter the University Automobile Club's event, which was a competition to design a machine that could travel the furthest on 1 imperial quart of petrol.

Harry Ricardo's engine had a single cylinder, and was the heaviest entered, but his motorcycle design won the competition, having covered a distance of 40 miles.

Harry Ricardo was then persuaded to join Bertram Hopkinson, Professor of Mechanism and Applied Mechanics, researching engine performance.

Harry Ricardo graduated in 1906 and spent another year researching at Cambridge.

Harry Ricardo is said by Percy Kidner, then co-managing director of Vauxhall, to have had a hand in the design of the Vauxhall engine designed by Laurence Pomeroy for the RAC 2,000 miles trial of 1908.

Harry Ricardo produced designs for two sizes, and the smaller one sold about 50 engines until 1914, when the war halted production.

In 1909 Harry Ricardo designed a novel two-stroke split cycle 3.3-litre engine for his cousin Ralph Harry Ricardo, who had established a small car manufacturing company, "Two Stroke Engine Company", at Shoreham-by-Sea.

Harry Ricardo fared better making two-stroke engines for fishing boats.

Harry Ricardo continued to design engines for small electric lighting sets; these were produced by two companies until 1914.

Interest in the 1909 Harry Ricardo designed split cycle Dolphin engine continues and in 2017 Harry Ricardo PLC formed a new consortium called Dolphin-N2 to further develop the concept.

Harry Ricardo was asked to look at the problem of reducing smoky exhaust gases and decided that a new engine was needed.

Harry Ricardo succeeded in designing a new six-cylinder engine with reduced smoke emissions, which was much more powerful, and still fit into the same space as the existing one.

In 1917 his old mentor, Bertram Hopkinson, who was now Technical Director at the Air Ministry, invited Harry Ricardo to join the new engine research facility at the Department of Military Aeronautics, later to become the RAE.

In 1918 Hopkinson was killed while flying a Bristol Fighter, and Harry Ricardo took over his position.

In 1919 Harry Ricardo was studying the phenomena affecting the combustion within the petrol engine and the diesel engine.

Harry Ricardo realised that turbulence within the combustion chamber increased flame speed, and that he could achieve this by offsetting the cylinder head.

Harry Ricardo realised that making the chamber as compact as possible would reduce the distance that the flame had to travel and would reduce the likelihood of detonation.

Harry Ricardo later developed the induction swirl chamber, which was an attempt to achieve orderly air motion in a diesel engine, the swirl being initiated by inclined ports and accentuated by forcing the air into a small cylindrical volume.

In 1922 and 1923 Harry Ricardo published a two-volume work "The Internal Combustion Engine".

In 1929 Harry Ricardo was elected Fellow of the Royal Society.

Harry Ricardo enhanced the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine in the Mosquito by giving it an oxygen enrichment system to improve its performance.

Harry Ricardo assisted in the design of the combustion chambers and fuel control system of Sir Frank Whittle's jet engine.

In 1974, at the age of 89, Harry Ricardo suffered a pelvic injury in a fall.

On 16 June 2005 a blue plaque was placed outside the house where Harry Ricardo was born in Bedford Square, London.

The first internal combustion engine which Harry Ricardo designed and built as a schoolboy currently displays this Engineering Heritage plaque in the Ricardo plc company exhibition area.

In 1915, Harry Ricardo formed Engine Patents Ltd, the company which is today known as Harry Ricardo PLC.