What makes a diesel engine different to a regular gas engine, and is one better than the other?

Last month's "How It Works" story gave you the basics of the four-stroke cycle, describing the motion of the intake and exhaust valves in relation to the piston moving up and down in the cylinder.

Air flowing into a four-stroke diesel engine gets cleaned as it passes through the air filter. It then flows through tubing until it is compressed in the spinning blades of the turbo. As a result, the ...

In 1673, Christian Huygens invented the first engine. It was designed to pump water from the Seine River to King Louis XIV's Palace of Versailles. Built with an open combustion chamber, it consumed ...