Farm implement maker Blackstone & Co., which was located in Stamford, Lincolnshire, UK, was founded in 1889  and produced engines in a time where internal combustion engines were just coming into their own. The company has since been gobbled up many times over, and little remains, but this engine lives on.

The oil engine shown above–which will keep you enthralled for the entire eight minutes and eight seconds of the video–is considered a hot bulb engine, which requires the fuel source, kerosene in this instance, to come into contact with a hot metal surface inside the bulb. That’s the torching process in the beginning.

Kick-starting the combustion process.

Air is compressed into the bulb chamber by the piston, and oxygen completes the process during the compression stroke of the engine. The hot bulb engine was typically a one-cylinder, two-stroke engine that ran at low speeds. Compression ratios hovered in the 3:1 to 5:1 range and receives fuel during the intake stroke and not at the end of the compression stroke like a true diesel.

The parts and pieces are rusty, but they still seem to operate just fine.

This particular 1909 model, 10 horsepower hot bulb engine was manufactured by the aforementioned Blackstone & Co. and, according to the poster, was used for pumping water from a river to a market garden.

Then someone decided “blown-up” would be a better state for the engine, and tried to demolish the engine by blowing up the cylinder. The engine was repaired and returned to service, until the river encroached on its home. It was flooded a number of times, buried it in river silt and filled it with fish, rust, and who knows what else, until it was recovered and repaired in 1997.

Go ahead. Watch the video. Enjoy the sights and glorious mechanical sounds of days gone by–and thank those folks who have engineered much better combustion engines than this one. A sweet trip down memory lane.