Faster Internal Combustion Engine Development Requirements

Aside from the obvious issues of concept and actual development, what sort of other areas (such as metallurgy) would you need for ICE to be developed faster, say in the early 19th century instead of the late as in OTL?
 
There's a little problem with fuel, for openers. In turn that depends on the development of organic chemistry, and some sort of push to extract crude oil as a natural resource rather than simply skimming it off ponds as it occurred naturally. And then for the Otto cycle to be workable / practical, you'd need electric developments to yield the mechanism by which a spark is produced at the proper time. That in turn leads me to conjecture that given its strictly mechanical nature the Diesel engine might have been developed sooner: kerosene (not greatly dissimilar from diesel fuel) was generally available in the 1850s or so; advances in machining to yield the close tolerances needed for diesel engines might have been feasible.

Frankly, given the number and scope of supporting technical developments required, I'd guess that the development of the Otto cycle engine came about roughly as soon as it possibly could.
 
There's a little problem with fuel, for openers. In turn that depends on the development of organic chemistry, and some sort of push to extract crude oil as a natural resource rather than simply skimming it off ponds as it occurred naturally.

This might actually be comparatively easy. We just need someone who think like James Young and try distilling petroleum to get paraffin, thus sparking off the refinery industry about half a decade earlier. Then we might be able to get kerosene and other such products in place to push for utilization by a diesel-like engine.


And then for the Otto cycle to be workable / practical, you'd need electric developments to yield the mechanism by which a spark is produced at the proper time.

In other words, we need to get the ignition magneto invented earlier.


Thank you for your input, it has helped me piece together some of the picture in understanding how ICE came to be.
 
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