History of the Internal Combustion Engine:

• Gunpowder Piston Engine: In 1673, a Dutchman named Chrstiaan Huygen attempt ed to stuff a piston in a tube like gun barrel and explode gunpowder that caused the piston to move. But it only worked once before the cylinder had to be filled with gunpowder.
  
• Watt’s and Newcomen’s steam engine: The Scottish mechanical engineer and chemist James Watt who improved on Thomas Newcomen’s 1712 Newcomens steam engine wt. his Watt steam engine, in 1776.  which was fundamental to the changes brought by the Industrial Revolution in both his native Great Britain and the rest of the world. The basic theory of push and pull of steam engine is to burn to water to high heat and liquid became steam gas and expanded by 1,700 times, high pressure steam pushed the piston forward,, then the cylinder will be cooled down by atmosphere. The steam condensed back to liquid water  produced a “cheating vacuum” to pull the piston back to the original position.
• GAS-Atmospheric Engines : In 1859, a Belgian engineer Jean J. Lenoir's experimentation with electricity led him to develop the first internal combustion engine which burned a mixture of  coal, gas and air ignited by a "jumping sparks" ignition system by Ruhmkorff coil,[2] and which he patented in 1860. The engine was a steam engine converted to burn gaseous fuel and thus pushed in both directions. The fuel mixture was not compressed before ignition (a system invented in 1801 by Philippe LeBon who developed the use of illuminating gas to light Paris), and the engine was quiet but inefficient,[3] with a power stroke at each end of the cylinder. In 1863, Lenoir demonstrated a second three-wheeled carriage, the Hippomobile, little more than a wagon body set atop a tricycle platform.[3] It was powered by a 2543 cc (155 in3; 180×100 mm, 7.1×3.9in)[2] 1.5 hp, "liquid hydrocarbon" (petroleum) engine with a primitive carburettor which was patented in 1886.[8] It successfully covered the 11 km (7 mi) from Paris to Joinville-le-Pont and back in about ninety minutes each way, an average speed less than that of a walking man (though doubtless there were breakdowns).[2] This succeeded in attracting the attention of Tsar Alexander II, and one was sent to Russia, where it vanished; Lenoir was not pleased. In 1863, he sold his patents to Compagnie parisienne de gaz and turned to motorboats, instead, building a naptha (Ligroin) fueled four-cycle in 1888.[3][2][9] Jules Verne wrote in his 1863 novel Paris in the Twentieth Century of boulevards crowded with horseless carriages, "the Lenoir machine applied to locomotion."