Thanks to “a guy working on hydraulic pressure in Italian Renaissance water gardens, we have the combustion engine,” said James Burke in his book “Connections.”1In this passage, Burke was illustrating the roundabout way innovation often occurs, with some improvements resulting from decades of gradual enhancements, usually building on the ideas of countless other people.John Lienhard, in his daily essays “The Engines of Our Ingenuity,” on National Public Radio and in his book by the same title, also espouses that opinion, saying that by the time Rudolf Diesel built and improved his automobile engine during 1890-97, Carl Benz’s internal combustion e...