I avoid commenting too much on the difference between historians and anthropologists because they overlap quite a bit.

Here's how Malaria gave you the gasoline engine.

So Britain in particular is trying to get quinine because everyone in its island colonies off in the Far East is getting Malaria and dying by the droves. Now this is actually not terrible because the British, at this point basically in control of every trade route worth mentioning, have a decent enough supply of quinine plantations. The problem is that quinine tastes disgusting, and you really can't avoid the taste because at the time, the way you take it is by dissolving it in water.

Well in the process of trying to get it to taste less like a rancid human asshole, the Brits end up discovering that depending on how you mix the solution, it becomes carbonated. Add a little bit of sweetner and it does help with the taste a little bit, and all those bubbles are at least interesting on the tongue. So they promptly find a way to bottle this new fizzy soda and find a way to dispense it from said bottle. How? Well, a spray nozzle.

Jump ahead a bit. That spray nozzle is now being used in the latest marketing triumph, perfume, and its being used everywhere, only this time its much, much smaller and the nozzles don't send out a stream of fizzy liquid, they aerosolized the liquid perfume so that it comes out in the cloud we know today. That part is important.

Now, two Germans are working on their gasoline engine, but they have a problem. They can get it to run, but not efficiently; if you just burn the gasoline it uses up a huge amount and doesn't get nearly enough bang - if you'll pardon the phrase - for your buck. So what do they do? Well, first they get a perfume style nozzle, which means that instead of liquid gasoline they are injecting a small, explosive cloud of gasoline in to a cylinder. Then they make one that is adjustable; change the mixture to make it pump in more or less gasoline.

This explosion drives a pistol, which turns a crankshaft, which makes your wheels spin, which propels the car. And how did they make this explosion? With aerosolized gasoline, which they made by creating a cloud like perfume, which traces the origins of the spray nozzle back to the tonics first used to make quinine taste better, because quinine tastes awful but is necessary for the prevention of malaria, which was an issue because the British needed people to run their plantations.

Mother. Fucking. History.