Carburetor
The first carburetor was invented by Samuel Morey in 1826. The first person to patent a carburetor for use in a petroleum engine was Siegfried Marcus with his 6 July 1872 patent for a device which mixes fuel with air.
Fuel injection
In 1980, Motorola (now NXP Semiconductors) introduced the first electronic engine control unit, the EEC-III. Its integrated control of engine functions (such as fuel injection and spark timing) is now the standard approach for fuel injection systems. The Motorola technology was installed in Ford North American products.
In the 1970s and 1980s in the U.S. and Japan, the respective federal governments imposed increasingly strict exhaust emission regulations. During that time period, the vast majority of gasoline-fueled automobile and light truck engines did not use fuel injection. To comply with the new regulations, automobile manufacturers often made extensive and complex modifications to the engine carburetor(s). While a simple carburetor system is cheaper to manufacture than a fuel injection system, the more complex carburetor systems installed on many engines in the 1970s were much more costly than the earlier simple carburetors. To more easily comply with emissions regulations, automobile manufacturers began installing fuel injection systems in more gasoline engines during the late 1970s.