Diesel engine

"Like a demon, the engine lived in our house"

Rudolf Diesel (Paris, March 18, 1858 – The Channel, September 30, 1913)

On September 29, 1913, the 55-year-old world-famous German engineer Rudolf Diesel took the boat from Antwerp to Harwich, England. When the ship arrived at six o'clock in the morning, he had disappeared. The British and Germans lived at odds in those days.

Barely a few months later, the First World War would break out. Had Diesel underestimated the situation and had he been killed by the German secret service? He had mismanaged his wealth and lost most of his fortune through various misfortunes.

Had he committed suicide in a depressed mood? The hard work had ruined his health. Had he ended up in the sea after another heart attack?

The sheets in his cabin were open, but the bed had not been slept in. His nightgown lay neatly on the pillow. Brush and razor were ready above the sink. His watch lay on the bedside table.

Under the pillow, the ship's officers found a wallet containing one hundred pounds sterling, a respectable sum for the time.

His friend and traveling companion Georges Carels, from the Ghent motor factory Carels Frères, remembered that they had toasted his daughter's forthcoming wedding together. And Diesel's name was not on the passenger list.

Very strange, the newspapers thought.

Fourteen days later, a pilot ship discovered the corpse of the missing engineer off the coast of Vlissingen. The crew searched the body, found a wallet, a pocket knife and a spectacle case and immediately entrusted the body back to the North Sea.

His two sons, who had traveled to Vlissingen, recognized their father's belongings. They thought it was a heart attack. Thus, one of the most influential inventors of the twentieth century disappeared into the mists of time.

Rudolf Christian Karl Diesel was born on March 18, 1858 in Paris. His father had ended up as a journeyman on 'Wanderschaft' in Paris in 1850 and had continued to work there as a bookbinder and portfolio maker.

In 1855 he married a German girl who earned her living as an English teacher in Paris. Little Rudolf grew up in the heart of Paris. He often visited the technical museum, the oldest in the world, and made drawings of all kinds of machines when he was 10 to 12 years old.

His son Eugen, his biographer, later wrote: "The love of machines was innate in him."

When the Prussian-French war broke out in 1870 and Paris was completely surrounded by the Prussian troops, all Germans had to leave Paris. The Diesels fled to London and from there sent their 13-year-old son to live with relatives in Augsburg, Bavaria.

Rudolf came under the care of an uncle, a professor of mathematics, who immediately discovered and further developed his giftedness. This allowed Diesel to study at the Technical University of Munich, where he was taught by Carl Linde, a pioneer in the field of refrigeration systems.

Linde taught thermodynamics, the study of the relationship between heat and mechanical motion.

It was Linde who insisted that an awful lot of energy was lost with the steam engine, namely 90 percent. After his studies in 1880, Linde employed Diesel as a 'traveling engineer' of his factories. Diesel's own research convinced him that air was the most suitable means of making the most of energy. Diesel: 'I rush from city to city, barely getting to think about my family; and yet my bike and my future are on my mind all the time.' He was then 29. In 1893 he published the booklet Theory and construction of a rational heat engine to replace the steam engine and the combustion engines known so far. He had already taken out a first patent a year earlier. The diesel engine is an internal combustion engine where the ignition does not take place by an electric spark, but by compressed air at a high temperature. Fuel is injected, which ignites by itself due to the heat of the air. The choice of crude oil fuel was as spectacular as the system itself.

Diesel's black mistress

His son Eugen: 'The engine lived in our house like a demon and exerted great pressure on our existence.' Someone called the new engine 'Diesel's black mistress'.

With the support of three companies, including arms giant Krupp, Diesel was able to give a first demonstration for the association of German engineers in Kassel on June 16, 1897. At the 1900 World Exhibition in Paris, the motorcycle won a Grand Prix.

A slew of rival inventors and troublemakers tried to wrest the Diesel patent from him, a long-running issue that caused him many lawsuits and headaches.
Nevertheless, business was going brilliantly. Applications for the patent came from all over the world and Diesel was instantly a multimillionaire. The Americans alone were willing to pay a million dollars for the idea. The first diesel engines were intended for ships and for stationary purposes.

On the other hand, he was never as rich as he wanted himself and the world to believe. The many companies founded with his patents and in which he often owned shares were slow to get going or not at all, over a decade
the engine experienced teething problems. Meanwhile, Diesel lived on a high foot and built a large villa in Munich, a small castle. He bought oil fields in Eastern Europe, which turned out to be unprofitable, and invested in real estate through a shady venture.

His father had never recovered financially after his departure from Paris, so that Diesel very early had both his parents dependent. Returning to Munich, his father passed the time with spiritualism and a practice as a mesmerizer.

While Rudolf Diesel used to say: 'The only truths are the mathematical ones.'

Rudolf Diesel worked day and night on his engine, as if in a kind of trance, and after 1898 had to be admitted to a nerve clinic several times. It took too long for his complex engine to reach market maturity. No one knew about his financial problems.

His very wealthy friends, such as the American brewer Adolphus Busch or the Swedish-Russian oil baron Emanuel Nobel (the eldest brother of Alfred, the Nobel Prize founder), would certainly have helped him.

Apparently Diesel couldn't get over his pride and didn't confide in them.

In June 1913, at his villa in Munich, he received a large group of American engineers who invited him to the 1915 World's Fair in San Francisco. In September his book The Origin of the Diesel Engine was published in Berlin.

According to some biographers, Diesel was summoned to the naval headquarters in Berlin a year before the outbreak of World War II, where Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz pressured him to transfer his patents to the German state. Diesel refused.

Then he would have been invited by the British Admiralty. The German secret po-
The world's first diesel engine: 1897 litie would have wanted to prevent this visit. In any case, by the end of 1913, the year of his death, more than 100 seagoing ships were already equipped with diesel engines. Success came too late for its inventor.

Constantly in need of quick money, he took too many risks and dug an ever-deeper financial pit. Incidentally, it was not until 1936 – forty years later – that the first passenger car with a diesel engine, the Mercedes Benz 260 D, left the Daimler factories.

According to Diesel's sons, their father had worked too hard and as a result had weakened his heart, mismanaged his finances and suffered from depression. They did not believe the countless wild stories surrounding his strange death.
After his father's disappearance, son Eugen continued to hang around in Vlissingen for a while in the hope that his body would wash ashore.

He concluded his voluminous biography from 1939 – also published in Dutch under the title De roman van een motor – with the words: 'The place where he had been seen floating on 10 October was the area around the Zeehondenplaat off the mouth of the the Oosterschelde between the islands of Noordland and Schouwen.

There's probably my father's bones somewhere in the sand.'