Rudolf Diesel
1858 – 1913 · Germany
Known for: Invented the engine that carries the modern world
“An engineer who set out to waste less, and changed the way the world moves.”
Biography
Rudolf Diesel was the second of three children of Bavarian immigrants in Paris, born there on 18 March 1858 to Theodor Diesel, a leather goods maker from Augsburg, and Elise Strobel. The family lived close to hardship, and the boy worked in his father's workshop and delivered goods by barrow. The Franco Prussian War of 1870 uprooted them to London, from where his mother sent him on to Augsburg, to an aunt and uncle and to the vocational college where his uncle taught mathematics. At fourteen he wrote to his parents that he meant to become an engineer, and in 1875, against their wish that he start earning, he took up a scholarship at the Royal Bavarian Polytechnic in Munich.
One of his teachers there was Carl von Linde, the pioneer of refrigeration, in whose lectures Diesel first met the theoretical limit of what an engine can do. Typhoid delayed his graduation, and he spent the waiting months on the shop floor at Sulzer Brothers in Winterthur before taking his degree in January 1880 with the school’s highest marks. He built an ice plant for Linde in Paris, married Martha Flasche in 1883 and moved to Berlin in 1890 to run Linde's research department. Barred from using his employer's patents for his own ends, he struck out beyond refrigeration. An experimental engine running on ammonia vapour exploded and nearly killed him, costing him months in hospital and lasting damage to his eyesight, yet he held to the question that mattered: a steam engine wasted as much as nine tenths of the energy in its fuel, and he wanted one that came close to the ideal Carnot cycle.
His answer, patented in Germany in 1892 and set out in a treatise the following year, was to compress air inside the cylinder until it was hot enough to ignite fuel injected at the end of the stroke, with no spark at all. From 1893 Heinrich von Buz of the Augsburg machine works gave him workshops to test it, with backing from Krupp, and in 1897 the first successful engine, a single vertical cylinder of about twenty five horsepower, passed its official test. It weighed less than a comparable steam engine, burned a fraction of the fuel and made him wealthy. He tried many fuels, from coal dust to vegetable oil. In September 1913, crossing the English Channel by mail steamer, he disappeared from the deck at night, and the circumstances of his death have never been settled. The engine that carries his name went on to move the ships, lorries, locomotives and generators of the century that followed.