Behind the Scenes Minis: Diesel and Ibn Khaldūn

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Holly Frying and I'm Tracy Vie Wilson. One of the things we talked about this week, it was Rudolph Diesel and his Diesel engine and really the vanishing of Rudolph Diesel, which is really what I wanted to talk about. Um, listen Borderline Spooky Time. Yeah, I think based on my vague memory that back when I was on also that other podcasts in addition to this one called This Day in History Class, I feel like I did an episode that was about the day that Rudolph Diesel disappeared. Yeah. Um, and I think I had had uh this on my short list. A short is like I'm total miss number number like this. This is a short list of eight things. Yeah. And clearly it was not a priority to me because in all of that time it never moved up to the top. But also when I went on there today to delete it, since we were recording this, I realized I didn't even have his actual name on there. It just said guy who invented Diesel question mark, I love it, I love it. I did check with Tracy Usually if something comes up and we think the other might be interested, we'll say like, hey, I'm the thing about wearing on this are you? And Tracy was like, well I had him on a list. I was like, oh, then I won't do it. She said, no, I haven't touched it in years. Go ahead, So not a priority. I mean every once in a while I would kind of return to it and then just get distracted by something else. And similarly, the thing that was really drawing me to it was the questions around his disappearance and death. Yeah, it's um, it is interesting. So I I mentioned during the episode that I wanted to talk a little bit about press coverage of it and also the way his family and colleagues talked about it, like they were so insistent that nope, no way, not our loved one would never ever take their own life, and that I think is I mean, obviously it's unfortunate, Like we know, we know now a lot more about depression and anxiety and what leads people to do grave things. Um, but it does sort of break my heart that, like that denial is probably what led so many people to feel like they could never get any help, even when help started to be more readily available in the mental health sciences, which is so weird. But from the journalistic standpoint, it is such a strange and abrupt thing to me, the way the headlines in particular change because they are very they're much worthier when we don't know what happened to Diesel, right, when they're like mysteries surround the disappearance of Rudolph Diesel, no clues have become available, Um, you know, Dr Rudolph Diesel dead. It is feared like these are literal things I'm I'm reading, and then suddenly it's like Diesel was bankrupt, and it's so almost accusatory and it's bluntness at that point that again it's that thing of like we have always had this culture where failure it's the worst sin, and it's so strange to me because they're also I think, I hope, listen, this is my Pollyanna side coming out. I hope that there is more recognition that like failure is really a way people can learn. Obviously, if you fail in a way that harms others, that's a little more grave and serious. But like, I don't know anybody who always gets everything right. If they claim they do, they're probably fibben um So I really I'm I have in my my later years, certainly not when I was younger, because I wasn't being as thoughtful about much of anything. But you know, try to embrace the idea that failure is not bad, it is a good thing, like you can make peace with it and recognize that it's part of growth. But the fact that as a society that was not an avenue of possibility for so many people for so many years that I really wonder how many people found themselves in circumstances like this where they might have considered doing something dire or did do something dire, just because we had not evolved in our thinking about such things. Just troubling, and it wouldn't help if you were someone who was depressed and seeing the press then drag all of his financial affairs through the pages of their papers to sell more copies. Anyway, it just makes me wax a little bit pensive about how we look at celebrities, uh and inventors and scientists today and talk about their work, because clearly this was not a person that was um the least bit claiming he had done things he hadn't right, He was so troubled and upset when people were like no, but it was a mechanics that figured out the problems, And it's like, yes, but in a thing he created, um, you know, which was really quite revolutionary at the time, and I think he felt like he was being discredited, which could not have helped any of these other issues that were going on. Anyway, It just makes me want to be my I mean, I try to be more thoughtful certainly than I was when I was younger about how I talked about anybody publicly. Um, you don't know what you know. You're the thing you say on even Twitter or Instagram or whatever about a person. Um, you don't know what life that those words have beyond your keyboard. And I think it's important to consider at a time when we can kind of see how this this atmosphere where things like a financial failure became sort of gossipy and a little list us in the way they were covered, when really that's just a thing that happens to people. Sometimes he made bad business decisions. No one's arguing that, but like, yeah, I also think like in a lot of ways, most people's minds are primed to fill in gaps and information, and frequently there is a big gap between the thing that happens and the like sort of backstory yes that a person's mind will fill in the blanks, and sometimes that invented backstory then becomes circulated as fact and we don't actually now. Um yeah, anyway, so that was Rudolph Diesel. There's part of me that hopes some piece of unearthed level information appears that he was in fact living in Canada. But I don't think that's going to happen alas I certainly, I mean, I I understand the desire to to uh entertain conspiracy theories and be like, well, isn't it interesting that sudden me Like I The first thing that I thought the conspiracy theorist in my brain went, do we know that he put that black mark in his calendar? Or did somebody else do it when they were handling? Like a lot of things like that are still question marks. We're never going to know really what happened to him or what his mental state was at night. He may have been fine. He may have slipped after folding his coat carefully and placing it on the deck. We don't know. He may have felt lightheaded and stumbled right. Any number of things could have happened. But um it also is just a good thing to challenge any assumptions that one makes. Granted, there was a ruling in his cause of death, but it seems like that was made without maybe a ton of evidence one way or the other. It's okay to question. One of our episodes this week was on Emman Caldan. I still wish I could remember what led me to put the extremely inadequate description of Iman Caldune, Muslim historian onto my episode short list. I don't remember at all. Well, that's more than I usually put on any of mine. I just put like a name. Yeah, sometimes I put them in the Halloween subcategory with a name, and then I'll come back and be like, I just put this in the wrong place. This isn't the least bit HALLOWEENI I have clarifiers on some of the things on my short list, and sometimes it's because like it's I say short list, it's probably a hundred things, Like it's more than a year worth of episodes on that short list. But that means sometimes I will come back to it when I'm trying to figure out what I want to add to like the immediate pipeline, and I will not remember who somebody is, and so sometimes after having that happen once or twice, I will put in that clarifying note to be like, this is who the person is that I put on the list. Something we did not really talk about that I find interesting is that, possibly because there was a gap in how well known and well distributed his work was from the time that he died until it was rediscovered centuries later, a lot of the discussion of it, particularly in terms of his work in economics, has been more focused on like comparing him to figures from Europe in particular, or talking about how he sort of predicted the work of European economists. I think we used that term at the show at one point. There has not been as much analysis of like his economic theories as their own thing, Like not as much deep dive into like let's look at sort of an even Caldoonian theory of economics and see what that means. There's a lot more of like this is an idea that later shows up in Adam Smith, or this is an idea that later shows up in Reaganomics or whatever. Um. I don't know that I would have fully understood it had there been a lot of exploration of his economics work as its own thing, because that is not a field I have spent a lot of time on. Yeah. No, no, that wouldn't wouldn't necessarily be illuminating for me. Yeah, I will say that I had to chuckle a little bit because, um, as we mentioned at the beginning of that episode, right, he lived at a time that was pretty chaotic, constantly shifting power structures, uh, and that impacted his work. And I was like, so, it's like academics, but but because everyone I know that's in academia at like higher learning institutions is always reporting how did you know drum attic and and whatnot? Their jobs are, in their departments, various intrigues that are going on. And I was like, it's always been there. That's very very um diminishing view of it. I don't mean to send any academics. I just you know, when you're gossiping with your friends and they're like, ah, and then this in my department chair, and then and then this and that this person is jockeying for this, And I was like, oh, it's like that's just say it's always been that way. One of the things that I've for some strange reasons remember from college, even though this was half my life ago. At this point, I had a humanities teacher who was in the history department, and occasionally he would tell these stories about faculty meeting and then he would like, part of the story was one of the time, and then we had a knockdown, drag out fight about it. As Like, as a student, I was like, how can there be this many not drag knockdown drag out fights in the history department faculty meeting. I'm now I understand this more as an adult who has, you know, many years of adult experience, not in academia but in any workplace setting where people don't agree on how to do something. But I still just kind of part of me is like, I want to ask that guy, what were all these not down drag out fights about it, which at this point might would require a seance because it's people are not with us anymore. That would be funny a seance of academics who then get into a knockdown, drag out fight from the afterlife. Yeah yeah, uh. Anyway, I find I find really interesting and it's again not atypical at all that there would have just been no mention at all of his wife and daughters. Did he have sons, I'm not actually sure, but he definitely had five daughters who were killed in the shipwreck. And it's just like his mention of them and his autobiography is almost off hand about it. I mean, of course, I would be like, I have not read any of this work in the original Arabic because that is not a language that I know, and I have heard in one of the interviews that I listened to that was about this work, which was with a historian who I think speaks Arabic is a first language. Um, Like the English translations I have heard just don't compare to what the language of the original is like at all. Like the original language is just a lot more poetic and meta metaphorical in a way that a lot of the English translations are not. But um, his description of this shipwreck is described as almost just offhand, like it gets kind of mentioned in passing. So it's he had so many tragedies in his life apart from all of the political chaos and instability that he was part of. You know, look, a lot of his family to the black death, and you know, other friends and family members being either murdered, murdered for political reasons or executed. Uh. And then the loss of his wife and daughters just so much and it seems like logically that would have all affected him, and we just have no real documentation of his thoughts on any of it. Well, and it's worth noting, right Like you you mentioned in the episode that it was not it would not have been unusual for writings at the time by a scholar of his nature to to not really focus on that. But also everybody deals with tragedy differently, Like I definitely have family members who will talk about someone who they were utterly devoted to and they're passing and it's like a quick drive by mention and then you move on. I don't think that's uncommon either, right, So, like there are layers of like what's probably going on in his very minimal discussions of it. Not everyone is a big feeling sharer, so that may inform that as well. We just don't know. Yeah, So anyway, I find them really interesting and I'm glad I finally got to correct my overly reductive description of him in Metal episode short List If you want to send us a note about this more history podcast that I heart radio dot com. It's Friday. I hope your Friday is going well. I hope your weekend goes well whatever is on your plate. Uh, We'll be back Saturday with a Saturday Classic and something brand new will be in your feet on Monday. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. 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