The Life and Disappearance of Rudolf Diesel

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy Vie Wilson. This is an episode that's illustrative of how one episode can lead to a completely unrelated episode or a mostly unrelated episode, because the subject that we're covering today came up because while I was working on that Zipper episode, uh, and it had some legal happenings in nine thirteen, I came across a mention of Rudolph Diesel and the big event that happened in his life story that same year, and then I couldn't stop thinking about it. So here we are, although you know they do existing in similar lifetimes on the timeline, so that I guess that links them a little. Lynwood Bryant, writing for the journal Technology and Culture in nineteen seventy six, described the difficulty in writing about the invention of the diesel engine this way quote. So the diesel story is well documented in the sense that much has been written about it, but the literature is mostly polemical or promotional, so that there are still many uncertainties about what actually happened. Now we have enough pieces of the story of Rudolph Diesel's life that remained consistent that we can fairly confidently construct his biography and how he ended up working on what came to be known as Diesel Engines. But the way his life ended will forever be a mystery, and we're going to talk about all of that today. Heads up, there's gonna be quite a bit of discussion of suicide in this episode and a person's mental state and whether or not that might have indicated that they were suicidal. So if that is something that you are not interested in listening to, feel free to skip this one. Rudolph Christian Carl Diesel was born in Paris, France, on March eighteenth, eighteen fifty eight. Born at home on thirty Rue Notre Dame de Nazareth, that address, incidentally is now the site of a burger restaurant called the Cultran. His parents were Theodore Diesel and at least Strobl Diesel. Theodore was Bavarian by birth and had moved to Paris to pursue work as a book binder, although he transitioned to manufacturing leather goods after moving to France. Elise, whose family was from Nuremberg was already living in Paris when the two of them met and got married, and Rudolph was their second child. And while Rudolf was a child, he and his family continued to live in Paris. They were not wealthy. Rudolph worked in his father's leather workshop to help keep the family afloat, and then when the Franco German War broke out in eighteen seventy, the diesels, because they were German, were deported from France to London, England. Rudolph had been about to enter the Code Premier Superier that's upper primary school, and this was really quite a blow. So rude Off went from London to Germany for school, although his parents stayed in England. His father had grown up in the town of Oxford, Germany and Bavaria. It was about thirty miles or a about fifty kilometers west of Munich. Rudolph went there to live with an aunt and uncle, Barbara and Christoph Barnacle, where his uncle Christoph was a math teacher. At this point Rudolf would have been only about twelve, so he was getting his foundational primary schooling and he finished that in Augsburg at the Industrial School of Augsburg before moving on to Munich to attend Technical High school there. From his very early life, Rudolph Diesel naturally excelled at anything related to engineering, in the related sciences and math, and he had won awards for his achievements in these areas at school. Throughout his education he was an all around good student, but that really was the area where he just seemed to shine. And when he decided to continue his education at the Royal Bavarian Polytechnic of Unich, which he got a scholarship to do, his parents were concerned. They thought that he'd really just be better off going right into a career and starting to earn some money. They continued to worry about money, and they were concerned that in continuing his education and engineering instead of starting to bring money in, Rudolph was dooming his future. Man. There was an issue of concern about the timeline of Rudolph's schooling because he was not able to graduate on time. This was because of an illness, probably typhoid fever, and it prevented him from taking his final exams. He had to wait a whole year before the graduation exams would be administered again. He made use of that time by working for an engineering firm, and the following year he took his exams, passed and received his degree. While he was studying in Munich, Diesel had caught the attention of one of his teachers, Karl von Linda, and the engineer became his mentor. Linda's claimed to fame in history is refrigeration, and he developed some of the first mechanical refrigeration methods. And as Linda's work in that field gained momentum, he took his protegee Diesel with him. Lynda opened a Paris office, the lend Ice Machine Company in eighteen eighty, but then twenty two year old Diesel moved there to work as a refrigerator engineer. Already Diesel was working on developing combustion engines in his spare time. He had really been inspired by a lecture on thermodynamics that he had heard while studying in Munich, in which the lecturer had discussed the way heat could be harnessed as energy. This drove his interest in combustion engines. He tried out a number of different ways to generate heat for an engine, even solar power, but it took him a while to figure out a design that would actually work. Yes, some sources credit that lecture to lend as the lecture, but not all of them, so just know that if you're looking around for more info on it. From eighteen eight need to eighteen ninety, Diesel settled into both his engineering career and into family life. In eighteen eighty three, Diesel married Martha Flash. The two went on to have three children. Rudolph Jr. Was born in eighteen eighty three, a daughter named Hetty was born in eighteen eighty five, and a third child, Oigan, was born in eighteen eighty nine, ten years into his time with Linda's company, and just after his third child was born, Rudolph was promoted to the head of the engineering department. This also required them to move to Berlin, where the company had an office, and it was in Berlin that he envisioned what we know today as the Diesel engine, at least in its infancy. In eighteen ninety two, he had a development patent with the German government. Diesel had called his invention the new Rational heat Engine, and he was still working on these engines as a side project in his time off from Lynde's refrigeration company. That meant that he didn't have to involve the company in his patents, but it also meant that he need financial backing if he was going to start actually trying to build the engines that he was designing. He published a paper titled Theory and Construction of a Rational Heat Motor. In this paper described in detail how his engine worked. In Diesel's engine, a piston compresses air to a very high pressure that also raises its temperature significantly. The air is drawn in on the down stroke of a piston and it's compressed as the piston is on his upstroke as it starts to drop again. The fuel is then injected and it ignites from the high temperature of the compressed air. So this is different from a gasoline or a petrol engine, which compresses the air and the fuel and ignites them with a spark from a spark plug. So once that paper was out, Diesel's work started getting a lot of attention, enough that there were some large companies willing to bankroll the assembly of models of his engine based on his designs. Both the Krupp Company and Augsburg Machine Works, which is usually seen as m A N funded his work in the eight nineties. The two companies shared expenses and paid Diesel thirty thousand marks a year's his salary, along with all of the expenses needed for experimentation and prototyping, with the agreement that they would have some priority when it came to licensing the patents, and that they would also make money from the patents that were licensed to other companies. His early engines were focused on fuel efficiency, but he ran into issues with reliability. Diesel was really carefully notating every aspect of his work during this time in his life, and later used these meticulous notes to write a book about it. He wasn't working in a vacuum. He was in constant contact with colleagues to get their thoughts on various components of his idea, and also with potential business partners who he thought might be interested in the engine once he finished developing it and design after design, he was making adjustments to get the right pressure, the right timing, the right temperature, the right fuel, and the right cooling to make the whole thing work. In the support of Diesel's corporate backers paid off when Rudolph unveiled a four stroke compression engine with twenty five horsepower that worked consistently and well. And this prototype was displayed at Augsburg on a test stand and it received a lot of visitors. Business executives and engineers came to see it from all over and it was lauded as a breakthrough at the Society of German Engineers annual meeting in June that year. We'll talk about how Diesel parlayed his prototype and see a great deal of success in just a moment after we pause for a sponsor break. With so many engineers and businessman so excited about his engine, Rudolph Diesel was in a unique position of being able to partner with almost anyone he wished to license manufacturing rights in Germany. It was decided that three companies would split the market, and then Diesel negotiated with manufacturers in twelve other countries for royalties. And he made a lot of money in a very short period of time because just about every contract involved an upfront advance on future royalties. Since he was negotiating for royalties, it wasn't like he would have made any money before. They would, you know, have the long ramp of getting a manufacturing facility up and running. So he always baked in an upfront fee, so soon manufacturing facilities throughout Europe and North America were hard at work making their first attempts at actually building Diesel's designs. In the summer of the first diesel engine in the United States went on display at Madison Square Garden. That same year, Diesel founded two new companies with the financial backing of M. A. N. One of those companies was essentially a business firm to handle things like contracts, patent licensing, and other administrative aspects of his work. The other was to manufacture diesel engines and sell them. But there were many, many problems. None of the manufacturers, not Diesels, and not any of his licensees, were having luck actually building reliable engines. Engines that worked in the factory failed in the field, and Diesel instituted a policy that customers could return engines that didn't work to his factory that ultimately bankrupted it. He continued to tweak his designs, always searching for ways to improve efficiency and actually make them work. He had been largely handling marketing and licensing since he got that first consistent prototype up and running, but then he pivoted back to the shop himself. And started experimenting again. He tried a number of changes to his original designs, and at one point he was even touting a version of it that ran on peanut oil, but none of his experiments really addressed the issues with the faulty engine. His reputation was really damaged by all these failed engines in the market, and in late eighte he suffered a nervous breakdown while he was convalescing. Mechanics from M a N started a comprehensive field examination of diesel engines in their real world environments to see where, when and why they failed. Through this process, which involved taking one of the engines apart and sending it back to the factory with notes to be reworked, the company was able to fix these issues. This fixed the diesel engine, but critics noted that the machine only became usable once the inventor was out of the picture. Rudolph, though, had been operating since eight with the confidence that a lot of engineers had agreed that his prototype was functional and ready for market. Yeah, this is one of those things where a lot of people are like, well, he galloped into this industry way too quickly, and it's like he had so many people visit and be like, yes, this is absolutely we are ready for this, So there's some shared responsibility in whether or not it was ready. By nineteen o four, the French government was using these rework diesel engines and their submarines. The fuel needed for diesel engines was less expensive than the fuel needed for gasoline engines. This wasn't and still isn't a gallon to gallon price comparison. Diesel is often more expensive per gallon, and look it up today and you'll see that's the case. But you need a lot less of it. And it's lower fume production means that it's much less flammable than gasoline, and that made it perfect for military applications. In nineteen twelve, Diesel got wind of the fact that a man named Adolph Nagel from Dresden, Germany, was working out a book about the diesel engine. This is a pretty good indicator of just how much people recognize that the diesel engine was an important development, even in Rudolph's lifetime. Keep in mind, his engine was less than twenty years old from its first inception at that point. But Rudolph Diesel was concerned about the way someone else might characterize his work. As we've noted, there had been problems and setbacks along the way, as with any invention, and there were a lot of critics of his work from day one. A lot of them believe that while he may have been the idea man, the men working in his shops to actually fix and produce a working engine based on his designs were the real masterminds. Diesel couldn't stop Adolf Nichol's book from coming out, so he wrote his own version of the Diesel story. Concurrently, two other books came out around the same time about the diesel engine in addition to the two that we're talking about here, so that brings up to the total to four books about the diesel engine story, all in the same year. Rudolph's was, of course the most complimentary to the subject, while the other three publications were viewed largely as criticism of the man. Yeah, that's uh why that quote at the top was like, Okay, we have a lot of documentation of it, but they're all either pretty contentious about the whole thing or really promoting how great he was. In autumn of nineteen thirteen, Diesel and his associates headed for London for some meetings there. Diesel sailed for England to board the s S Dresden, leaving port from Antwerp, Belgium, on September At ten pm that night, Diesel went to his cabin on the Dresden to go ostensibly to bed, but he never made it to bed. When a porter called on Diesel's room in the morning to wake him at six fifteen am, as had been requested, the engineer was not there. He had not slept in the room, His bedclothes were still laid out on the bed, and his coat was found carefully folded on the ship's deck. Early reports of Diesel's disappearance were pretty brief. The story that ran in numerous papers was as follows and its entirety quote London. In October one, Dr Rudolph Diesel, inventor of the Diesel motor, is believed to have been lost overboard from the Channel steamer Dresden on the voyage between Antwerp and Harwich. Doctor Diesel embarked at Antwerp Monday night for London. On arrival of the vessel at Harwich, he was missing. His birth had not been disturbed, although his night attire had been laid out the paper. The Gloucester Echo expanded on the state of Diesel the night he disappeared, with some speculation that passage read quote. It is conjectured by his friends that doctor Diesel fell overboard during the voyage. He had complained to a friend some time ago that he was occasionally troubled with insomnia, and it is possible that when his friends retired to their cabins, he decided to continue his stroll of the deck. He was in the best of health and in very cheerful spirits, and had expressed the most sanguine expectations of the future of his engine and the developments of the company. The New York Times included an account of Diesel's last night from George Correll's director of the Consolidated Diesel Engine Company, who had been traveling with Rudolphin. He vanished Carrel's statement of the press reads quote. All three of us dined together immediately after the boat left Antwerp. Afterwards, we strolled on deck, talking and smoking. Doctor Diesel was in the very best spirits. The conversation was cheery and buoyant. Just about ten o'clock, when inside of the lights of Flushing, I remarked, well, I think it's time to be in bed. This was assented to by Dr Diesel, and all three of us descended to our cabins. We passed his cabin, he stepped in, but immediately afterward came along the corridor to my cabin, shook hands and wished me good night. I will see you tomorrow morning were the last words you spoke to me. Your references to the three of us, and that there was another consolidated Diesel executive with them. George Correll's had also examined Diesel's room when it was discovered that the man was missing, and he d ailed what he and that other colleague, her Lukman, had found. Quote. We returned to doctor Diesel's cabin. An inspection of the bed showed that it had not been slept in. The coverlet was turned down, and a night shirt lay ready for Doctor Diesel on the bed. His keys were in the lock of his little handbag, and he had hung his watch on the side of the bag in such a position that he would be able to see it from where he lay. Everything appeared orderly in the cabin. I could not say whether any money was missing, because I do not know how much he had in his possession, but there was nothing to indicate interference with his belongings. The last section of Karl's statement that The New York Times included suggested a level of incredulity that Diesel might have harmed himself on purpose. He reiterated Rudolf's good spirits that night, saying quote, he was quite jolly in humor when I parted from him overnight. If one has to put aside the thought of accident, I can only say that something must have given way in his brain. He was most steamius, did not smoke, as far as I know, did not suffer from giddiness. Follow Up articles about Rudolph Diesel's last days insisted that he was in a very good place in his life. The subtitle of an article from October two, also appearing in The New York Times read German inventor was a millionaire and his home was happy. Was not working hard. That article mentions the breakdown that he had thirteen years earlier when he was overworked, but it also insists that he was past that and at this point in his life he had everything that one could want. It reads, in part quote the initial difficulties and trials which he suffered, common to the experience of most great inventors, had long ago been surmounted. His patent rights in the Diesel engine were sold for huge sums in various countries, and having a mass of fortune, he had, to all intents and purposes, retired from active business. That right Up states that Diesel's fortune was worth an estimated two point five million dollars, and that while he attended occasional meetings to the various companies working with his inventions, the rest of his time was quite leisurely. Because the circumstances of his disappearance from the Dresden didn't evidence any sort of issue with the ship's railing, and there had been quiet seas on September twenty nine, it didn't seem like an accident had happened on deck. But also no one, it seemed, could fathom any sort of problem that might lead Rudolph Diesel to end his own life. His son in law, Baron Schmidt, told the press that the idea of suicide was quote entirely unsupported. It's important to keep in mind that all of this is playing out at a time when any kind of mental illness was viewed with a high degree of negativity and a lot of shame, so it's not surprising that everyone close to Diesel insisted that he was in excellent spirits prior to his disappearance. We'll talk about the mystery of what happened to Rudolph Diesel after we hear from some of the sponsors that keep stuff you missed in history class going. A week and a half after Rudolph Diesel vanished, on October tenth, a body was spotted in the North Sea by a Belgian sailor aboard a steamer Kurtzon. The location specifically was right at the mouth of the estuary Western Shelt, near Flushing, Netherlands, which opens into the North Sea. This is basically right where Correll's had said they were when he suggested that it was time for bed on the night the Diesel vanished. The body was that of a man, well dressed who matched the size of Diesel. There are some variations in what happened when this body was found. We do know that the body was not recovered, but that some of this person's effects were. There are two different reasons given for why the body was left in the sea. One is that the boat that found him was too small to take him on, and that seems a little odd because it was a steamer. And the other is that the body was just too decomposed for the sailor to be able to bring aboard. That's possible, although that then makes the collection of personal effects from the body seemed kind of odd. One newspaper account that came up in research made it sound like one of Diesel's sons had seen the body and believed it to be his father, but had not made any positive identification. That's also a little confusing. It actually seems more likely that in the relaying of the story of the sun seeing Rudolph's wallet, eyeglasses case, and pocket knife, which that actually did happen, somebody got confused and thought he had seen more than that. In any case, there was never a positive identification of anybody. Although that sounds like his son had said that those were his personal items they were, so yes, it gets a little strange. Um that placed into more strange theories. Around the same time that the body believed to be Diesel was found, the tone of the news reports about Diesel's life and finances started to shift pretty dramatically after all of those pieces that have been published in the days immediately following Diesel's disappearance claimed that he was very wealthy and very happy. A New York Times piece appeared on October thirte under the title Diesel family in straits. Missing inventors said to have left them in extreme need. This particular article is very brief. It's just two fairly succinct paragraphs, but it indicates that news was breaking in Berlin and Munich that Diesel had invested almost all of his money into various business ventures which were unsuccessful and had left him nearly destitute. The write up concluded by saying, it's being alleged quote that a realization of his position is responsible for his disappearance, so intimating that him realizing he was in too deep might have led him to take his own life. Within days of those first articles that things had not been as they had seemed for Diesel, the headlines shifted simply to Diesel was bankrupt. His creditors and Munich met on October fourteenth, and they laid bare the extent of the engineer's financial problems. His liabilities totaled three seventy five thousand dollars and his tangible assets were worth only ten thousand dollars that was reported quote. The meeting found itself unable to take definite action regarding the administration of doctor Diesel's wrecked fortune, as the exact state of affairs remains to be cleared up. One of the problems was that in reporting his assets to creditors, Diesel had overvalued his real estate holdings by as much as a hundred and twenty five thousand dollars. So while these reveals about Diesel's monetary problems had led most people to accept that he had died by suicide, the mysteries surrounding his death led others to theorize that the engineer had met with foul play. Diesel's own family never he believed that he would have killed himself, and that only fueled those theories. On the one hand, there were quite a few pieces of circumstantial evidence suggesting that Diesel had died by suicide. He had given his wife a bag containing all of the ready cash that he could get his hands on, as well as detailed information about the grave state of his financial affairs and instructions that she should open it in a week. His diary was also said to have been marked with the black X over the date of September twenty nine. None of that is truly definitive, though. One of the more engaging what if scenarios related to Diesel is whether he would have steered the global fuel industry away from crude oil and towards biodiesel. This is something that's been written about a lot in recent decades. In the last year of his life, Rudolph Diesel started really championing the use of vegetable oil as a fuel source, which he predicted would eventually be vital to the global fuel market. You'll remember he was, you know, at one point running his injury and on peanut oil as a demonstration. He really believed that readily available fuel sources like vegetable oils would enable agricultural communities away to keep pace with people in more industrial and metropolitan areas when it came to technology. He had always hoped from the beginning that his work would help democratize motorization so that small, independent producers and craftsmen of all kinds might be able to compete with large corporations. So even at the time of his death, there were people that thought that he might have been murdered by someone in the crude oil industry because of this ideology. The other and maybe most common theory was that German agents had murdered him fearing that Diesel was about to give the British Navy pad licenses to his diesel engines, just as tensions in Europe were escalating, as tensions would of course lead to World War One. One British paper is said to have run the speculative headline quote inventor own into sea to stop sale of patents to British government. Yeah, Diesel engines are apparently very important in the development of U boats, and Germany is said to have been concerned that they would lose their edge if the British government also had access to that same technology. The possibilities regarding Diesel's demise also included the belief by some that he had met no demise at all, but had in fact faked his death. For anyone who had been thinking as much during the months after Rudolph disappeared, there was a huge jolt of validation the following spring. In March nineteen fourteen, stories began hitting German and then US papers that Diesel was living in Canada and had been sending letters to Germany. Those kind of sputter out they never come through with any real evidence, So if they gave people the idea that that was really happening, they didn't follow up. Diesel's date of death is normally listed in September twenty nine, thirteen, even though some questions regarding his disappearance and death remain. His cause of death was ruled a suicide. In a nineteen fourteen article titled the Tragedy of Genius, which ran in papers across the US, it was noted how many brilliant men had met bad ends, and Rudolph Diesel is described this way quote. He was a broken hearted, bankrupt, a genius without business sense. His engine is used in every quarter of the globe. Next to what he is ranked by some as the greatest figure in the development of power. For all the good he did in advancements of science and industry, his reward was smile. Indeed, harassed by creditors by his urgent needs. His life had been one of misery for years, although he may have been in rough financial times when he died, Diesel's engine was just about to really gain success beyond military uses. Although as we said, many subs in World War One did have diesel engines. In the nineteen twenties, diesel engines became the standard on ships, replacing steam. In nineteen thirties, diesel gained a foothold in the truck market. The first car with a diesel engine was the Citruan Rosalie that was built in nineteen thirty three and was quickly followed by other models by other makers, including Mercedes Benz. The locomotive industry largely shifted to diesel in the nineteen fifties, and now diesels still everywhere, although less less so on the consumer market, more still in the industrial market. Yeah, although I have had friends with diesel cars that will talk to you for a long time about how their car can run on almost anything if it has to. Yeah. I've known people who have had like biodiesel cars. Um, those are kind of great because they often smell like French fries. Yeah. The one person I knew who had a biodiesel car who I rode in the car with them a lot, it did always smell like like French fries. There are, of course, still lots of issues related to like climate and pollut and stuff. Like that, because even though it is more fuel efficient than a gasoline engine, there are still like a lot of mission emissions concerns involved in diesel fuel. Yes, for sure, Yeah it's interesting, right we I mean, diesel as a word is very very common. I don't know how many people really think about the fact that there was a person named that, for whom the whole thing is named. Uh. And you know, of course his story takes such a weird turn and becomes for me an interesting examination of how the press handles things. We'll talk about that some on Friday. Um. You know, I always want to talk about that the press handles things. But in the meantime, I want to talk about two fun things because once again I am dipping into the pile of physical mail that I have, um, that has been sitting in the office. So both of these are old, for which I apologized, but I wasn't in the office to get them. But I wanted to point out both of these pieces of mail. One is from our listener, Sandy, and it makes me smile so big. She writes, high ladies. I spent several wonderful months listening to the back catalog at my desk job. Once I was caught up. I didn't know what to do, so I signed up for grad school. Thank you so much for encouraging me to be curious and keep learning. Here I am two years later, graduating virtually for the time being. Thank you for keeping me company for all of this time. Best regards, Sandy. And it is a picture from her graduation which was in so it's a couple of years back now. But Sandy, congratulations. That is awesome and amazing. She has her master's degree now and related to this because it is sustainability leadership, so was her her degree program, so that is kind of perfect for the diesel the diesel discussion. That is amazing. Seriously, congratulations. I don't know you, but I'm very proud of you. The other thing that I wanted to mention is a Christmas thing that we got from our listener, father Dan, who has written us I believe a few times, but he sent us Christmas waffles Um, which are are now through time and having been stacked at work, kind of Christmas crumbles. I apologize we didn't get them, but I appreciate the very very kind um shipment. It was very sweet of you to think of us and send those along, so thank you, Father dan Uh. If you would like to write to us, you gotta go with email. At this point we've said before we're we're not in a physical office right now, So you can do that at History Podcast at iHeart radio dot com. 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