Rudolf Diesel Timeline

Rudolf Diesel 19

1858 Rudolf Diesel born in Paris Bavarian parents, French childhood Rudolf Christian Karl Diesel is born on the Rue Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth, second of three children of a Bavarian leather goods maker and a merchant's daughter from Nuremberg. He is a French schoolboy who happens to be German, and he spends his free afternoons at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers looking at machines.
1870 Deported as an enemy alien Paris to London to Augsburg, aged twelve The Franco-Prussian War breaks out and the Diesels, like thousands of other Germans in Paris, are given days to leave. They go to London. Within months his mother sends him alone to his aunt and uncle in Augsburg to learn German properly. He arrives barely speaking it and enrols at the Royal County Trade School.
1873 Top of his class at Augsburg And a father who wants him working Diesel finishes the trade school with the best marks in his year. His father, struggling in London, writes instructing him to leave school and start earning. Diesel refuses, wins a scholarship instead, and effectively decides at fifteen that he will not be a leather worker.
1875 – 1880 Munich, and Carl von Linde The Carnot lecture At the Technische Hochschule in Munich, Diesel hears Carl von Linde explain that a steam engine converts only a small fraction of its fuel into work, and that Carnot's theory sets a far higher ceiling. He writes in the margin of his notebook that he intends to study this. Typhoid delays his final exams by a year, and when he sits them in 1880 he records the highest marks in the institution's history to that date.
1880 – 1890 Ten years in refrigeration Ice machines in Paris Diesel joins Linde's firm in Paris, becomes its director, and spends a decade building industrial ice plants across Europe. He is good at it and it bores him. In every spare hour he works on ammonia vapour engines, solar-powered engines, and anything that might approach the Carnot ideal. Several of the experiments come close to killing him.
1883 Marries Martha Flasche Three children, and a great deal of moving Diesel marries Martha Flasche in Munich. They have three children — Rudolf junior, Heddy and Eugen — and follow his career from Paris to Berlin to Munich. Martha will be the one who opens the bag thirty years later.
1890 – 1892 Berlin, and the ammonia dead end Abandoning the working fluid Transferred to Berlin to run Linde's research office, Diesel finally accepts that ammonia will not deliver the efficiency he wants. He abandons the whole approach and asks a different question: what if the fuel is burned inside the cylinder, and the air is compressed so hard that no ignition source is needed at all?
1892 Diesel patents compression ignition No spark required Rudolf Diesel files a patent for an engine that compresses air so violently that injected fuel ignites from the heat alone. His stated aim is efficiency — he wants to give small workshops an engine that can compete with the great steam plants. The result is the most thermally efficient engine type ever built, and the workhorse of every ship, lorry and locomotive of the following century.
1893 Theory and Construction of a Rational Heat Engine The book before the machine Diesel publishes a full theoretical treatment of an engine nobody has built, arguing from thermodynamics that it must work. The book is enough to persuade MAN in Augsburg and Krupp in Essen to fund him. Almost every specific claim in it turns out to be wrong in practice — the engine he ends up building is not the one he described — but it gets him the workshop.
1893 The first engine nearly kills him Augsburg, 10 August The prototype fires for the first time and the indicator blows apart in Diesel's face. He survives, spends weeks recovering, and goes straight back to it. Four more years of failed runs, redesigned injection systems and burst cylinder heads follow before the thing works reliably.
1897 The first working diesel at Augsburg Twenty-six per cent efficient After four years of explosions and near-fatal failures at the MAN works in Augsburg, Diesel demonstrates an engine achieving around twenty-six per cent efficiency at a time when steam engines manage ten. It weighs five tonnes and produces twenty horsepower. Diesel becomes a millionaire, then loses most of it, then disappears over the side of a cross-Channel ferry in 1913.
1898 A millionaire in a single year Licences sold across the world Following the Munich exhibition, licences sell to firms across Europe and America — Sulzer, Krupp, Busch in St Louis, and others. Diesel makes several million marks in a matter of months and builds an enormous villa in Munich. He is a superb engineer and a catastrophic businessman, and he is now surrounded by both licensees who cannot make the engine work and lawyers who say it was never his idea.
1898 – 1899 Collapse and the sanatorium The engines fail in the field Many licensed engines, built to Diesel's drawings but without his four years of workshop experience, simply do not run. Lawsuits and public attacks on the design follow. Diesel suffers a severe breakdown, spends long periods in sanatoriums, and never fully recovers his health. He spends much of the following decade defending his patents rather than improving his engine.
1900 Peanut oil at the Paris Exposition The first biofuel demonstration At the Paris World Exposition an engine built to Diesel's design runs on peanut oil at the request of the French government, which is interested in fuel its African colonies could produce themselves. Diesel argues for years afterwards that vegetable oils will matter as much as petroleum. The point is forgotten for most of a century.
1903 The first diesel ships Where the engine actually wins The Russian tanker Vandal and the French canal boat Petit-Pierre become the first vessels driven by diesel engines. This is the application that matters: at sea, fuel economy and the absence of a boiler and coal bunkers are worth more than anything, and the diesel engine takes over shipping almost completely within thirty years.
1912 The Selandia crosses oceans The end of the steamship The Danish motor ship Selandia sails from Copenhagen to Bangkok without a funnel, and Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, comes to look at her. Within a generation the coal-fired merchant fleet is obsolete. Diesel, by this point, is nearly bankrupt.
1913 The Origin of the Diesel Engine Settling the record, at last Diesel publishes a short book setting out his own account of the invention, largely to answer twenty years of accusations that he took the idea from Akroyd Stuart, from Carnot, or from his licensees. It appears a few months before he disappears.
1913 Disappearance from the Dresden Antwerp to Harwich, 29 September Diesel boards the mail steamer Dresden at Antwerp, bound for a meeting in London about diesel engines for British submarines. He dines, tells a companion he will see him in the morning, asks to be called at six, and goes to his cabin. In the morning the bed has not been slept in. His hat and coat are folded under the rail. In his diary, a cross is marked against the date.
1913 The bag, and the body Two hundred thousand marks and empty accounts Martha Diesel opens the bag her husband gave her before leaving, with instructions not to open it for a week. It contains two hundred thousand marks in cash and bank statements showing the family is effectively broke. On 10 October a Dutch crew recovers a body from the North Sea and removes the personal effects — a pill case, a spectacle case, a pocket knife — which his son identifies. The verdict is suicide. The theories that he was pushed, by German naval interests or by oil, have never gone away.