Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's
Speaker 2: Chuck and Benz here sitting in for Jerry, and this
Speaker 2: is stuff you should know?
Speaker 3: What you know?
Speaker 2: I kind of pick up the.
Speaker 4: Ball the baton. We are doing an episode today on
Speaker 4: Rudolph Diesel, invention of our inventor of the diesel engine.
Speaker 4: And this was prepared for us by Anna Green, one
Speaker 4: of our writers, and edited a great job, very exhaustive. Look,
Speaker 4: but this was a listener suggestion and I went back
Speaker 4: to look at who it was, and it turns out
Speaker 4: there were three emails over the past like a couple
Speaker 4: of years to investigate Rudolph Diesel. Scott Simpson, I don't
Speaker 4: think my friend Scott Simpson, who's also a comedian but
Speaker 4: who knows okay, Christian Coiner and then very mysteriously Leo
Speaker 4: and Jenny Oh No, last name yeah, Leo and Jenny.
Speaker 4: The last name isn't in Jenny.
Speaker 2: Right, No, the middle initial is in in the last
Speaker 2: name is Jenny.
Speaker 4: Yeah. So thanks for these suggestions, because this was I
Speaker 4: didn't know anything about the guy, didn't know anything about
Speaker 4: the diesel engine, and now I feel good enough to
Speaker 4: get a Jeopardy answer or two correct.
Speaker 2: For sure, Yeah, call us ken. I had no idea
Speaker 2: about this either. I didn't realize that diesel is technically
Speaker 2: a proprietary eponym, or at least a proper noun. If
Speaker 2: you see like that Diesel engine, the d should be
Speaker 2: capitalized because it was invented. It's named after its inventor,
Speaker 2: Rudolph Diesel, who was working around the turn of the
Speaker 2: last century and a little bit before, a little bit after.
Speaker 2: And he was a German kid born in Paris to
Speaker 2: a father who well, his father was a bit of
Speaker 2: a character, as we'll see in some of the worst ways.
Speaker 2: But who was He was an interesting person who made
Speaker 2: his own way in the world and changed it radically.
Speaker 2: The irony is he changed it in ways that were
Speaker 2: the opposite of what he wanted to or how we
Speaker 2: wanted to change the world.
Speaker 4: Yeah, for sure. And like many inventors, his story starts
Speaker 4: out as a child who was sort of obsessed with
Speaker 4: figuring out how things worked. A tinkerer who would take
Speaker 4: apart things. We've heard the story kind of time and
Speaker 4: time again. Someone who would like disassemble things in their house,
Speaker 4: put them back together. As a kid in Paris, he
Speaker 4: was working for his dad a lot of the time
Speaker 4: or in school, and in eighteen sixty seven came across
Speaker 4: his first internal combustion engine at the Paris World's Fair
Speaker 4: when he saw the auto engine, Nicholas Auto's coal gas engine,
Speaker 4: like I said, at the World's Fair.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and this was a big deal. Other people had
Speaker 2: invented internal combustion engines before, but Nicholas Auto's was like
Speaker 2: the culmination of it. It was like the real deal. So
Speaker 2: the fact that it really struck young Rudolph Diesel, this
Speaker 2: would have been oh he would have been fifteen, nineteen, No,
Speaker 2: he would have been nine.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Imagine being a nine year old kid and seeing an
Speaker 2: internal combustion engine and saying to yourself, this is what
Speaker 2: I want to dedicate my life.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that was the.
Speaker 2: Kind of kid. Theodore Diesel was right. And again it
Speaker 2: was a big deal that he saw this engine, or
Speaker 2: I should say the engine itself was a big deal.
Speaker 2: But they didn't stick around Paris for much longer. That
Speaker 2: was eighteen sixty seven. Within three years, the Franco Prussian
Speaker 2: War broke out and the Diesel family said we need
Speaker 2: to get out of France. Let's move to London, and
Speaker 2: they did, and the whole family took a downward turn
Speaker 2: from there.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, I get the idea that it was
Speaker 4: just sort of moved uprooted and moved to a new
Speaker 4: country and had a lot of time getting good work
Speaker 4: because their family did not live well there, thankfully at
Speaker 4: least for Rudolph. A few months after getting there, he
Speaker 4: was twelve at the time and uncle said, come back
Speaker 4: to Germany, come back to Ausburg, live with us. Your
Speaker 4: uncle here, Christophe Barnacle, will help pay for your schooling.
Speaker 4: He enrolled at the Royal County Trade School for three
Speaker 4: years while his family stayed in London. So when he
Speaker 4: graduated in eighteen sixty five, his dad said, hey, need
Speaker 4: you to come back to London and get some get
Speaker 4: a job and help us out, like your schooling is over.
Speaker 4: Rudolph said nine, I'm gonna stay here. I want to
Speaker 4: be an engineer, which means I need to keep going
Speaker 4: to school. So he denied his father and enrolled at
Speaker 4: the Technicia Hochschuler Munschen there in what we call Munich, Germany.
Speaker 4: He got a scholarship to go there and very the
Speaker 4: word I'm looking for when something happens, it's very important
Speaker 4: and auspicious.
Speaker 2: No, resolute, No.
Speaker 4: Not that sort of the opposite of coincidence. Uh, purposefully yeah, yeah, perpendicularly,
Speaker 4: just very importantly. There, I will say, met one Carl
Speaker 4: von Linda, who would be his a big person in
Speaker 4: his life, his employer at one point, and a mentor
Speaker 4: and friend.
Speaker 2: I get what you're trying to say. I can't think
Speaker 2: of the word either, kind of like.
Speaker 3: Auspiciously, like auspicious as fate would have it. No, it
Speaker 3: is auspicious, right, predetermination, predestination someone I know, this is
Speaker 3: the kind of stuff people like.
Speaker 2: I'm like, I like stuff, you should know, but there's
Speaker 2: a lot that I don't like about it too. You know.
Speaker 4: Where I was leading with that was from that point
Speaker 4: where he met von Linda and was in school he
Speaker 4: became fascinated by another proprietary epic engine, the steam engine
Speaker 4: invented by Danny Steam.
Speaker 2: Right. No, he came across the Carnov cycle, Right, Wasn't
Speaker 2: that another thing that really kind of struck him floated
Speaker 2: his boat?
Speaker 4: Yeah, besides Danny Steam's invention.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, the Carno cycle is this It is a
Speaker 2: theoretical engine external combustion engine that where every bit of
Speaker 2: energy put into it produces work, so it's one hundred
Speaker 2: percent efficient. It's essentially impossible, but it's theoretically possible. And
Speaker 2: that combined with auto's internal combustion engine, really kind of
Speaker 2: came together to give Rudolph Diesel like his his purpose
Speaker 2: in life, his mission in life. And then, like you said,
Speaker 2: when he fortuitously met Carl von Linz.
Speaker 4: The word yeah.
Speaker 2: Everything came together because now he had a mentor of Haron,
Speaker 2: a guy who gave him a job right out of
Speaker 2: right out of school. And when you take like the
Speaker 2: fact that his family was using their luggage in London
Speaker 2: as the furniture in their house, and his aunt and
Speaker 2: uncle came a call in and said, let's just pluck
Speaker 2: you out of this situation and put you on the
Speaker 2: road to your destiny. And then you're going to go
Speaker 2: forth and change the world. Literally, your invention is going
Speaker 2: to fuel the Second Industrial Revolution and put us where
Speaker 2: humans are today. You can largely thank Rudolph Diesel in
Speaker 2: his invention for that. It's it's just mind boggling the
Speaker 2: series of events that happened to do that, and the
Speaker 2: effect that it had on the world.
Speaker 1: No.
Speaker 4: Absolutely. He moved back to Paris eventually in eighteen eighty
Speaker 4: and like you said, he went to work for Carl
Speaker 4: von Linde. I think it said Linda and I had.
Speaker 2: I just imagine him being like a seventies mom.
Speaker 4: I think German. It wouldn't be lend I think it
Speaker 4: would be lind like with Ah at the end.
Speaker 2: Sure, but I don't know about Linda.
Speaker 4: You know, like Linda's bagels. He worked for for Lynd
Speaker 4: as an ice guy. He had a ice machine company,
Speaker 4: and he was all kinds of things. He was an
Speaker 4: apprentice for a little while. He eventually became a salesperson
Speaker 4: over this decade that he worked for him. But one
Speaker 4: of the other cool facts, and this is the Jeopardy question,
Speaker 4: maybe one of them. Ye, it's like, what other famous
Speaker 4: thing did Rudolph Diesel invent? He invented and got a
Speaker 4: patent for the ice cube.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. I was like when I saw that, I
Speaker 2: was like, well, wait, does that mean he invented the
Speaker 2: ice cube? Yes, Indeed, Rudolph Diesel, the inventor of the
Speaker 2: Diesel engine, also invented the ice cube.
Speaker 4: Yeah, which I guess is the means of I mean
Speaker 4: maybe they just never thought of freezing ice in cubes before.
Speaker 2: I guess. But think about it, Chuck, we would be
Speaker 2: lacking one quarter of NWA had Theodore Diesel not come
Speaker 2: along or Rudolph Diesel not come along.
Speaker 4: That's a good point.
Speaker 2: So he graduated like like we kind of put the
Speaker 2: car in front of the horse. But he graduated and
Speaker 2: went on to get that job with Linda Carl von Linda.
Speaker 2: But when he did graduate from school, he had the
Speaker 2: highest grades in the history of the entire school. One
Speaker 2: of the reasons why he was a very serious student.
Speaker 2: He was not some even though he was well taken
Speaker 2: care of and funded. He was you know, when he
Speaker 2: had a scholarship, he worked his tail off and took
Speaker 2: his his his studies very seriously. So this kid was
Speaker 2: like he was pretty put together for you know, his age,
Speaker 2: for sure.
Speaker 4: Yeah, absolutely, So, you know I said he worked there
Speaker 4: for a decade. Within that decade, for about six or
Speaker 4: seven years of it, he after inventing the ice cube,
Speaker 4: which would help found n w A and I guess
Speaker 4: prevent from just being tea.
Speaker 2: Right, or hot tea sure, or even tepid ta.
Speaker 4: Right, tepid t. That's that's your refer name.
Speaker 2: Reallypid t.
Speaker 4: Yeah, neither hot nor cold.
Speaker 2: You have to say it like you're slightly annoying, tepid tea.
Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly. He started working on engines again, this this
Speaker 4: idea popped back into his head, this memory of the
Speaker 4: Carno cycle of like, gosh, there's got to be a
Speaker 4: way to make Danny Steam's engine more efficient. And for
Speaker 4: about six or seven years he worked on and trying
Speaker 4: to develop an ammonia powered heat engine. Ammonia was too volatile,
Speaker 4: so he eventually ends up back in Berlin with his
Speaker 4: By this time he had a wife, Martha and three
Speaker 4: children and started working like in Earnest on the internal
Speaker 4: combustion engine and I believe filed a patent in eighteen
Speaker 4: ninety two.
Speaker 2: Uh yeah, I feel like we should take a break
Speaker 2: and then come back and talk about like, you know,
Speaker 2: how what what? Like this guy wasn't working in a vacuum,
Speaker 2: so what environment? What world he was working? And when
Speaker 2: he was trying to come up with his diesel engine.
Speaker 4: All right, let's do it.
Speaker 1: Stop you know, stop stop stop here? Should know no
Speaker 1: stop you know stop stop stop here? Shouldn't know stuff?
Speaker 1: You should know as w s K.
Speaker 2: You should know, so, Chuck. I found a BBC article
Speaker 2: that kind of put the stakes out there pretty well
Speaker 2: about what was driving in part Rudolph Diesel's obsession with
Speaker 2: creating a super efficient engine. And one of the things
Speaker 2: they said was that there was a ton of horses.
Speaker 2: I think they said in a city of five hundred
Speaker 2: thousand people, there were probably one hundred thousand horses, and
Speaker 2: all of them were walking around, pooping and peeing everywhere,
Speaker 2: all over the place. So an alternative to horse power
Speaker 2: was very desirable, and we already had steam power, but
Speaker 2: steam power had its own thing going on, and in
Speaker 2: one way, one of the big weaknesses of steam powers
Speaker 2: that it required tons and tons and tons of coal,
Speaker 2: because you use coal to heat a boiler, to boil
Speaker 2: water to create steam to run a piston, and then
Speaker 2: the piston turns the chemical energy of the coal into
Speaker 2: the mechanical work that turns something or makes something go
Speaker 2: up and down or does whatever. Probably has something to
Speaker 2: do with gears. I don't get it, but there was
Speaker 2: already back in the eighteen sixties a book by a
Speaker 2: guy named Stanley Jevin or Jivaon called The Coal Question,
Speaker 2: and this guy was already warning about peak coal, essentially
Speaker 2: pointing out like coal is a non renewable resource everybody,
Speaker 2: and we are using it really really fast. This guy
Speaker 2: was already ringing the alarm about it. Rudolph Diesel was
Speaker 2: exactly the kind of person who this whose ear was
Speaker 2: out for this kind of thing. So in addition to
Speaker 2: replacing the really inefficient steam engine, in addition to replacing
Speaker 2: like letting the horses go retire and be put out
Speaker 2: to pasture, and then also about you know, coming up
Speaker 2: with something that doesn't use coal, all of these things
Speaker 2: came together to kind of give him this mission in
Speaker 2: this drive.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Absolutely. He went back idea wise, at least to
Speaker 4: the auto engine again an internal combustion engine, but auto's
Speaker 4: engine used a spark, like you know, a spark plug
Speaker 4: to ignite the fuel, and Diesel still thought, there's got
Speaker 4: to be a better way. I don't think we need
Speaker 4: that spark. I think we can use highly compressed air
Speaker 4: that gets so compressed and so hot it will ignite,
Speaker 4: and ended up sort of using this idea from a
Speaker 4: tinder box that he saw that was a base a
Speaker 4: sparkless way to ignite tender and it was like a
Speaker 4: sort of like a syringe. It was larger, it was
Speaker 4: about the size of a like a bicycle pump, but
Speaker 4: like a glass syringe that compressed air such that it
Speaker 4: would eventually provide that ignition. And he was like, hey,
Speaker 4: if it works there, it could work in an engine.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And the genius of all this is so again,
Speaker 2: steam engines are powering the industrial revolution. They've done their thing,
Speaker 2: They've completely changed the world. But again, they're really inefficient.
Speaker 2: I think they're about ten percent efficient. So ninety percent
Speaker 2: of the energy in the coal is lost to heat
Speaker 2: to the environment, only ten percent.
Speaker 4: Terrible.
Speaker 2: Actually, yeah, it's really really inefficient. And so one of
Speaker 2: the geniuses of an internal combustion engine in the first place,
Speaker 2: but also specifically Diesel's engine is it says, what if
Speaker 2: we just got rid of all the stuff that led
Speaker 2: up to that piston moving and just like make the
Speaker 2: engine that piston. If you compress air enough, you're compressing
Speaker 2: the molecules really tightly, really quickly. It causes them to
Speaker 2: become excited, which causes them to put off heat, and
Speaker 2: if you compress it enough, it produces enough heat that
Speaker 2: it can ignite fuel in that piston. Causing the piston
Speaker 2: to move up and down. And that's ultimately what you're
Speaker 2: after is making that piston move up and down. So
Speaker 2: he got rid of all that stuff, the piles of coal,
Speaker 2: the big boiler full of steam, the steam itself, and
Speaker 2: took the whole the whole process right to the piston itself.
Speaker 2: And it worked really, really well.
Speaker 4: It turned out, yeah, eventually, And you know, we should
Speaker 4: probably talk a little bit about his big idea with this.
Speaker 4: It wasn't just he had. He had other drives besides
Speaker 4: making an engine that worked more efficiently. He was he
Speaker 4: had this idea of helping the common person. And uh,
Speaker 4: you know, while while Danny Steam's invention may have powered
Speaker 4: the industrial Revolution, what what did it do for the
Speaker 4: artisan in the countryside, or the craftsmen or the small
Speaker 4: business person. And I think I can build an engine
Speaker 4: that's small enough, that runs on cheap fuel, that doesn't
Speaker 4: require much, if any maintenance if you're kind of keeping
Speaker 4: up with it, or you know, repair as long as
Speaker 4: you're maintaining it. Rather that it can revitalize the countryside
Speaker 4: and make people in rural areas give them the same
Speaker 4: sort of chance to succeed by having the power of
Speaker 4: an engine at their disposal.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, because those steam engines were so big and
Speaker 2: required so much labor, they just sucked people from the
Speaker 2: countryside and consolidated them in the cities. And he wanted
Speaker 2: to do the opposite. And so if you have a light, portable,
Speaker 2: efficient engine that people in the rural areas can use, yeah,
Speaker 2: like you said, it give them put them on equal
Speaker 2: footing with the industrialists of the city. But also you
Speaker 2: mentioned cheap fuel too. One of his dreams was to
Speaker 2: make his diesel engine run on vegetable oil. Essentially biodiesel
Speaker 2: is essentially what he was trying to do, and it
Speaker 2: was a viable idea for a really long time, basically
Speaker 2: the entire time he was alive. And that would have
Speaker 2: really given people in rural areas a leg up because
Speaker 2: they could have grown their own fuel to power the
Speaker 2: engines that they had at their disposal to run their
Speaker 2: arts and crafts fares.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so he had big ideas he filed his patent,
Speaker 4: he went to try and get funding, a lot of
Speaker 4: skepticism obviously in the financial marketplace at the time, and
Speaker 4: he got a couple of guys, Heinrich von Butz and
Speaker 4: Friedrich Krup to give him some money. Von Botz, for
Speaker 4: his part, was a managing director at Machine Fabric Alsberg
Speaker 4: and also said, hey, you can take some of my
Speaker 4: factory space to work on this stuff. So Rudolph moved
Speaker 4: to Alsberg in eighteen ninety three started working on this
Speaker 4: engine with that sort of tinderbox idea in mind. And
Speaker 4: the one thing he couldn't figure out. He was like, a, no,
Speaker 4: compressing air can ignite this thing, but I just don't
Speaker 4: know how much pressure I'm gonna need. And for a
Speaker 4: little while it got a little dangerous in that machine shop.
Speaker 2: Yeah there, I guess. There was no way to work
Speaker 2: it out on paper. First. He had to figure it
Speaker 2: out like in real.
Speaker 4: Life by compressing air.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's essentially adding some combustible fluid to or fuel
Speaker 2: to it. So he did that. His first working prototype
Speaker 2: he demonstrated in the lab. I don't even know if
Speaker 2: it was demonstration. I think they just tried it the
Speaker 2: first time and the it compressed air so much I guess,
Speaker 2: and produced so much heat that the engine blew up
Speaker 2: and like you said, blue throughout the lab like pieces
Speaker 2: of the engine went flying. But when like you can
Speaker 2: just imagine in the movie, like they rise up from
Speaker 2: behind like some big crate and everybody's hair standing on
Speaker 2: and there's smoke coming off of there. He's like it worked.
Speaker 2: In that he proved that if you compressed air you
Speaker 2: could create he ate enough heat to ignite something. You
Speaker 2: didn't need a spark, you didn't need coal or a boiler.
Speaker 2: You like, his engine could work and it had just
Speaker 2: been proven.
Speaker 4: Yeah, for sure. The second one went much better. It
Speaker 4: did not explode. The third one was the big sort
Speaker 4: of moment when the bell rang, it ran on kerosene.
Speaker 4: He was thirty nine years old, which is pretty incredible
Speaker 4: to think about, and felt comfortable enough to do a
Speaker 4: public test on February seventeenth, eighteen ninety seven, in front
Speaker 4: of an audience there at the Machine Fabric Factory for
Speaker 4: the employees and engineers. A few other firms were there,
Speaker 4: and it was a really big, big success. And he
Speaker 4: in that he achieved not only a working engine, but
Speaker 4: it was had a basically invisible and almost odorless exhaust
Speaker 4: and reached an efficiency of twenty six point two percent
Speaker 4: compared with Danny Steams measly ten percent.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you're like, well that's you know, not that
Speaker 2: much better. That is a mind boggling improvement in efficiency
Speaker 2: over the existing technology that was just out of the gate.
Speaker 2: It was revolutionary. And like you said, I think Friedrich Krup.
Speaker 2: Is that how you pronounced his last name? Yeah, he
Speaker 2: was an early investor, And I was like, that name
Speaker 2: sounds very familiar. And I went and looked him up
Speaker 2: on Wikipedia, in honor of my reformed view of Wikipedia,
Speaker 2: and I found out that it was, in fact who
Speaker 2: I've been calling Krupp, the same Krupper Krup family that
Speaker 2: gave rise to the Tyson Krup International mega conglomerate from Europe.
Speaker 2: It might be okay, so Tyson Krup, you're familiar with
Speaker 2: that company, right, They're just enormous?
Speaker 4: Sure?
Speaker 2: Two, Yeah, that's right. And so I was reading a
Speaker 2: little bit about Friedrich Croup on Wikipedia and little known
Speaker 2: fact he used to write a giraffe everywhere he went.
Speaker 4: As you do. I have a few quotes if I may,
Speaker 4: because it's really hard to overstate, like you were saying,
Speaker 4: what a leap forward this was in technology. One of
Speaker 4: his biographers, a man named It's last name is a Brunt,
Speaker 4: said it was the most disruptive technology in history. Winston
Speaker 4: Churchill called it the most perfect maritime masterpiece of the century.
Speaker 4: And if you're wondering what maritime has to do with it,
Speaker 4: we'll get to that. And then no less than Edison
Speaker 4: said it was one of the greatest achievements of mankind.
Speaker 4: So that's how big of a deal the diesel engine was.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And again, so Rudolph is like, like, this is happening,
Speaker 2: Like I'm making this happen like this, the people in
Speaker 2: the country, in the rural countryside are going to be saved,
Speaker 2: Like this whole industrialization thing is going to be reversed
Speaker 2: and kind of mellowed out and smooth dover, and the
Speaker 2: world's going to be saved, essentially. And it just did
Speaker 2: not quite go that way. I mean, just the very
Speaker 2: fact that he had wincient triciall weighing in on how
Speaker 2: great it was kind of gives you an indication that
Speaker 2: it did not go the way that he wanted.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Well, one thing that did go the way he
Speaker 4: wanted was he made a ton of money off this thing.
Speaker 4: Once he had a working prototype, people started literally lining
Speaker 4: up to get a license for this thing, just a
Speaker 4: license to build it. Like they had to figure out
Speaker 4: how to build it and how to mass produce it
Speaker 4: and everything. But he ended up selling twenty two different
Speaker 4: licenses over a two year period in eighteen ninety seven
Speaker 4: and eighteen ninety eight alone to people like Watson and
Speaker 4: Yarn and Yarien in Scotland. Augustus Bush bought the United
Speaker 4: States and Canadian license for what would be nine million
Speaker 4: dollars today, basically fiat in Italy, like people are buying
Speaker 4: licenses hand over fist basically. And eventually he would even
Speaker 4: sell all of his rights and patents to the General
Speaker 4: Diesel Company for three and a half million marks. And
Speaker 4: I tried to convert that to US dollars in twenty
Speaker 4: twenty four.
Speaker 2: What did you get?
Speaker 4: Did you try?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 4: What did you get?
Speaker 2: I got eleven and a half million US dollars today?
Speaker 4: Oh boy, I got three hundred and fifty million dollars.
Speaker 2: Well, I don't know, you could be right. I went
Speaker 2: to a German inflation calculator first and converted three and
Speaker 2: a half million marks from eighteen ninety eight to two
Speaker 2: twenty three or twenty four dollars.
Speaker 4: Marks and then all the euros now though.
Speaker 2: Right, But there was a selection you could chase convert
Speaker 2: it to euros or Marx Deutsche marks.
Speaker 4: Oh okay, and I clicked deutsch marks.
Speaker 2: I'm almost positive. And then I took that and exchanged
Speaker 2: at today's rate for US dollars. That's how I came
Speaker 2: up with it. But I mean, you know, me and math,
Speaker 2: you're proud wrecking buttons and stuff like that. I'm not
Speaker 2: that good.
Speaker 4: No, I think your methodology was better. What I did
Speaker 4: was I went back to see what the Deutsche mark
Speaker 4: to the US dollar was in nineteen or in eighteen ninety.
Speaker 2: Eight, and pulled a few economists.
Speaker 4: I converted that to US dollars front to eighteen ninety
Speaker 4: eight US dollars and then did a calculation. So that's
Speaker 4: probably that's good, the wrong methodology, but.
Speaker 2: I mean it's crazy that they would be so wildly,
Speaker 2: so wildly off. So what was yours? Like three hundred million? Yeah,
Speaker 2: and mine was like eleven year. Let's split the difference
Speaker 2: and saved about one hundred and sixty million marks or
Speaker 2: US dollars today.
Speaker 4: Well, I think your I think your methodology is better.
Speaker 4: But either way, he made a lot of money off
Speaker 4: of this thing. It ran off of, like you said,
Speaker 4: potentially vegetable oil. But you know, kerosene, peanut oil, all
Speaker 4: kinds of things, and it was or could have been
Speaker 4: a boon to the you know, this big idea that
Speaker 4: he had of the people in the countryside, had it
Speaker 4: not been for the Yeah.
Speaker 2: So, one of the things that all of these international
Speaker 2: companies who had licensed the right to make diesel engines
Speaker 2: were supposed to do was, as they were developing their
Speaker 2: own versions, any technological breakthroughs were supposed to be shared
Speaker 2: with all the other licensees, So the diesel engine itself
Speaker 2: would be cooperatively developed internationally, kind of like a human
Speaker 2: undertaking among the global community. And I guess that worked
Speaker 2: for a little while. But then, like you said, when
Speaker 2: the First World War started to come around, intentions rose.
Speaker 2: The diesel engine came to be the center of an
Speaker 2: arms race between the UK and Germany. And despite being
Speaker 2: German of German heritage, a German citizen, having created the
Speaker 2: diesel engine in Germany, Rudolph Diesel was not a fan
Speaker 2: of the Kaiser, was not a fan of the ultranationalism
Speaker 2: that was starting to develop in Germany that helped lead
Speaker 2: the world to World War One. And he's like, I
Speaker 2: kind of like the UK and where they're coming from
Speaker 2: these days, I'm going to move there and actually helped
Speaker 2: them with their arms race to create the diesel engines
Speaker 2: that will be used to power this new scary technology
Speaker 2: called submarines.
Speaker 4: Yeah. In nineteen twelve he co founded the Consolidated Diesel
Speaker 4: Engine Company with a British engineer named George Correll's and
Speaker 4: the submarine. And that's why Churchill said it's the most
Speaker 4: perfect maritime masterpiece of the century. Is all of a sudden,
Speaker 4: you had submarines that didn't require tons and tons of
Speaker 4: coal on board, tons and tons of soldiers to shovel
Speaker 4: that coal, these big dangerous coal ovens. You had this
Speaker 4: like super efficient engine inside this thing. It was like
Speaker 4: it totally revolutionized how submarines operated and thus how the
Speaker 4: war went.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I looked up George Correll's too on Wikipedia, and
Speaker 2: apparently he was known to giggle like a schoolgirl at
Speaker 2: dirty jokes. Really no, no, I'm making a comment on
Speaker 2: wikiped but I'm just kidding.
Speaker 4: Crap.
Speaker 2: I'm sorry. It wasn't intended to mislead you. I I
Speaker 2: it was really a targeted It was targeted at Wikipedia.
Speaker 1: Well.
Speaker 4: Part of the reason that always works is because you're
Speaker 4: so good at digging up these arcane facts. So I
Speaker 4: tend to just be like, holy cow, listen to that.
Speaker 2: Wow, that's really something. Giggled like a school girl.
Speaker 4: You say, I just got joshed.
Speaker 2: I'm sorry. You got caught in the drag net, is
Speaker 2: what it was.
Speaker 4: So, uh, should we take another break?
Speaker 2: Sure?
Speaker 4: All right, let's take another break. We'll talk a little
Speaker 4: bit more about diesel.
Speaker 1: Stop you know, stop stood stop here? Shouldn't know no,
Speaker 1: stop you know stop stood stop here, shouldn't know stop
Speaker 1: you should know as why why.
Speaker 3: Sk sk?
Speaker 2: But tough he should know.
Speaker 4: So while all this is happening, I mentioned that he
Speaker 4: got married and had three kids. They were all in
Speaker 4: Berlin together in eighteen ninety. But when he moved to Alsberg,
Speaker 4: like I said, to develop this engine, he left his
Speaker 4: family behind for five years. Then the family moved to Munich,
Speaker 4: and then finally he said, you know, we got to
Speaker 4: reunite the family. I'm going to build my magnificent, most
Speaker 4: magnificent idea. Aside from that engine, sure will be this
Speaker 4: mansion from architect Max Littman. And it was. It was
Speaker 4: quite a mansion. And in fact, even though he had
Speaker 4: a lot of money, the way things turned out with
Speaker 4: him financially, I dare say that he overdid it a bit.
Speaker 2: There was a bike track, indoor bike track for his kids.
Speaker 2: I mean state of the arts stuff. One, yeah, two, three, four.
Speaker 2: Five bathrooms a lot for back then for sure. And
Speaker 2: I'm not talking out houses, I mean bathroom.
Speaker 4: I mean I don't have five bathrooms in his twenty
Speaker 4: twenty four.
Speaker 2: There was a staff. It's not that impressive because everybody
Speaker 2: had a staff back then.
Speaker 4: Right, Yeah, I don't have a staff.
Speaker 2: But still it was like it was a big deal.
Speaker 2: And not only was it a beautiful, amazing, advanced mansion
Speaker 2: that he helped design, this put a inder, a punctuation
Speaker 2: mark on years of living away from his family in
Speaker 2: different countries, like dedicating his life to this diesel engine
Speaker 2: and taking good care of them for what I could understand,
Speaker 2: but not being a part of the family. He was
Speaker 2: a part of creating the diesel engine. And so by
Speaker 2: building this mansion, he was coming back home, coming back
Speaker 2: to his family and starting a new chapter, restarting an
Speaker 2: important chapter of his life.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but it was a chapter marked by some poor health.
Speaker 4: I saw that he got migraines, suffered from migraines, gout.
Speaker 4: I know that he dropped a ton of money on
Speaker 4: this mansion. I don't think that ruined him or anything.
Speaker 4: But he also made some bad financial investments apparently, and
Speaker 4: they're kind of conflicting stories about how bad off the
Speaker 4: family was. But as we'll see in the end, it
Speaker 4: turns out that they weren't doing so great in the
Speaker 4: financial department after all.
Speaker 2: No, I saw it. Yeah, I saw a lot of
Speaker 2: his early engines did not work very well. They weren't reliable,
Speaker 2: and so there was a lot of customers that wanted
Speaker 2: their money back initially. So, like you said, there's a
Speaker 2: big debate over just how bad off they were in
Speaker 2: Douglas Brunt, one of his recent biographers from twenty twenty
Speaker 2: four is at odds with a biographer from the seventies
Speaker 2: named John Frederick Moon. Moons like he was destitute and desperate.
Speaker 2: This guy was in dire financial streets. Douglas Brunt, who
Speaker 2: again wrote much more recently forty years, six fifty years
Speaker 2: more recently, good God, he was like, No, actually, I
Speaker 2: think that this was like an eighteen nineties phase and
Speaker 2: that you know, after the turn of the century, started
Speaker 2: to make his money back again, and that he was
Speaker 2: on okay financial footing.
Speaker 4: Yeah, he was still really wrapped up in this this
Speaker 4: big idea of you know, saving the common person. In
Speaker 4: nineteen oh three, he wrote a book called or published
Speaker 4: one and at least in nineteen oh three called Solidarity
Speaker 4: Colon even back then the Rational Economic Salvation of mankind
Speaker 4: when he talked about, you know, sort of this basically
Speaker 4: socialist ideas that he you know, of of the class
Speaker 4: division being you know, not not a good thing. And
Speaker 4: unfortunately nobody I don't think it was a very good book.
Speaker 4: No one really read it much.
Speaker 2: No tell him what that wonder seems like?
Speaker 4: I said, Yeah, there was one review that called it
Speaker 4: a real pain to read.
Speaker 2: That's not a glowing review, No know what you're looking for.
Speaker 2: But in writing that book in conjunction with Create the
Speaker 2: Diesel Engine, he was quoted as having said that he
Speaker 2: solved the social question like he's like, here's the engine,
Speaker 2: here's what we're trying to do. I basically just saved
Speaker 2: the world. And he said that he was able to
Speaker 2: do what all the nations combined were unable to throw
Speaker 2: out the Rockefellers, and it just did not happen that way.
Speaker 2: As a matter of fact, when did he publish.
Speaker 4: That book nineteen oh three, nineteen oh three.
Speaker 2: Over the next ten years, he was still in a
Speaker 2: position and his engine was still in a position that
Speaker 2: it wasn't entirely clear which way it was going to go.
Speaker 2: It wasn't World War one fully yet, it was just
Speaker 2: the very beginning of it. I think there was still
Speaker 2: a really good chance that diesel engines would run on
Speaker 2: vegetable oil. It was very much up in the air.
Speaker 2: And in September of nineteen thirteen September twenty ninth, I
Speaker 2: believe he went on a fateful trip more than a
Speaker 2: three hour toer, but it was it's not that much,
Speaker 2: more like less than twenty four hours, I think, to
Speaker 2: go do a groundbreaking of the company that he co
Speaker 2: founded with George Carrell's.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I got a named Alfred Laucom, who was another
Speaker 4: engineer who was a pal of theirs. And a few
Speaker 4: days before this, we should mention that he right before
Speaker 4: he went on this trip, he gave his wife a
Speaker 4: brand new overnight bag and said, here's this bag, don't
Speaker 4: open it until next week. Very mysterious thing to do.
Speaker 4: But he went to Ghent and got on the S. S.
Speaker 4: Dresden on the twenty ninth with those three other two guys,
Speaker 4: had dinner with them. Seemed like they had a good
Speaker 4: time and they were all in good spirits. Then he
Speaker 4: was like, all right, dinner's over. I'm gonna go to bed,
Speaker 4: and he was never seen again. No.
Speaker 2: The next morning, his companions, George Carrell's and Alfred they
Speaker 2: went to go rouse him and say hey, let's party
Speaker 2: this morning, and he didn't answer. So they went in
Speaker 2: his room. His bed was not slept in, His nightclothes
Speaker 2: were laid out on the bed, his travel bag was there,
Speaker 2: his watch was on his travel bag, and he was
Speaker 2: just nowhere to be found. So they informed the captain
Speaker 2: who had the ship searched, and in short order they
Speaker 2: found his coat and hat on deck near a railing,
Speaker 2: and his coat had been neatly folded. Just not a
Speaker 2: good sign. And when they made land in London, he
Speaker 2: was just not there. He was no longer on the ship.
Speaker 2: At some point somewhere in the English Channel, almost to
Speaker 2: the North Sea, Rudolph Diesel just vanished off the SS Dresden.
Speaker 4: That's right. And what was in that leather bag that
Speaker 4: he gave his wife.
Speaker 2: Twenty thousand German marks. No idea how much that is
Speaker 2: in today's US dollars, but it was a significant amount
Speaker 2: of money.
Speaker 4: Let's say there was a lot of money. And there
Speaker 4: were also financial records basically showing that they were broke.
Speaker 4: So that sort of seen, at least at this point
Speaker 4: in his life, puts to rest the question that they
Speaker 4: were financial troubles. Yeah, so you know, here's some money,
Speaker 4: but our accounts are empty. The disappearance was a very
Speaker 4: big deal, obviously, and right away because he had made
Speaker 4: a lot of enemies. The Kaiser Wilhelm did not like him.
Speaker 4: John D. Rockefeller did not like him, and there were,
Speaker 4: you know, people saying like, could one of them had
Speaker 4: him killed? Is it foul play? Was it just an accident?
Speaker 4: Was it a suicide? Like no one, no one knew
Speaker 4: and seemingly no one knows for sure, even though most
Speaker 4: people agreed that it was suicide.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the folded coat kind of says something that it
Speaker 2: wasn't just falling overboard. That kind of goes away with
Speaker 2: that one. And that was the initial one too, because
Speaker 2: he had he had been said to have been in
Speaker 2: high spirits. George Carrell said that after dinner, as they
Speaker 2: walked some. They walked him back to his state room.
Speaker 2: He said, I'll see you tomorrow. Yeah, another evidence or
Speaker 2: another bit against the idea that it was suicide. His watch,
Speaker 2: like I said, it was set on his bag, but
Speaker 2: it was laid out in such a way that he
Speaker 2: could see what time it was when he would be
Speaker 2: laying down in bed. Not something you do.
Speaker 4: You don't drop up your watch.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like you don't really go to that trouble if
Speaker 2: you don't think that. If you think like I'm going
Speaker 2: to at my life in a couple hours, that doesn't matter.
Speaker 2: And then George Crels also told The New York Times
Speaker 2: that he did that Rudolph did not suffer from giddiness.
Speaker 2: I guess that means that he would not have answered
Speaker 2: the call of the void, is what he was saying.
Speaker 4: Yeah, this whole idea of murder, none of it really
Speaker 4: holds up to scrutiny when you investigate either the fact
Speaker 4: that the Germans came after him because he didn't help
Speaker 4: them build, you know, their engines for the submarines for
Speaker 4: the war, or Rockefeller. So those generally don't hold up
Speaker 4: when you look into him more closely. And like I said,
Speaker 4: most people say it was suicide, but they're the the
Speaker 4: what was his first name, Brent's name, Douglas Douglas Brunt,
Speaker 4: who wrote the Maurice biography as a theory that he
Speaker 4: did not die at all and that he was it
Speaker 4: was sort of faked, basically by the British, and he
Speaker 4: was shuttled away to Canada where he could continue working
Speaker 4: on these engines for the war.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there was a New York Times article in nineteen
Speaker 2: fourteen that said as much that he'd been rumored to
Speaker 2: be working in Canada. That is probably not true because
Speaker 2: about eleven days, I think eleven days after he went missing,
Speaker 2: a body washed up. So okay, it depends on who
Speaker 2: you ask me or Chuck. It turns out his body
Speaker 2: that turned up at the mouth of a Dutch river
Speaker 2: and was taken ashore and taken into town and was
Speaker 2: identified or viewed by one of his sons as almost
Speaker 2: certainly his dad, but not a positive identification because it
Speaker 2: was too decomposed.
Speaker 4: Or I don't think the Dutch river part is debated.
Speaker 2: Oh, I thought it was. I thought they were out
Speaker 2: to sea.
Speaker 4: No, no, no, I saw everywhere I saw. It was
Speaker 4: at the mouth of a Dutch River. He was just
Speaker 4: pulled out of the water. But I saw in a
Speaker 4: lot of places, including the Brunt's biography, that the body
Speaker 4: was returned to the water because it was just so
Speaker 4: unrecognizable and you know, rotted by that point, which is
Speaker 4: really gross that they put the body back in the
Speaker 4: sea but kept the belongings that he had. That I
Speaker 4: saw also disputed. I saw that there were everything from
Speaker 4: glasses case to a pocket, pin knife to a pillbox,
Speaker 4: and I even saw one say that was an ID
Speaker 4: card recovered. I don't think that's true, because that's literal
Speaker 4: positive identification unless it's you know, planted on somebody to
Speaker 4: make it seem like a suicide. Other most places I
Speaker 4: saw didn't mention an ID card, but they did say
Speaker 4: that the sun identified the items and said, yeah, those
Speaker 4: are my Debt's things.
Speaker 2: And then mysteriously among his possessions was found the tooth
Speaker 2: of a giraffe.
Speaker 4: I don't believe that.
Speaker 2: Good, You're like, no, that's the one truth, right, So,
Speaker 2: I mean that's no one knows what happened to him.
Speaker 2: There's no solution to that puzzle. Yeah, I'm going with
Speaker 2: that was his body, you think, Yeah, suicide probably everything
Speaker 2: I saw was that he was in dire financial straits.
Speaker 2: And I mean plenty of people have died by suicide
Speaker 2: for that reason. Sure, so it's it's entirely possible. I
Speaker 2: don't know enough to be like, yep, that's it, but
Speaker 2: that's probably where I lean.
Speaker 4: I would say, well, regardless of what happened, the you know,
Speaker 4: the invention of that engine was h you know, you
Speaker 4: heard the quotes that changed the history of the world
Speaker 4: in a lot of ways and such that it just
Speaker 4: a cup years ago. In twenty twenty two, a full
Speaker 4: ninety six percent of trucks in the EU run on
Speaker 4: diesel engines. And here in America it's a little bit
Speaker 4: different because we've been had a love hate relationship with
Speaker 4: diesel over the years as far as trying to phase
Speaker 4: it out or other people saying, no, it's a superior fuel,
Speaker 4: But about twenty three percent of fuel in the US
Speaker 4: is diesel fuel still.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And the reason why people say it's superior is
Speaker 2: because even though there's more CO two, there's more carbon
Speaker 2: in diesel fuel. Diesel burns more efficiently than gas, so
Speaker 2: it actually releases less CO two than gas does, even
Speaker 2: though there's more CO two. And diesel because less is
Speaker 2: burned over the course of say fifty miles or something
Speaker 2: like that. So it's true, but still it does it
Speaker 2: is a polluter. If you're trying to get away from
Speaker 2: fossil fuels, diesels included in there too.
Speaker 4: I remember having a couple of friends back in the
Speaker 4: day that had like a hand me down old you know,
Speaker 4: seventies Mercedes Benz Diesel from their parents or something or
Speaker 4: their grandpa grandpa died and they got one of those
Speaker 4: you know, chuggy engines. I just remember they were very
Speaker 4: loud and it seemed like they just did nothing but
Speaker 4: spew black smokes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I know, the diesel smoke is just so noxious too.
Speaker 4: It seemed like it. I mean, maybe they were old
Speaker 4: cars or not running right. I have no idea, but
Speaker 4: that's sort of my only memory of diesel engines.
Speaker 2: No, I'm with you, Yeah, they're still like that. If
Speaker 2: you want to know more about Diesel and his engine,
Speaker 2: then just go read Douglas Brunt's book on it. And
Speaker 2: since I mentioned Douglas Brunt for the one last time,
Speaker 2: it's time for listener maw.
Speaker 4: I'm gonna call this Harvard follow up with the old
Speaker 4: Puritans episode. Hey guys, in your recent episode of Puritans,
Speaker 4: you mentioned the founding of Harvard. I'm a graduate of
Speaker 4: the Divinity School and learned an interesting tidbit. I believe
Speaker 4: it was in the sixties and the Divinity School had
Speaker 4: fallen on kind of hard times. Enrollment was down, wasn't
Speaker 4: attracting the best students or teachers, so Harvard had the
Speaker 4: sensible business idea of selling it off. The court declared, though,
Speaker 4: that if Harvard sold the Divinity School, the university would
Speaker 4: have to close its doors, because the original charter states
Speaker 4: at the purpose to be educating a quote learned learned
Speaker 4: clergy end quote. So if they stopped doing that, the
Speaker 4: school was no longer following its charter. Another wise choice. Later,
Speaker 4: the university doubled down at support, and some three decades
Speaker 4: or so after, it was the institution in which I
Speaker 4: spent three years on my way to a Master's of Divinity.
Speaker 4: During orientation, the dean of the school said to us,
Speaker 4: you all belong here. So either we are not as
Speaker 4: elite as you had assumed, or you were brighter than
Speaker 4: you had thought. Either way, you belong here. Welcome.
Speaker 2: What a great message.
Speaker 4: That's pretty cool. Keep up the great work guys. You
Speaker 4: are you guys are a gift in such divided and
Speaker 4: divisive times. Thanks for that. That is from Eric Wickstrom.
Speaker 2: Thanks Eric, Reverend Eric Wickstrom, Thanks Reverend reverends. That's funny
Speaker 2: that mention of how attendance was down in the sixties
Speaker 2: so much that they were going to sell the Divinity
Speaker 2: School reminded me of Reverend Lovejoy's origin story from The Simpsons,
Speaker 2: and he was saying it was the early seventies. The
Speaker 2: sixties were over and people were ready to feel bad
Speaker 2: about themselves again.
Speaker 4: So good.
Speaker 2: Yeah, if you want to be like Reverend Eric, you
Speaker 2: can email us too, especially with additional info. We didn't know.
Speaker 2: That's interesting. We love that stuff. You can send it
Speaker 2: to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
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