On February 23, 1893, a compression-ignition internal combustion engine invented by engineer Rudolf Christian Karl Diesel, a personality already known at that time in the European technical circles, was patented in Berlin.
First, he tried to invent the refrigerator
Like many others, Rudolf Diesel has made his own way in life. Born March 18, 1858, she came from a family of modest emigrants with three children. Parents left the German city of Augsburg to settle in Paris in the tumult of events in 1848.
When Rudolph arrived, the mother sent him to his relatives in Augsburg, to study there, and to go to school. From Augsburg he wrote to his mother at the age of 14 that he wanted to become an engineer.
Without any resources but hard at school, he received a merit scholarship, based on which he was able to do his work at the Polytechnic in Munich, which was later completed in Switzerland. In January 1880, he returned to Paris, where, along with his former professor Karl von Linde, he was trying to invent the refrigerator.
In 1883 she marries Martha Flasche, who is fascinated by her husband's aggressive mind, admiring him and encouraging him to devote himself to inventions. Rudolf obtains more licenses in France and Germany.
A brilliant career
A brilliant career, a happy family, who can want more? In 1890, the family, which already had three children, moved to Berlin, where the new spark ignition engine designed by Rudolf Diesel obtained license no. 67207 of February 23, 1893. Numbered, the industrialist Alfred Krupp and the MAN plants funded him for building the prototype.
The engine has been designed to work with oil residues, thus reducing operating costs. The idea of diesel was not clearly defined at that time, but its solution was quickly imposed, and the solutions were offered to specialists until 1900, when the first commercialized diesel engine was presented at the great Paris Exhibition.
This engine has a 1960 cc engine, develops a speed of 172 rpm and a power of 19.71 hp. Parameters impressed, but the engine offered at the Paris Exhibition had two major inconveniences: it produced smoke (pollutant) and produced a hard-to-accept noise.
In 1911 and 1912, Rudolf Diesel worked to improve his engine so that he no longer depended on hydrocarbons. He is trying to adapt his invention so that the engine can be fed with vegetable oils, which can have an important energy content. The solution also envisaged a particular advance of agriculture in the future.
As far as the immediate use of the patented engine is concerned, the inventor was passing over the fact that it was polluting and noisy. He successfully offered the shipbuilding industry: the inconveniences disturbed less in the case of propulsion of ships.
Tragically ending
He did not get to refine his engine to cope with roads. This task was assumed by those who followed them. In 1936, they introduced the first Mercedes-equipped Diesel engine on the market, and in 1938 Peugeot also took off its own model gate. The low fuel price has attracted customers from the start.
Rudolf Diesel had great insight into the engine he invented, but the plans were brutally interrupted by his disappearance under conditions that remained mysteriously covered today. On the night of September 29, 1913, while traveling on the Dresden ship, from Antwerp to London, the engineer disappeared from the ship.
The investigation showed that at 22:00 after dinner, he separated from the co-workers with whom he had dinner, and then asked to be awakened the next morning, at 6:00. At that time, neither the staff nor the staff found it in the cabin.
Ten days later, the crew of the Dutch coach, Coertsen, discovered in the sea of the body an unknown one, whom Rudolf Diesel's son Eugen identified with his father's objects as his father's.
Since both friends, family and experts excluded the idea of suicide, political commentators - who existed then - made countless speculations about tense relations between states around World War I, the interests of circles in England, Germany, France and more from everywhere.
The outbreak of the First World War and the heavy economic crisis that followed have cast the tide of forgetfulness over the mystery of the inexplicable disappearance of the inventor, which remains an enigma to this day.