Today, meet Rudolf Diesel. The University of
Houston's College of Engineering presents this
series about the machines that make our
civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity
created them.
Historian Linwood Bryant
writes about Rudolf Diesel. Diesel saw himself as a
scientific genius and the James Watt of the late
nineteenth century. He was vain, oversensitive, and
a little paranoid. He did not win the hearts of
other engine makers.
In 1912, twenty years after Diesel conceived his
engine, four people wrote books about its
development. Diesel wrote one and people out to
minimize his claims wrote the other three. The
seeds of the dispute, Bryant argues, were sown in
Diesel's conventional view of invention -- that a
device is first invented, then developed, and
finally improved, all in a linear sequence. Diesel
left clear records of what he did. Between 1890 and
1893 he definitely invented the engine using his
knowledge of thermodynamics. The idea of burning
fuel slowly, and at higher pressures, was certainly
his.
Diesel also worked from 1893 to 1897 at the
Augsburg Machine-Works developing a working engine.
During that time he had to do a lot more
theoretical work and invention. In his view, he was
still inventing the engine. People outside the
process saw all that as development -- the
dirty work anyone has to go through to make a good
idea into workable hardware. After 1897 Diesel
figured he was finished, and he turned to promoting
the engine. But it was still woefully unready for
the market. It needed eleven more years of
improvement. Meanwhile, Diesel worked himself into
a nervous breakdown promoting the not-yet-ready
engine.
Diesel saw his own development work as a
continuation of the inventive process (as it surely
was). But he viewed all the innovation
needed to make the engine into a commercial success
as no more than mop-up work by lesser minds. He
irritated other engine designers by sneering at
their work. He failed to see that what made his
engine viable in the marketplace was a lot of truly
inventive thinking by very good engineers.
Diesel was badly troubled by criticisms of his role
in creating the engine, and, in 1913, he vanished
from a boat to England. His body was found ten days
later. His death brought out all kinds of lurid
stories about plots to sell secrets to the British.
However, it seems pretty clear that he committed
suicide.
I have an old Diesel engine book first published in
1912 with an introduction by Diesel. In the 4th
edition, the English author ruefully says that Dr.
Diesel's friendship was "more valued than he knew."
In his introduction Diesel says he "finished
construction of the first commercially successful
motor" in 1897. Then he arrogantly asserts that few
factories are good enough to build his engines --
that second-string makers shouldn't even try.
Still, there's no denying Diesel was a visionary.
He admits, for example, that his engine
seems to threaten England's coal industry.
But, he adds, we'll soon extract our Diesel fuel
from coal tar. We now know how to do that. We don't
make much Diesel fuel from coal tar today, but we
know how to do so -- anytime we choose to.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
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