Rudolf Diesel

Biography

Rudolf Christian Karl Diesel was born at 38 Rue Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth in Paris on 18 March 1858. When the Franco-Prussian War broke out in 1870 the family was deported and settled in London, and Rudolf was sent to Augsburg for his schooling. He finished top of his class in 1873, went on to the Industrial School of Augsburg and around 1875 won a scholarship to the Royal Bavarian Polytechnic in Munich, where Carl von Linde was one of his professors.

Typhoid fever kept him from graduating in July 1879; he worked at Sulzer Brothers in Winterthur and graduated in January 1880 with top honours. He then helped Linde build a refrigeration and ice plant in Paris and became its director. In 1890 he moved to Berlin to run Linde's research and development department. His patent DRP 67207 dates from 1892 and was published in February 1893, the year his treatise Theory and Construction of a Rational Heat Motor appeared.

From 1893 to 1897 Maschinenfabrik Augsburg, led by Heinrich von Buz, gave him the chance to build and test the engine, with support from Krupp. The single-cylinder, four-stroke Motor 250/400, rated at about 18 kW (25 hp), was officially tested in 1897. The Augsburg firm merged with a Nuremberg engineering company in 1898 and took the name Maschinenfabrik Augsburg Nürnberg, M·A·N, in 1908. On 29 September 1913 Diesel boarded the SS Dresden at Antwerp for a meeting in London, went to his cabin around 10 p.m. and was not seen again. A body later found in the Eastern Scheldt was returned to the sea, and on 13 October his son Eugen identified the recovered belongings. How he died remains unexplained.