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Rudolph Christian Karl Diesel was the inventor of the gas-oil engine, well known with his name.
In 1978, he was included in the Automotive Hall of Fame, grouping the main protagonists of car history.

He was born in Paris from German parents in 1858.
He was an excellent student starting from the elementary schools and, when he was 12, he was admitted to the Ecole Primaire Superieure, the best of Paris intermediate schools.

But at the beginning of the French-Prussian war (1870), his family was considered enemy in France and it had to move to London to find asylum in a neutral Country.

A cousin of his helped Rudolph to come back to the native town of his family, Augsburg, where he attended the Royal Commerce School of that county and won a grant for the Technische Hochschule of Munich where he was an excellent student and become pupil of Carl Von Linde, the pioneer of refrigeration.

After his graduation, he worked 2 years as a designer in Winterthur, Switzerland.
Then, he came back in Paris, where he worked as refrigeration engineer at the Linde refrigeration industries.

He got married in 1883 and he had 3 sons.

Always in Paris, he opened his first workshop-laboratory (1885), where he started to study a new engine type.
That project wasn't still concluded when Diesel moved in Berlin, as requested by the Linde industries.
Just there, he got the German patent for his new engine (deposited on February 23rd 1892) that developed the idea that to ignite the fuel into the engine, the simple high pressure of the fuel was enough for the great heating produced in it, eliminating every kind of ignition system.

On February 17th 1894, a single piston engine could work for a minute during a public demonstration; the engine was fueled by powdered fuel, injected by a compressed air jet.
It was a 3 m high engine, reaching a compression pressure up to 80 Atm.

Diesel built an improved model in 1897 with some similar features with the prototype built by Herbert Akroyd Stuart (1890); for this reason, Diesel had to face several disputes on the paternity of that project.
Eventually, his engine had an official award and just on this model, the modern Diesel engines are built.

The production of this new engine started after 3 years of study and the first engine for the market was built in an American distillery.
Many were the patents released to his engine in all the European Countries that gave him a millionaire rent and made him rich within few years.

Diesel had a rather unstable character, subject to frequent temper changes, nervous breakdowns and frequent paranoid behaviours.

He died on September 29th 1913 in never cleared up circumstances during a trip on his own boat across the English Channel from France to England.
The first hypothesis considered was the suicide, because his board diary, found in his empty boat, had a cross on that day page and this made think to a premeditated act.

Another theory about his death involves the German Navy, that was starting to use the Diesel engines in its submarines, a fact that Diesel deeply adversed.
It was thought that he was going in England to propose to the Royal Navy the use of his engines to oppose to the German Navy and this could be a good reason to Germany to eliminate him.

His body was found in the sea some days later; following that time uses, the mariners took only his personal effects (then, recognized by his son Eugen) and they gave back his body to the sea.

Learn more about this author, Aldo Bonincontro.
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