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Rudolf Diesel once said "The use of vegetable oils for engine fuels may seem insignificant today. But such oils may become in the course of time as important as the petroleum and coal tar products of the present time."

Born in Paris in 1858 Rudolf Christian Karl Diesel was a social thinker ahead of his time in some respects. His most famous invention was born out of a desire to help artisans to be able to afford to compete with big industry.

He also hoped it would help farmers as they could produce their own fuel.

To start at the beginning Rudolf's father was a leather craftsman which probably explains why Rudolf would want to help other artisans in his later life. Rudolf was keen to learn and a good linguist probably thanks to his mother who was a governess and language tutor. His parents were Germans who had moved to Paris in the pursuit of a better way of life, unfortunately the family experienced a lot of hardships. Both of his parents encouraged him to keep learning and after seeing his fascination with machinery his father would take him to local factories. Rudolf loved the machines, but his social conscience was also awakened when he saw the working conditions, this stayed with him for life.

When he was 12 his parents sent him to live with a cousin in Augsburg as they could no longer afford to keep him. This ended up being a lucky break for Rudolf as his cousin also encouraged his studies and kept him while he attended school earning a scholarship, at 18, to Munich Polytechnic. It was at the polytechnic that he found the commercial side to inventions. In an effort to make the geometry class more interesting Rudolf made a series of plastic models to show different mathematical surfaces these were copied and sold to schools around Germany. The income was handy as during this time Rudolf was sending whatever money he could to his parents who were still in Paris.

After graduating from Munich Polytechnic Rudolf became a refrigeration engineer working for a factory in Switzerland, during his time there he invented a process for producing crystal clear ice. The company he was working for were not interested in the process so he left, taking it with him and ended up back in Paris working for a German firm selling his ice-machine. It was around this time that he met a young German woman called Martha Flasche who was employed as a governess. They had a lot of common interests and were married in 1883; they went on to have three

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