The Story of Rudolf Diesel
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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. ♪♪♪

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Ben's here, sitting in for Jerry. And this is Stuff You Should Know. What?

You're not going to pick up the ball? The baton? Yes. We are doing an episode today on Rudolph Diesel, inventor of the diesel engine. And this was prepared for us by Anna Green, one of our writers. And Anna did a great job, very exhaustive look. But this was a listener suggestion, and I went back to look at who it was, and it turns out there were three emails over the past couple of years

To investigate Rudolph Diesel, Scott Simpson. I don't think my friend Scott Simpson, who's also a comedian, but who knows? Okay. Christian Koiner. And then very mysteriously, Leo and Ginny. Oh, no last name? Yeah. Leo and Ginny. The last name isn't in Ginny. Right. No, the middle initial is N and the last name is Ginny.

Yeah, so thanks for these suggestions, because this was, I didn't know anything about the guy, didn't know anything about the diesel engine, and now I feel good enough to get a Jeopardy answer or two correct. For sure. Yeah, call us, Ken. I had no idea about this either. I didn't realize that diesel is technically a proprietary eponym, or at least a proper noun.

If you see like the diesel engine, the D should be capitalized because it was invented. It's named after its inventor, Rudolf Diesel, who was working around the turn of the last century and a little bit before and a little bit after. And he was a German kid born in Paris to a father who, well, his father is a bit of a character, as we'll see in some of the worst ways, but who was just a, you

He was an interesting person who made his own way in the world and changed it radically. The irony is he changed it in ways that were the opposite of what he wanted to or how he wanted to change the world.

Yeah, for sure. And like many inventors, his story starts out as a child who was sort of obsessed with figuring out how things worked. A tinkerer who would take apart things. We've heard this story kind of time and time again. Someone who would like disassemble things in their house, put them back together. As a kid in Paris, he was working for his dad a lot of the time or in school. And in 1867 came across

his first internal combustion engine at the Paris World's Fair when he saw the auto engine, Nicholas Otto's coal gas engine, like I said, at the World's Fair. Yeah, and this was a big deal. Other people had invented internal combustion engines before, but Nicholas Otto's was like the culmination of it. It was like the real deal. So the fact that it really struck young Rudolf Diesel, this would have been...

he would have been 15 19 no he would have been 9 yeah imagine being a 9 year old kid and seeing an internal combustion engine and saying to yourself this is what I want to dedicate my life to yeah that was the kind of kid Theodore Diesel was right

And, again, it was a big deal that he saw this engine, or I should say the engine itself was a big deal. But they didn't stick around Paris for much longer. That was 1867. Within three years, the Franco-Prussian War broke out, and the Diesel family said, we need to get out of France. Let's move to London. And they did. And the whole family took a downward turn from there.

Yeah, I mean, I get the idea that it was just sort of moved uprooted, moved to a new country and had a lot of time getting good work because their family did not live well there. Thankfully, at least for Rudolph, a few months after getting there.

He was 12 at the time. His aunt and uncle said, come back to Germany, come back to Augsburg, live with us. Your uncle here, Christoph Barnicle, will help pay for your schooling. He enrolled at the Royal County Trade School for three years while his family stayed in London. So when he graduated in 1865, his dad said, hey, need you to come back to London and get a job and help us out. Your

your schooling is over. Rudolph said, nine, I'm going to stay here. I want to be an engineer, which means I need to keep going to school. So he denied his father and enrolled at the Technische Hochschule München there in what we call Munich, Germany. He got a scholarship to go there and very, what's the word I'm looking for? When something happens, it's very important and-

Nah. No. Resolute? No. Sort of the opposite of coincidence.

Purposefully? Perpendicularly? Yeah, perpendicularly. Just very importantly there, I will say, met one Carl von Linde, who would be a big person in his life, his employer at one point, and a mentor and friend. I get what you're trying to say. I can't think of the word either. Kind of like it was... Auspiciously? I said auspicious. As fate would have it? No? Is auspicious right? Predetermination? Predestination? Predestination?

I know this is the kind of stuff people like. I'm like, I like stuff you should know, but there's a lot that I don't like about it, too, you know? Where I was leading with that was from that point where he met Von Linda and was in school, he became fascinated by another proprietary eponym engine, the steam engine.

Invented by Danny steam. Uh, no, he came across the, um, Carnot cycle, right? Wasn't that another thing that really kind of struck, struck him, floated his boat. Yeah. Besides Danny steam's invention. Yeah. Well, the Carnot cycle is this, it is a theoretical engine, external combustion engine that, um,

where every bit of energy put into it produces work. So it's 100% efficient. It's essentially impossible, but it's theoretically possible. And that combined with Otto's internal combustion engine really kind of came together to give Rudolf Diesel like his purpose in life, his mission in life. And then, like you said, when he fortuitously met Carl von Linn. That's the word. Yeah.

Everything came together because now he had a mentor, a patron, a guy who gave him a job right out of school. And when you take like the fact that his family was using their luggage in London as the furniture in their house and his aunt and uncle came a call in and said, let's just pluck you out of this situation and put you on the road to your destiny. Yeah.

And then you're going to go forth and change the world. Literally, your invention is going to fuel the second industrial revolution and put us where humans are today. You can largely thank Rudolf Diesel and his invention for that. It's just mind-boggling the series of events that happened to do that and the effect that it had on the world. Yeah.

No, absolutely. He moved back to Paris eventually in 1880. And like you said, he went to work for Carl von Linde. I think it said Linda. I know. I just imagine him being like a 70s mom. I think in German it wouldn't be Linde. I think it would be Linde, like with an E at the end. Sure. But I don't know about Linda. You know, like Linda's bagels. Right.

He worked for for Linda as an ice guy. He had a ice machine company and he was all kinds of things. He was an apprentice for a little while. He eventually became a salesperson over this decade that he worked for him. But one of the other cool facts, and this is the Jeopardy question, maybe one of them.

It's like, what other famous thing did Rudolph Diesel invent? He invented and got a patent for the ice cube. Yeah. Yeah. I was like, when I saw that, I was like, well, wait, does that mean he invented the ice cube? Yes, indeed. Rudolph Diesel, the inventor of the diesel engine, also invented the ice cube. Yeah, which I guess is the means of, I mean, maybe they just never thought of freezing ice in cubes before. I guess. But think about it, Chuck. We would be lacking one quarter of NWA in

had Theodore Diesel not come along, or Rudolph Diesel not come along. That's a good point. So he graduated, like we kind of put the cart in front of the horse, but he graduated and went on to get that job with Linda, Carl von Linda. But when he did graduate from school, he had the highest grades in the history of the entire school. One of the reasons why he was a very serious student, he was not some –

Even though he was well taken care of and funded, he was, you know, when he had a scholarship, he worked his tail off and took his studies very seriously. So this kid was like, he was pretty put together for, you know, his age for sure. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I said he worked there for a decade. Within that decade, for about six or seven years of it, he, after inventing the ice cube,

Which would help found NWA and I guess prevent iced tea from just being tea. Right. Or hot tea. Sure. Or even tepid tea. Right. Tepid tea. That's your rapper name. It really is. Tepid tea. Yeah.

I'm neither hot nor cold. You have to say it like you're slightly annoyed. I'm tepid tea. Yeah, exactly. He started working on engines again. This idea popped back into his head, this memory of the Carnot cycle of like, gosh, there's got to be a way to make Danny Steem's engine more efficient. And for about six or seven years, he worked on trying to develop an ammonia-powered heat engine. Ammonia was too volatile.

So he eventually ends up back in Berlin with his, by this time he had a wife, Martha, and three children and started working like in earnest on the internal combustion engine. And I believe filed a patent in 1892. Wow.

Yeah, I feel like we should take a break and then come back and talk about like, you know, how what what like this guy wasn't working in a vacuum. So what environment, what world he was working in when he was trying to come up with this diesel engine. All right, let's do it.

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So, Chuck, I found a BBC article that kind of put the stakes out there pretty well about what was driving, in part, Rudolph Diesel's obsession with creating a super-efficient engine. And one of the things they said was that there was a ton of horses. I think they said in a city of 500,000 people, there were probably about 100,000 horses, and all of them were walking around pooping and peeing everywhere, all over the place. So an alternative to horsepower is

was very desirable. And we already had steam power, but steam power had its own thing going on. And in one way, one of the big weaknesses of steam power is that it required tons and tons and tons of coal

Because you use coal to heat a boiler, to boil water, to create steam, to run a piston. And then the piston turns the chemical energy of the coal into the mechanical work that turns something or makes something go up and down or does whatever. Probably has something to do with gears. I don't get it.

But there was already back in the 1860s a book by a guy named Stanley Jevin or Jeevan called The Coal Question. And this guy was already warning about peak coal, essentially pointing out like coal is a non-renewable resource, everybody. And we are using it really, really fast. This guy was already ringing the alarm about it. And-

And Rudolph Diesel was exactly the kind of person whose ear was out for this kind of thing. So in addition to replacing the really inefficient steam engine, in addition to replacing, like letting the horses go retire and be put out to pasture, and then also about, you know, coming up with something that doesn't use coal, all of these things came together to kind of give him this mission and this drive. Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. He went back idea idea wise, at least to the auto engine again, an internal combustion engine. But Otto's engine used a spark like, you know, a spark plug to ignite the fuel. And Diesel still thought there's got to be a better way. We I don't think we need that spark. I think we can use highly compressed air that gets so compressed and so hot it will ignite fuel.

And ended up sort of using this idea from a tinderbox that he saw that was basically a sparkless way to ignite tinder. And it was sort of like a syringe. It was larger. It was about the size of a bicycle pump, but like a glass syringe size.

that compressed air such that it would eventually provide that ignition. And he was like, hey, if it works there, it could work in an engine. Yeah. And the genius of all this is, so again, steam engines are powering the industrial revolution. They've done their thing. They've completely changed the world. But again, they're really inefficient. I think they're about 10% efficient. So...

90% of the energy in the coal is lost to heat to the environment. Only 10% actually. It's terrible. Yeah, it's really, really inefficient. And so one of the geniuses of an internal combustion engine in the first place, but also specifically diesel's engine, is it says, what if we just got rid of all of the stuff that led up to that piston moving?

and just make the engine that piston. And if you compress air enough, you're compressing the molecules really tightly, really quickly. It causes them to become excited, which causes them to put off heat. And if you compress it enough, it produces enough heat that it can ignite fuel.

in that piston, causing the piston to move up and down. And that's ultimately what you're after, is making that piston move up and down. So he got rid of all that stuff, the piles of coal, the big boiler full of steam, the steam itself, and took the whole process right to the piston itself. And it worked really, really well, it turned out.

Yeah, eventually. And, you know, we should probably talk a little bit about his big idea with this. It wasn't just he had he had other drives besides making an engine that worked more efficiently. He was he had this idea of helping the common person. And, you know, while while

Danny Steem's invention may have powered the industrial revolution. What did it do for the artisan in the countryside or the craftsman or the small business person? And I think I can build an engine that's small enough, that runs on cheap fuel, that doesn't require much, if any, maintenance if you're kind of keeping up with it or, you know, repair as long as you're maintaining it rather.

Right. Yeah. Because those steam engines were so big and required so much labor, they just sucked people from the countryside and consolidated them in the cities. And he wanted to do the opposite. Right.

And so if you have a light, portable, efficient engine that people in the rural areas can use, yeah, like you said, it'd give them – it'd put them on equal footing with the industrialists of the city. But also you mentioned cheap fuel too. One of his dreams was to make his diesel engine run on vegetable oil essentially. Yeah.

Biodiesel is essentially what he was trying to do. And it was a viable idea for a really long time, basically the entire time he was alive. And that would have really given people in rural areas a leg up because they could have grown their own fuel to power the engines that they had at their disposal to run their arts and crafts fairs.

Yeah, so he had big ideas. He filed his patent. He went to try and get funding. A lot of skepticism, obviously, in the financial marketplace at the time. And he got a couple of guys, Heinrich von Butz and Friedrich Krupp, to give him some money. Von Butz, for his part, was a managing director at Machine Fabric Augsburg.

and also said, hey, you can take some of my factory space to work on this stuff. So Rudolph moved to Augsburg in 1893, started working on this engine with that sort of tinderbox idea in mind. And the one thing he couldn't figure out, he was like, no compressing air can ignite this thing, but I just don't know how much pressure I'm going to need. And for a little while, it got a little dangerous in that machine shop.

Yeah, I guess there was no way to work it out on paper first. He had to figure it out like in real life.

By compressing air? Yeah, essentially adding some combustible fluid to it or fuel to it. So he did that. His first working prototype, he demonstrated in the lab. I don't even know if it was a demonstration. I think they just tried it the first time. And it compressed air so much, I guess, and produced so much heat that the engine blew up. And like you said, blew throughout the lab, like pieces of the engine went flying and

But when like you can just imagine in the movie, like they rise up from behind like some big crate and everybody's hair standing on end, there's smoke coming off of there. He's like it worked in that he proved that if you compress air, you could create enough heat to ignite something. You didn't need a spark. You didn't need coal or a boiler. You like his engine could work. And it had just been proven. Yeah.

Yeah, for sure. The second one went much better. It did not explode. The third one was the big sort of moment when the bell rang. It ran on kerosene. He was 39 years old, which is pretty incredible to think about, and felt comfortable enough to do a public test on February 17, 1897 in front of an audience there at the machine fabric factory for the employees and engineers there.

A few other firms were there, and it was a really big success in that he achieved not only a working engine, but it had a basically invisible and almost odorless exhaust and reached an efficiency of 26.2% compared with Danny Steam's engine.

measly 10%. Yeah. And you're like, well, it's, you know, not that much better. That is a mind boggling improvement in efficiency over the, the, the existing technology. That was just out of the gate. It was revolutionary. Uh, and like you said, I think, um,

Friedrich Krupp, is that how you pronounce his last name? Yeah. He was an early investor and I was like, that name sounds very familiar. And I went and looked him up on Wikipedia in honor of my reformed view of Wikipedia. And I found out that it was in fact who I've been calling Krupp, the same Krupp or Krupp family that gave rise to the Tyson Krupp international mega conglomerate from Europe.

It might be Krupp, actually. Okay. So Tyson Krupp. You're familiar with that company, right? They're just enormous. Sure. Two Ps. Yeah, that's right. And so I was reading a little bit about Friedrich Krupp on Wikipedia and little known fact, he used to ride a giraffe everywhere he went. Oh, as you do. I have a few quotes, if I may, because it's really hard to overstate, like you were saying, what a leap forward is.

this was in technology. One of his biographers, a man named, his last name is Brunt, said it was the most disruptive technology in history. Wow.

Winston Churchill called it the most perfect maritime masterpiece of the century. And if you're wondering what maritime has to do with it, we'll get to that. Just wait. And then no less than Edison said it was one of the greatest achievements of mankind. Wow. So that's how big of a deal the diesel engine was. Yeah.

And again, so Rudolph is like, this is happening. Like, I'm making this happen. Like, the people in the country, in the rural countryside are going to be saved. Like, this whole...

industrialization thing is going to be reversed and kind of mellowed out and smoothed over and the world's going to be saved essentially. And it just did not quite go that way. I mean, just the very fact that you had Winston Churchill weighing in on how great it was kind of gives you an indication that it did not go the way that he wanted.

Yeah. Well, one thing that did go the way he wanted was he made a ton of money off this thing. Once he had a working prototype, people started literally lining up to get a license for this thing, just a license to build it. Like they had to figure out how to build it and how to mass produce it and everything. But he ended up selling 22 different licenses over a two-year period in 1897 and 1898 alone.

to people like Watson and Yarin in Scotland. Augustus Bush bought the United States and Canadian license for what would be $9 million today. Basically, fiat in Italy, like people are buying licenses hand over fist, basically. And eventually he would

even sell all of his rights and patents to the General Diesel Company for three and a half million marks. And I tried to convert that to U.S. dollars in 2024. What did you get? Did you try? Yeah. What did you get? I got 11 and a half million U.S. dollars today. Oh, boy.

I got $350 million. Well, I don't know. You could be right. I went to a German inflation calculator first and converted three and a half million marks from 1898 to 2023 or 24 marks.

Well, they're euros now, though. Right. But there was a selection. You could convert it to euros or marks, Deutschmarks. Oh, okay. And I clicked Deutschmarks. I'm almost positive. And then I took that and exchanged it at today's rate for U.S. dollars. That's how I came up with it. But, I mean, you know me and math. You're probably right. And clicking buttons and stuff like that. I'm not that good at it. No. I think your methodology was better. What I did was I went back to see what –

the Deutschmark to the U.S. dollar was in 1898. You polled a few economists. I converted that to U.S. dollars, to 1898 U.S. dollars, and then did a calculation. So that's probably the wrong methodology. But I mean, it's crazy that they would be so wildly different. So wildly off. So what was yours? Like 300 million? Yeah. And mine was like 11 and a half. Let's split the difference and say it was about 160 million marks, or U.S. dollars today.

Well, I think your methodology is better. But either way, he made a lot of money off of this thing. It ran off of, like you said, potentially vegetable oil, but, you know, kerosene, peanut oil, all kinds of things. And it was...

Or could have been a boon to the, you know, this big idea that he had of the people in the countryside, had it not been for the war machine. Yeah. So one of the things that all of these international companies who had licensed the right to make diesel engines were supposed to do was as they were developing their own versions, any technological breakthroughs were supposed to be shared with all the other licensees.

So the diesel engine itself would be cooperatively developed internationally, kind of like a human undertaking among the global community. And I guess that worked for a little while. But then, like you said, when the First World War started to come around and tensions rose, the diesel engine came to be the center of an arms race between the UK and Germany.

And despite being German, of German heritage, a German citizen, having created the diesel engine in Germany, Rudolf Diesel was not a fan of the Kaiser, was not a fan of the ultra nationalism that was starting to develop in Germany that helped lead the world to World War I. And he's like, I kind of like the UK and where they're coming from these days.

I'm going to move there and actually help them with their arms race to create the diesel engines that will be used to power this new scary technology called submarines. Yeah. In 1912, he co-founded the Consolidated Diesel Engine Company with a British engineer named George Carels. And the submarine, and that's why Churchill said it's the most perfect maritime masterpiece of the century, is all of a sudden you had submarines that didn't require...

Tons and tons of coal on board, tons and tons of soldiers to shovel that coal, these big dangerous coal ovens. You had this like super efficient engine inside this thing. It was like it totally revolutionized how submarines operated and thus how the war went. Yeah. I looked up George Carell's too on Wikipedia and apparently he was known to giggle like a schoolgirl at dirty jokes.

Really? No. No. I'm making a comment on Wikipedia, but I'm just kidding. I'm sorry. It wasn't intended to mislead you. It was really a target. It was targeted at Wikipedia.

Well, part of the reason that always works is because you're so good at digging up these arcane facts. And so I tend to just be like, holy cow, listen to that. Wow, that's really something. Giggled like a schoolgirl, you say. I just got joshed. I'm sorry. You got caught in the dragnet is what it was. So should we take another break? Sure. All right. Let's take another break. We'll talk a little bit more about Diesel.

Stop. You should know.

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S-Y-L-Y-S-K-S-K-K-K-K. Duffy should know. Duffy should know. So while all this is happening, I mentioned that he got married and had three kids. They were all in Berlin together in 1890, but when he moved to Augsburg, like I said, to develop this engine, he left his family behind for five years.

Then the family moved to Munich. And then finally he said, you know, we got to reunite the family. I'm going to build my most magnificent idea, aside from that engine, will be this mansion from architect Max Littmann.

And it was quite a mansion. In fact, even though he had a lot of money, the way things turned out with him financially, I dare say that he overdid it a bit. There was a bike track, indoor bike track for his kids. I mean, state-of-the-art stuff. One, two, three, four, five bathrooms. A lot for back then. For sure. And I'm not talking outhouses. I mean bathrooms. I mean, I don't have five bathrooms in 2024. There was a staff. It's not that impressive because everybody had a staff back then, right?

Yeah, I don't have a staff. But still, it was a big deal. And not only was it a beautiful, amazing, advanced mansion that he helped design, this put an end or a punctuation mark on years of living away from his family in different countries, dedicating his life to this diesel engine and taking good care of them, for what I could understand, but not being a part of the family. He was a part of

creating the diesel engine. And so by building this mansion, he was coming back home, coming back to his family and, and starting a new chapter, restarting an important chapter of his life.

Yeah, but it was a chapter marked by some poor health. I saw that he got migraines, suffered from migraines, gout. I know that he dropped a ton of money on this mansion. I don't think that like ruined him or anything, but he also made some bad financial investments apparently. And they're kind of conflicting stories about how bad off the family was. But as we'll see in the end, it turns out that

They weren't doing so great in the financial department after all. No, I saw. Yeah, I saw a lot of his early engines did not work very well. They weren't reliable. And so there was a lot of customers that wanted their money back.

Initially. So like you said, there's a big debate over just how bad off they were. And Douglas Brunt, one of his recent biographers from 2024, is at odds with a biographer from the 70s named John Frederick Moon. Moon's like he was destitute and desperate. This guy was in dire financial straits. Douglas Brunt, who again wrote much more recently, 40 years, 50 years more recently. Good God.

He was like, no, actually, I think that this was like an 1890s phase and that, you know, after the turn of the century, he started to make his money back again and that he was on OK financial footing. Yeah.

He was still really wrapped up in this big idea of, you know, saving the common person. In 1903, he wrote a book called – or published one at least in 1903 called Solidarity, colon, even back then. The Rational Economic Salvation of Mankind when he talked about, you know, sort of this –

basically socialist ideas that he, you know, of the class division being, you know, not a good thing. And unfortunately, nobody, I don't think it was a very good book. No one really read it much. No. Tell them what that one reviewer said. Yeah, there was one reviewer that called it a real pain to read. That's not a glowing review.

No, not what you're looking for. But in writing that book, in conjunction with creating the diesel engine, he was quoted as having said that he solved the social question. Like he's like, here's the engine. Here's what we're trying to do. I basically just saved the world. And he said that he was able to do what all the nations combined were unable to, throw out the Rockefellers.

And it just did not happen that way, as a matter of fact. When did he publish that book? 1903?

1903. Over the next 10 years, he was still in a position and his engine was still in a position that it wasn't entirely clear which way it was going to go. It wasn't World War I fully yet. It was just the very beginning of it, I think. There was still a really good chance that diesel engines would run on vegetable oil. It was very much up in the air. And in September of 1913, September 27,

I believe he went on a fateful trip, more than a three hour tour, but it was not that much more like less than 24 hours, I think, to go do a groundbreaking of the company that he co-founded with George Carels.

Yeah. I got to name Alfred Lowcombe, who was another engineer who was a pal of theirs. And a few days before this, we should mention that he right before he went on this trip, he gave his wife a brand new overnight bag and said, here's this bag. Don't open it until next week.

A very mysterious thing to do. But he went to Ghent and got on the SS Dresden on the 29th with those three other two guys, had dinner with them, seemed like they had a good time and they were all in good spirits. Then he was like, all right, dinner's over. I'm going to go to bed. And he was never seen again.

No, the next morning, his companions, George Carels and Alfred, they went to go rouse him and say, hey, let's party this morning. And he didn't answer. So they went in his room. His bed was not slept in. His nightclothes were laid out on the bed. His travel bag was there. His watch was on his travel bag. And he was just nowhere to be found. So they informed the captain who had the ship searched. And in short order, they found his coat and hat.

on deck near a railing, and his coat had been neatly folded, which is not a good sign. And when they made land in London, he was just not there. He was no longer on the ship. At some point, somewhere in the English Channel, almost to the North Sea, Rudolf Diesel just vanished off the SS Dresden. That's right. And what was in that leather bag that he gave his wife?

20,000 German marks. No idea how much that is in today's U.S. dollars, but it was a significant amount of money, let's say. It was a lot of money, and there were also financial records basically showing that they were broke. So that sort of seemingly, at least at this point in his life, puts to rest the question that there were financial troubles. Yeah. Yeah.

So, you know, here's some money, but our accounts are empty. The disappearance was a very big deal, obviously. And right away,

Because he had made a lot of enemies. Kaiser Wilhelm did not like him. John D. Rockefeller did not like him. And there were, you know, people saying, like, could one of them had him killed? Is it foul play? Was it just an accident? Was it a suicide? Like no one knew and seemingly no one knows for sure, even though most people agree that it was suicide. Yeah.

Yeah. The folded coat kind of says something that it wasn't just falling overboard. That kind of does away with that one. And that was the initial one, too, because he had been said to have been in high spirits. George Carell said that after dinner, as they walked him back to his stateroom, he said, I'll see you tomorrow.

Yeah. There another evidence or another bit against the idea that it was suicide. His watch, like I said, it was set on his bag, but it was laid out in such a way that he could see what time it was when he would be laying down in bed.

Not something you do if you don't. Yeah, like you prop up your watch. Yeah. Like you don't really go to that trouble if you don't think that if you think like I'm going to end my life in a couple hours. That doesn't matter. And then George Carell's also told the New York Times that he did that. Rudolph did not suffer from giddiness. I guess that means that he would not have answered the call of the void is what he was saying.

Yeah, this whole idea of murder, none of it really holds up to scrutiny when you investigate either the fact that the Germans came after him because he didn't help them build their engines for the submarines for the war or Rockefeller. So those generally don't hold up when you look into them more closely. And like I said, most people say it was suicide, but they're the what was his first name? Brent's name? Douglas. Douglas.

Douglas Brunt, who wrote the Maurice biography, has a theory that he did not die at all and that he was it was sort of faked, basically, and by the British. And he was shuttled away to Canada where he could continue working on these engines for the war. Yeah, there was a New York Times article in 1914 that said that as much that he'd been rumored to be working in Canada. Yeah.

That is probably not true because about 11 days, I think 11 days after he went missing, a body washed up. So, okay. It depends on who you ask, me or Chuck, it turns out. His body either turned up at the mouth of a Dutch river and was taken ashore and taken into town and washed.

was identified or viewed by one of his sons, almost certainly his dad, but not a positive identification because it was too decomposed. Or... Well, I don't think the Dutch River part is debated. Oh, I thought it was. I thought they were out to sea. No, no, no. Everywhere I saw it was at the mouth of a Dutch River. Okay. He was just pulled out of the water. But I saw in a lot of places, including...

Brunt's biography that the body was returned to the water because it was just so unrecognizable and you know

rotted by that point, which is really gross. That doesn't make any sense. That they put the body back in the sea but kept the belongings that he had that I saw also disputed. I saw that there were everything from glasses case to a pocket pen knife to a pillbox. And I even saw one say there was an ID card recovered. I don't think that's true.

Because that's literal positive identification unless it's, you know, planted on somebody to make it seem like a suicide. Most places I saw didn't mention an ID card, but they did say that the son identified the items and said, yeah, those are my dad's things. And then mysteriously among his possessions was found the tooth of a giraffe. I don't believe that. That's good. You're like, no, that's the one true thing. Right.

Uh, so, um, I mean, that's, no one knows what happened to him. There's no solution to that puzzle. Um, yeah, I'm going with that was his body. Um, you think suicide? Probably everything I saw was that he was in dire financial straits. And I mean, plenty of people have died by suicide for that reason. Sure. Um, so it's, it's entirely possible. I don't know enough to be like, yep, that's it. But that's probably where I lean, I would say.

Well, regardless of what happened, the invention of that engine was, you heard the quotes, it changed the history of the world in a lot of ways and such that just a couple of years ago in 2022, a full 96% of trucks in the EU run on diesel engines.

And here in America, it's a little bit different because we've had a love-hate relationship with diesel over the years as far as trying to phase it out or other people saying, no, it's a superior fuel. But about 23% of fuel in the U.S. is diesel fuel still. Yeah, and the reason why people say it's superior is because even though there's more CO2, there's more carbon in diesel fuel, diesel burns more efficiently than

than gas. So it actually releases less CO2 than gas does, even though there's more CO2 in diesel because less is burned over the course of, say, 50 miles or something like that. So it's true, but still it is a polluter. If you're trying to get away from fossil fuels, diesel is included in there too. I remember having a couple of friends back in the day that had like a

hand-me-down old, you know, 70s Mercedes Benz diesel from their parents or something. Or their grandpa died and they got one of those, you know, chuggy engines. I just remember they were very loud and it seemed like they just did nothing but spew black smoke everywhere. Yeah, I know. The diesel smoke is just so noxious too. It seemed like it. I mean, maybe they were old cars or not running right. I have no idea, but that's sort of my only memory of diesel engines. No, I'm with you. Yeah. They're still like that.

If you want to know more about Diesel and his engine, then just go read Douglas Brunt's book on it. And since I mentioned Douglas Brunt for one last time, it's time for Listener Mail.

I'm going to call this Harvard follow-up with the old Puritans episode. Hey, guys. In your recent episode on Puritans, you mentioned the founding of Harvard. I'm a graduate of the Divinity School and learned an interesting tidbit. I believe it was in the 60s, and the Divinity School had fallen on kind of hard times. Enrollment was down, wasn't attracting the best students or teachers. So Harvard had the sensible business idea of selling it off.

The court declared though that if Harvard sold the Divinity School, the university would have to close its doors because the original charter states that the purpose to be educating a "learned clergy." So if they stopped doing that, the school was no longer following its charter. Another wise choice later, the university doubled down its support and some three decades or so after it was the institution in which I spent three years on my way to a Masters of Divinity.

During orientation, the dean of the school said to us, you all belong here, so either we are not as elite as you had assumed or you are brighter than you had thought. Either way, you belong here. Welcome. What a great message. That's pretty cool. Keep up the great work, guys. You guys are a gift in such divided and divisive times. Thanks for that. That is from Eric Wickstrom. Thanks, Eric. Reverend Eric Wickstrom. Thanks, Reverend.

Speaking of reverends, it's funny that mention of how attendance was down in the 60s so much that they were going to sell the Divinity School reminded me of Reverend Lovejoy's origin story from The Simpsons. I don't remember. It was the early 70s. The 60s were over and people were ready to feel bad about themselves again. Yeah.

So good. If you want to be like Reverend Eric, you can email us too, especially with additional info we didn't know that's interesting. We love that stuff. You can send it to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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