On Sept. 29, 1913, Rudolf Diesel, inventor of the engine that transformed industry and transport, disappeared during a nighttime crossing of the English Channel. He had boarded the Dresden, a ferry on the Belgium-London route. The captain reported his disappearance in international waters, where there was no legal jurisdiction or investigating authority. There was no forensic report and no official investigation.
Almost two weeks later, the crew of a Dutch steamer, the Coertzen, found a corpse near the mouth of the Scheldt River. Decomposition was severe, but the sailors noticed the good quality of the clothing still around the body. After bringing the remains alongside, they took four objects from the pockets—a wallet, a knife, a glasses case and an enameled pillbox—before returning the decomposed body to the sea. The ship then made its scheduled stop at the Dutch port of Flesinga, where the crew reported the find and handed over the objects. When port authorities informed the family, Eugen Diesel quickly recognized his father's belongings. The most accepted explanation was suicide, but the press of the time also weighed murder.
The case is now being brought back into view by Douglas Brunt's book The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel, due to be published in Spain by Capitán Swing on Nov. 15. Its Spanish subtitle, Genio, poder y engaño en vísperas de la Gran Guerra, signals the author's thesis. Brunt links the paths of Rockefeller, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Winston Churchill and Diesel to explore the political, economic and technological rivalries of the quarter-century before World War I.
News of the inventor's death made front pages from New York to Moscow and fed speculation. Some outlets pointed to two of the most famous men in the world as possible suspects. One theory involved Kaiser Wilhelm II and his agents: rumors that Diesel was negotiating with the British were said to have angered the emperor, who might have ordered his death to stop the transfer of patents. A headline claimed the inventor had been thrown into the sea to halt the sale of patents to the British government. The other celebrity mentioned was John D. Rockefeller, then the richest man alive. He and his wealthy associates saw Diesel's revolutionary technology as a threat to their business empires, and another newspaper said Diesel had been murdered by agents of the big oil companies.
Diesel was born into a family of impoverished immigrants and used a rare educational opportunity at age 12 to train, later studying engineering and joining Germany's most respected technical circles. His engine promised to transform industry and transport through greater energy efficiency, longer range and the ability to do without the huge steam boilers and stoker crews used on ships. But his ambitions went beyond engineering: he wanted a compact, inexpensive energy source that would revive rural and urban economies, strengthen artisans and improve working conditions in the industrial age. He opposed economic concentration, dependence on oil monopolies and mechanized war.
Brunt writes that the terrible irony is that Diesel abhorred the social changes his engine helped forge. The technology he conceived as a tool to improve workers' lives would also transform the military and the conduct of war; on the eve of World War I, the possibility of using his engine to power submarines became increasingly strategic. Brunt argues that the inventor's genius put him on a collision course with an emperor and a magnate.
Before the diesel engine became widespread, large battleships such as the Dreadnought and liners such as the Lusitania and Titanic were powered by steam. Shipbuilders installed a giant boiler and a coal furnace fed by crews to turn water into steam; its pressure turned the engine's gears, while a funnel sent black smoke from the coal furnace into the sky. Brunt, writing in Yachts International, called this a rudimentary technology. A ship raising steam from a cold boiler took hours to depart, and the tons of coal needed for the furnace took up valuable cargo space. The dozens of men living aboard to shovel coal took up even more space and had to be fed. The huge, inefficient engines forced ships to go from port to port around the world for more coal, announcing their arrival with a sky covered in smoke visible 100 miles away.
The diesel engine did not need hours to boil water; it worked immediately after a cold start. It did not need teams of men to feed a fire, but drew liquid fuel automatically from a tank. It had no boiler, furnace or funnel. It burned a viscous fuel that was safe to store and used it so efficiently that a ship could circle the globe without refueling, with no perceptible exhaust emissions to betray its presence on the horizon. Brunt presents the design as a leap in humanity's ability to convert a substance into energy.
Diesel's disappearance was quickly overshadowed by the events that led to World War I. As his engine spread around the world, the creator faded from collective memory, unlike Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, Alexander Graham Bell or the Wright brothers, whose names remained tied to major technological transformations. Brunt summarizes the paradox by saying the man seems deliberately erased from history, to the point that his surname is usually written with a lowercase d. Diesel advocated peace, equality, artisanal work and humane working conditions in an era of relentless exploitation. Without conclusively solving the mystery, the book reconstructs the political and economic rivalries around the case and shows the contradiction of an innovation that ended up serving interests opposed to those of its creator.
Only a year earlier, in 1912, prominent international figures had praised the emergence of the revolutionary technology. Edison hailed the engine as one of humanity's greatest achievements, and Churchill, an early admirer and advocate of diesel engines, declared that a new class of cargo ship powered by the fuel was the most perfect maritime masterpiece of the century. A few months later, Diesel was dead and his body had been returned to the sea; his name would be heard by the general public only rarely, such as on the publication of Brunt's book.
Sources: elDiario.es.