Rudolph Diesel - Father of the Diesel Engine

Today, we're exploring the remarkable, yet ultimately tragic, life of Rudolf Diesel, the man whose name became synonymous with a revolutionary engine that powered a new era of industry and transportation.

Diesel's story begins in Paris in 1858, a young German engineer with an insatiable curiosity and a drive to improve upon the inefficiencies of the steam engines dominating his era. He was a visionary, dreaming of an engine so efficient it could run on a variety of fuels, even vegetable oil, empowering small businesses and artisans. We'll explore his early influences, his rigorous education under the likes of Carl von Linde, and the arduous 13-year journey to bring his compression-ignition engine to life. 

And succeed he did! By the turn of the 20th century, Rudolf Diesel was a millionaire, his engine adopted across industries, powering everything from pipelines to electric plants, trucks, and especially, marine vessels. We'll trace the incredible impact of the diesel engine on the Second Industrial Revolution, how it enabled larger ships, faster transport, and truly transformed global commerce. But with great success often comes great scrutiny, and Diesel's later years were plagued by health issues, financial woes from bad investments, and growing pressures from powerful interests.

This is where his story takes a dark, inexplicable turn. On September 29, 1913, Rudolf Diesel boarded the steamship Dresden from Antwerp to London, seemingly on his way to a groundbreaking meeting about installing his engines on British submarines. He retired to his cabin that evening, instructing to be woken at 6 AM. But when his colleagues checked on him, the cabin was empty, his bed untouched, and his nightshirt neatly laid out. Ten days later, a body, identified by personal items as Diesel's, was recovered from the North Sea.

Was it suicide, a desperate act by a man facing financial ruin and declining health? Or was something far more sinister at play? We'll examine the various theories that immediately emerged: whispers of industrial espionage, fears that he was about to sell his patents to rival nations on the eve of World War I, or even assassination by the powerful oil and coal magnates whose industries stood to be disrupted by his engine's versatility. Join us as we piece together the fragments of evidence, the lingering questions, and the enduring mystery surrounding the vanishing act of Rudolf Diesel, the man who engineered the future, only to disappear without a trace.

Transcript

0:06

Hey, Alex, how you doing? Man, hey, Kelly, how's it going? Man, it's going great. Very excited to be here recording another episode of dirt nap city, the podcast about interesting dead people and oh man, I've got one for you today. I've got one that that that is right in line with what we like to talk about, but I think you're going to be a little bit surprised. It's going to be a little bit unexpected for you. The ones we like to talk about are the ones who everybody's heard the name, right? But nobody knows much deeper than that, not famous enough, usually for a biopic, but famous enough where 100% name recognition, right? Yeah, yeah, or at least 99% you know most, most people are gonna know who this person is, and and that kind of leads into a good first clue, and that as as our long term listeners know, Alex does not know who we're talking about today, and I am going to give him some clues to see if he can guess you know who it is. You the listener, because you you obviously clicked on the link. But I'm going to start off by telling you that this person has huge name recognition. The name itself is kind of synonymous with power. The name itself, but it isn't. The name has almost become a thing unto itself and not necessarily about the person. It's not. JD, power, is it? That's a good guess. That's a good guess. No, this. This guy was born March 18, 1858, in Paris, France. And he died, September 29 1913, and this is a big clue. He died in the English Channel, or so they say, Hmm, any thoughts on that? So died in some sort of an accident, some sort of a mysterious circumstances, sure, sure. Yeah, it was only 55 he was German by birth, Bavarian, actually, but lived most of his childhood in France and England. Didn't, didn't move back to Bavaria till he was older. Kind of tripped up on the whole. Name is synonymous with power, okay? He Yeah, when you, when you hear his name, you almost think of his name as a, not a proper noun, but just as a normal noun. He is. When you say power, do you mean literal power? Literal power. So volt, yeah, you're on the right track. You're on the right track. I'll give you another hint. There's another person with the same last name is contemporary today, who is got a shaved head and is known for being both fast and furious. Diesel, yes, yes. Rudolph diesel. Rudolph Christian Carl, diesel. How much do you know about him? Nothing. You're right. That's right in our wheelhouse. That's a name that you don't think of as a name associated with power. I don't know about the mysterious circumstance of his death, so I'm interested in hearing about that. Here's good here's the thing about Rudolph, diesel is or about his invention, the diesel engine. It actually should always be capitalized, because the diesel engine is a proper noun, a proper name. And so when you, when you say diesel with a lowercase d, you're actually doing a disservice to Rudolph. Put some respect on his name. You really should. You really should. Now his first name is Rudolph. As I said, before you got any other famous rudolphs You can think of over the years, well, you've got, besides the reindeer, you've got Valentino. Rudolph. Valentino, Italian actor, yep, Giuliani. Giuliani, American, America's mayor for America's mayor for a minute. Yep, yep, any others you can think of? How about Rudolph Isley, an American singer, I don't, oh, I didn't know that his name was Rudolph. Rudolph, Rudolph Shanker, you know who that is? No, he was the founding member, one of the founding members of the scorpions, guitarist and founding member. Rudolph Shanker, yeah, rock. You like a hurricane, okay? And then Rudolph Hess. Rudolph Hess was a Nazi, a German. He was he worked for Hitler back in the day, but you're right. Rudolph, the Red Nosed Reindeer, is probably the most famous, followed by those others. Rudolph diesel was born. And, like I said in Paris, to Elise and Theodore diesel. Now, Theodore, then, that's the way it was pronounced in the audio book. Not Theodore spelled Theodore, but pronounced Theodore was a bookbinder from Augsburg Bavaria. So here's another weird connection. When my dad was in the Air Force and we and he was stationed in Germany. We actually lived in Augsburg. Oh, nice, yeah. He grew up kind of poor. The diesels weren't very wealthy. I guess book binding was not a huge thing back then, and Theodore was very strict, so strict, in fact, that he once chained Rudolph to a desk for the entire day. Wow, that is strict. Yep. Chained him there, and the family left for the day and came back and he was still chained to the desk. He also made Rudolph cruel. He made Rudolph wear a sign that said thief, after after Rudolph had borrowed a tool from his dad's shop without permission. He made him wear it to school like he made him. He made him make the sign that said thief, and then he made him wear it to school. I saw somebody one time on the freeway with a sandwich board that said thief, and I think it was like a court ordered thing that the the judge had made them stand on the side of the road. Wow. The sign that said thief, that's some judges are into shame. Some parents are into shame. We call that diesel justice. There you go. Well, despite his father's discipline, his his father was loving. He cared about him. You know, they had a they had a he had a brother and a sister, and his mother was a little more soft, and she was into art, and she was into music. And so Rudolph had this very natural ability for science and technology and engineering and math and all these things that he was naturally good at. But because his parents raised him in such a way that he was introduced to some arts and some visual arts and music. He kind of had both sides of the brain. He had a creative side as well as a mathematical and scientific side. So kind of that's how he was brought up, and it turned him into a bit of a social theorist. He became interested in intellectual pursuits, as well as engineering pursuits, which was unusual for a German kid at the time. So growing up when he was 12, he until the time he was 12, they lived in Paris. But then the Franco Prussian war came along, and this would have been in the late 1800s I guess, you know, or 1870s or so. And at that time, because his family was of from Bavaria or Bavarian descent, living in in France was not a good option. And so they actually had to be. They were what is it called when you're kicked out of a country, exiled, exiled. Thank you. They were exiled from France. He already was fluent in French, but then they moved to London and he became fluent in English, so he learned French and English. Now he's a he's a German descent kid. He actually really preferred France to London, or Paris to London. He felt Paris was a much prettier city, and his family had been sort of better off when they were living in Paris, when they were exiled to go to live in London, they were poor. And, you know, they really became poor, and they started to see things like England at the time was the entire city of London, unless you were very wealthy, was very dirty, a lot of coal. England didn't have the coal was the main fuel source in England, and so there was soot all over everything. There was a lotion dick in the dickens episode that we talked about 100% yes, yeah. And this all had an impact on him. But so he learned, he learned English while living in London, he already knew French, and then when he was 14, he had an opportunity to go study with his mom's sister and brother in law, and their last name was barnacle now, can you say he was raised by barnacles? What do you immediately think of when you think of barnacles, yeah? Like the nautical, the stuff that grows on the side of a boat, right? Well, yeah, I just, I automatically think of SpongeBob SquarePants, perfect. Oh, sure, sure, sure. Barnacles. The barnacles were stationed or lived in Augsburg, Germany, where his family was from, and he actually went there. And guess what? He learned German. So now he speaks fluent French, fluent English and fluent, fluent German. He got accepted into the technical Hochschule, or high school in the. The city of Augsburg, and his parents wanted him to come home when he was 16, so he moved. He moved over to Augsburg with the barnacles at 14. His parents wanted him to be done with school and come back and work in London when he was 16, but the barnacles kind of kept him there and made the case for him to go to a higher education because he was very gifted, and so he ended up staying. He got a scholarship to go to a technical school in Augsburg, and he learned thermodynamics and refrigeration, which at the time there weren't really any refrigerators. So he was learning how to make ice and how to keep things cold and things like that, which was an unusual thing at the time, had you. I mean, if you think about it, we kind of take chilling and cooling of our food for granted, but at this time, back then, they were just starting to understand how refrigeration worked. And sure, sure, yeah, losing using thermodynamics and heat transfer and that kind of stuff, exactly, exactly. So after, after he graduated, he married in 1883 he married a woman named Marta. And again, it's spelled Martha, but pronounced Marta, Flash, F, L, A, S, C, H, E, and he joined an ex professor that he had in school named Karl von Lind. Carl von Lind had his own company, making refrigerants and studying refrigerants and stuff like that. So he was able to get a job with Carl von Lin studying refrigerants. And during that time, between 1883 and 1890 after he married Marta. He had three children. He had Rudolph Jr, who was his oldest son. He had a daughter named Hedy, and he had a younger son named Eugen. And what's interesting is a lot of the book I read was from a family biography that Eugen wrote, or autobiography that Eugen wrote later in life. So some of this stuff was directly from the newspapers, you know, big stories and stuff like that. But Eugen was a kind of a natural journalist, and kept a documentation and diary of the entire family's experience. And so a lot of this came from him. I like the name Eugen diesel. Eugen diesel, yeah, it's a pretty cool name. You know what the prevailing type of motor was, right? I mean, we talked about this when we talked about Henry Ford, or do you mean, what year are we talking about here? Late 1800s 1890 so it was steam, right? Steam, steam engine. Yep, everything was steam, and steam was extremely inefficient, supposedly, like less than 5% of the potential power from the fuel actually made it actually became power with steam. Steam, it just gave off a lot of heat. It gave off a lot of smoke. It gave off a lot of soot. It was, he had to have boiling water, basically, right. So if anything, anything, yeah, could burn you. It's, it's not and heavy too, yes, yes. Very hard to, very hard to be efficient with steam. So, but that's kind of what interested our boy, Rudolph diesel. He started to after he had been working with, working for this refrigeration company of Carl von Linde for a while, he started to study more and more dynamics, and he came up with this idea, this concept of an engine that would run on something besides steam. And it was this whole idea of an internal combustion engine. So a steam engine, like you said, it's it's actually just boiling water and causing something to spin, right? Whereas internal combustion has a whole process of strokes, you know, the the part where it explodes and the part where it expels, and the part where it actually creates the movement. But before we get into any of that, I didn't know this, but I'm really glad to know it now. Do you know the difference between an engine and a motor? Isn't an engine where something is well known that would be a we kind of use them interchangeably, right? Most people use those terms interchangeably, but they actually mean two different things. Yeah, does an engine mean that something has to be moving moving forward as a result? No, an engine is a machine that converts chemical energy from fuel into mechanical energy. So that's what we're talking about with combustible fuel like gasoline, diesel, natural gas. Those are all so car engines, jet engines, diesel generators, those are all examples. Doesn't matter if they move or not. Converts, converts what chemical energy, so some sort that could even be steam. No, because, well. Yeah, I guess so, I guess so. Okay, yes, and it's called a steam engine. So you're right. A motor is actually where it converts electrical energy into mechanical energy. So car motors, ceiling fans, industrial motors and machinery, you know, a little, a little motor that you might have in a drill, you know, if you had an electric drill, those, those are not engines, those are motors. So anything that's even like, Hmm, so you couldn't have anything that's that's a hand crank, couldn't be a motor either, if it's, if it's if it burns fuel, it's an engine. If it runs on electricity. It's a motor. That's the difference a hand crank, I guess would be a set of gears. It's more of a gearing thing, right? Okay, so anyway, he understood this, and he started to experiment. Now, one other interesting thing, you know how combustible gasoline is, right? If you took a match while you were filling up your car at the gas station and you held it too close to the gas tank, the fumes can catch fire, and that could be a huge problem, right, right, right, yeah, with diesel fuel. And diesel fuel is a very broad topic of fuel, a very broad set of things. It's not just one thing, but diesel fuel is not nearly as combustible as gasoline. As a matter of fact, it said that you can throw a match onto an open container of diesel fuel and it won't, it won't Ignite, really. The reason is, for diesel to work, it's got to be under high pressure and high temperature. So it requires heat and pressure to ignite, whereas all they all normal gasoline needs is heat. It doesn't need that pressure. So these, these original motors, I'm sorry, these original engines, not motors that diesel was developing, were built to withstand 1000s of pounds of pressure internally, because they had to have that for it to actually start to start to work. There was a guy named Nicholas Otto, Otto, and he was the first one to develop the four stroke engine. And I said it poorly just a minute ago, but a four stroke engine basically has, like an intake, a combustion, the power stroke cycle, and then, like the X, the X exhaust, right? So it's four, four complete strokes that happen the diesel motor. Diesel engine was based on the four stroke idea, that there were four different strokes that would happen. And after 20 years, he finally kind of got one that worked, and he started, he started using this, and it's the diesel engine used compression. It was much more efficient, like instead of being, say, 5% efficient as a steam engine might be, it was maybe 15 or 20% efficient, but that was a huge leap forward. It still gave off a lot of heat. It still gave off a lot of waste, but not nearly as much as you got with something like coal when they were so at this point, the fuel is the same, but the engine is different. No, the fuel is actually different. So what's what's different at this point too. So, so it's two things. He's making a diesel fuel and a diesel engine. So the original idea that that Rudolph diesel had for diesel engines was that they could run on vegetable oil, they could run on peanut oil, they could run on it. The number of things that you can run a diesel engine on is way, way more. It doesn't have to be a petroleum based thing. It could be, it could be some sort of organic oil that was made peanut oil. I don't know if you know this, but Willie Nelson's bus, for a while was actually set to run on kitchen grease. Yeah, I remember in Austin, there used to be quite a few people that would make cars that run on that kind of stuff, and you just go to the back of a restaurant, yeah, they're closing, and you'd get their grease, and then the car would smell like whatever kind of restaurant, like Chinese restaurant, french fries, or whatever they were they were cooking. You remember how that was a thing, like maybe 20 years ago? These were all these well, and it still is. These were all these were all diesel engines. These were all based on the same engine that Rudolph diesel invented. So those people, they're doing that, obviously, because they're not having to pay for gas, but they could also, if they went to a gas station, they would use the petroleum diesel right and and diesel, Rudolph diesel had this idea. Know that it was going to be a great technology for many countries and many people, because the type of fuel you could use in it was so versatile that you didn't have to have petroleum, you didn't have to have Standard Oil, right? You'd have to have a refinery. You could just, you know, we'll get your food, make your food and then fill up your tank, right? It's very renewable. When he first designed the prototype, it was 1893 and then in 1918 97 is when he actually had the the results, enough to kind of show it off to people and to say, hey, this actually works. So when he when he had that successful demonstration in 1897 he was coming up with several different names for it. At first he wanted to call it the Delta engine. And delta is the symbol for change, right? It's the Greek or whatever. And then, but he didn't decide on that. Then he was going to call it the Excelsior engine. Excelsior, I guess was just a word that was used back then to mean high quality. Yeah, kind of a cool name, the Excalibur engine. He kind of liked that because he thought it was sort of magical, and it would be something that would be magical. But his wife Marta finally said, just call it the diesel engine. And he was like, Well, okay, so that's what he called it. So he demonstrated it to a big group of scientists and engineers and business people. And after that, people went crazy for it, because they realized the potential of it. And he decided he was going to set it up so that each country would have one primary manufacturer and distributor of diesel engines, and he was going to license that to them. So he went around to different countries, you know, all around the world, and started to negotiate these terms. In 1897 he sold the rights to the diesel engine in the United States to Adolphus bush. Now you know who Adolphus bushes, right? The beer magnet, the beer Yes, in St Louis, and he and Adolphus Bush became good friends. The problem was initially that the early days, the early days of it, it didn't work without an expert, so it would have problems. And unless there was somebody there who had either was diesel himself or had trained under Rudolph diesel, it was very hard for people to keep these motors running initially, because, you mean, they would just like conk out, they would conk out. I mean, remember, they're under high degrees of pressure and heat. And so a lot of times they would explode. There were lots of explosions of early diesel engines. It was not easy to keep one running. But again, his idea was that you'd be able to run it on grease, animal fat, vegetable oil, seed oil. And also another way that they could run it was actually a derivative of coal called coal tar. So England was very, very rich in coal. And England actually was interested in diesel engines running on coal tar, because they could refine the coal, make this coal tar, and it would run cleaner than it would run than than it would then things would just run on normal coal. It was cleaner than burning coal, cleaner than burning coal, but not cleaner than a regular refined petroleum, right? No, no, but, but, but this was the early days, right? They were still experimenting with this stuff. You imagine the pollution if we all were running our cars on coal, coal tar, coal tar. But still, you know, that's probably even more like, it sounds bad, doesn't it? It does so he, you know, he did have this sort of trauma from growing up when he was living in England and seeing all this soot and everything. And he really did like the idea when you ran, aside from the smell that you mentioned earlier about, you know, smelling like a Chinese restaurant, when you ran it on grease, kitchen grease, or animal fat or recycled grease, it actually ran fairly cleanly, and that was something that he really appreciated and liked. But during all this time, this is the, you know, the the 1910s at this point, 19, 1908 19 1019, 12. World War One was brewing, and there were a few factors at work that were kind of working against Rudolph diesel number one, Kaiser Wilhelm didn't like how friendly diesel was with the Americans. He didn't like how friendly he was with the French, because he had been raised there, he didn't like how friendly he was with the English, and so he was kind of targeted by the early by Kaiser Wilhelm the second, who was the Kaiser of or the head of Germany at the time, and then the other person. That he actually kind of got crosswise with you want to guess who that was. It's an American, Henry Ford. No, no. Henry Ford actually offered him a job. It was John D Rockefeller, because Rockefeller at this time. The problem with Rockefeller is people were no longer using the oil burning lamps, and so Rockefeller was trying to figure out how he was going to sell all his oil well. Cars were just becoming a thing, you know, motorized transportation and so, but the diesel, because it could run on other things besides petroleum, was threatening to Rockefeller. So Rockefeller did not like Rudolph diesel. The other challenge that became during this time was Rudolph diesel realized that even though he thought that this engine could be used for powering generators for towns or powering generators for small business, it really started getting picked up by a lot of the countries in a militaristic way. And one of the first use cases for the diesel engine was on ships. So steam ships would have these big plumes of smoke, and they would have these big smoke stacks, and they would have guys that had to sit in the bottom and or stand in the bottom and shovel coal into the into the burner to keep the ship going, diesel engines could actually run a ship much more efficiently than than coal could. But then that was when, and also, without having the obvious telltale sign of smoke, there was a lot less smoke coming off the top of it. So if you had a warship and it was using steam for power, well, guess what? People could see you coming from many miles away because of all the smoke coming off of this, off of the coal that you were burning. But if you were using a diesel engine, you could sneak up on people a lot more effectively, hmm, than you could. Well, the Germans took that and started putting it into submarines. And, you know, they called them U boats, right at the time. Yeah, Germany called them the U boats. Those submarines initially were using. They were experimenting with submarines, and they were very, very inefficient. They were very ineffective. But as soon as they started putting diesel motors into submarines. That's when the U boats became a big threat during during World War One. One thing that was also coming into its own at the time was Winston Churchill was running a secret development of a new type of armored vehicle, and they were calling these armored vehicles, land ships. They were big, big machines, but they tried to keep the development of these land ships secret from everyone, and they were bringing in steel and reinforcing these big armored vehicles. And when asked about why they were using so much steel, Winston Churchill's cover was that they were building water tanks, and that that's how armored vehicles got to be known as tanks. Oh, wow, that's interesting. Yeah, they were using, they were using the term water tank as a as a cover, and the term tank just kind of stuck. So all of these different uses of diesel engines started to come to be. Obviously. This made Rudolph diesel very wealthy. He started to make some money. He moved his family to Munich. They built a ginormous house and his children had a very good upbringing. His wife, Marta, had a very good social life, and things were okay with him. You know, some of the people from dirt nap city that he ran around with and was friends with. One was Ferdinand von Zeppelin. Oh, nice. And Zeppelin actually used diesel later in some of the later Zeppelin models. He met Thomas Edison one time, and he and Thomas Edison actually didn't get along very well because Thomas Edison was so arrogant. Apparently he was very discussive. He was a rival of John D Rockefeller. Rockefeller didn't like him. Teddy Roosevelt wrote that Rudolph diesel was one of the most brilliant inventors of his time. And then, as I said earlier, Henry Ford actually wanted to hire him to develop diesel engines for Ford vehicles, but he he declined on that. All of this is going on. Rudolph started to have some money, but then he also started to experience some problems with his money. He got a little over leveraged, and he was trying to raise more money. He was trying to kind of consolidate these different licenses he had given out for the. The building and manufacturing and distribution of diesel engines. And while this was all going on, he was starting to get a little over leveraged. And there there was some some financial problems brewing for him. Even though he was making a lot of money, he was also spending and losing a lot of money on some bad investments. Well, on September 29 1913 he boarded a steamship. Kind of ironic. It was a steamer named SS Dresden in Antwerp, England, and he was on his way to a meeting that he was supposed to have. He had dinner on the ship. He retired to his cabin around 10am or 10pm and then he was never seen again. He disappeared off the SS Dresden in the English Channel. Now there was a lot of conjecture about what happened, but a few other things that had gone on, number one right before this trip that he took on the SS Dresden, he had given his wife a gift before he left, and in it he had stuffed 20,000 German marks in cash he had with his son, Rudolph Jr. He had actually shown Rudolph where some of his important things around the house were hidden. Had gone around and made a point to show his son where they were hidden. And he had also shredded a bunch of papers before, before he went on this trip. So after he disappeared, there was a lot of conjecture about what happened? And there were kind of three main, three main theories. One was that he fell overboard accidentally and couldn't be found. Two was that he committed suicide by jumping overboard, and three was that he was murdered by somebody like, you know, Wilhelm Kaiser, Wilhelm the second or, or maybe, maybe John D Rockefeller had some, some of his goons come out and kill him. But nobody could really say for sure. And then there were some other weird things that happened when he disappeared at the back of this ship, the SS Dresden, there was a place where, apparently he had gone into the water, but he had a top hat and his coat were folded neatly on the edge of that now, why would somebody, why would somebody fold their coat and place their hat neatly on the edge before they fell into the water. Do you know the answer to that? No, no, I don't. I don't still, still got your what's your what's your implication there? What are you implying when you say, Why would somebody fold that? Well, I mean, if you were gonna kill yourself by jumping off a ship, would you, would you take off your top hat and fold your fold your jacket neatly and then jump in? I might okay. He might well, okay. So again, three, three theories, accident, he was sleepwalking, or he had had too much to drink at dinner, and he fell over the rail. It was a, it was a four and a half foot rail, by the way, so they don't think he fell, you know, even somebody sleepwalking, that would be kind of you'd have to intentionally climb up onto it. Was it suicide? Because his he was in financial ruin. There was a lot of people didn't want to talk about that. You know, it was kind of a forbidden thing to talk about suicide. But at the time, he was also poised. He had, he had made some money, he had lost some money, and now, because of how popular the diesel engine was and some military contracts he had coming up, he was about to make a lot more. So suicide. Seems like he was really close to getting going from millionaire to billionaire, kind of situation, you know, was it murder? Was it the German government, because they were mad that he was licensing this technology to their enemies? Was it John D Rockefeller and you know, his goons that he sometimes hired to enforce things. Well, here's what happened. Is about, let's see how many days later was it? It was like two weeks later, a Dutch Pilot Boat found a corpse of a man floating, floating in the water. It had been there for two weeks and was pretty badly decomposed. They pulled it close to the ship and actually had a guy go out in a little dinghy and remove any personal effects, well, on this body, supposedly, was. A pill, a little pill container, some eyeglasses, some pocket knife, and an ID card. And this stuff was brought in, and supposedly there was bad weather, and so they didn't pull the body, and the body was badly composed, so they just pushed the body away and let it just stay in the water rather than bringing it in. This stuff was sent to Eugen and and to his mother, and it was identified, and it was, yeah, that's that belongs to my father, Rudolph diesel. You know this pill, pill, pill case and eyeglasses case and pocket knife and all that stuff that was pulled from him. But What's strange about that is they didn't pull the body in, and supposedly in maritime law and tradition, no matter how badly decomposed a body was, they should have pulled him in, and the fact that they didn't makes everybody think that he faked his death, that this was all planned, that he didn't go out on the Dresden. He left somewhere and had gone back to to England or back to Germany, and that this group of Dutch people on this pilot boat just went along with this story. And, you know, someone was given these artifacts to say that he had died and that he actually immigrated to Canada so that he could get away from all these problems. But unless he had access to like you'd had to have somebody in on it, yes, feed him. Feed him his money. Otherwise, it's the same issue as why he wouldn't have killed himself, like if he's on the top of the world. Well, if you fake your own death and don't have access to that money, then it's other than the dying part. It's no different than faking your own death. Well, the other the other part that made it even more suspicious was about two months later, Marta disappeared mysteriously, his wife. Oh, so you think she joined him in Canada? She joined him in Canada. Yeah, that's a theory, but nobody ever proved it. It's never, he was never. So this is still an unsolved mystery. It is, it is, yeah, is Eugen still alive? Eugen is not, I would say he but I don't think he died until, like, the 60s or 70s, Eugen, but in his, in his biography of the family, he didn't ever say that, you know, that his, his death was faked, and maybe Eugen wasn't in on it, you know, maybe it was just him and Marta that's cold blooded. Yeah, yeah. But big mystery as to as to what happened to Rudolf Diesel. I mean, if it, the biggest reason that they think of this faked death theory is because it was really out of character for this Dutch Pilot Boat not to bring the body on board, despite bad weather, despite decomposition. That's something that they should have just done, you know, and so well, of course, there was no DNA. That wasn't a thing back then. So other than the convention that you said about how that's what you're supposed to do. I could see if this thing is nasty and it's decomposed, I could see not bringing it. Well, yeah, you can, but you're not a sailor, right? As a sailor, you know, they wanted, a lot of them believed that the soul couldn't rest until it was brought back to the family, kind of thing. So, yeah, I mean, it could have been any of those things, accident, suicide, murder or faked his own death, but, yeah, and now today, if you think about it, you know, we tend to think of when we think of transportation, we tend to think of personal vehicles, right, cars and such and such. And now there's electric cars and there aren't many diesel cars. Diesel cars never really caught on, but every, almost every tractor trailer truck that's out there is diesel, almost almost every ship, almost every bus, almost every construction equipment runs on diesel. Their airplanes that run on diesel. It's, yeah, the commercial cars that were diesel were all Volkswagens, I think, yeah, and German, that would make sense, because it was kind of founded from, from a German company. I knew somebody that had a Volkswagen Golf that was diesel, yeah, yeah, that's the that's the green, that's the green handle right at the gas station. Yeah, it is, it is, and it won't fit in the it won't fit in the normal gas gas dispenser. It won't fit in your normal gas tank. Thank God, and that's good, because if it did, it would wreck your right engine, right, right. Totally different type of fuel, much, much thicker, heavier fuel that doesn't burn like gasoline. You. Yeah, there is a show on TV series on Discovery Channel called the diesel brothers. And this was a pretty cool quote that I watched an episode just as I was doing this. These guys that go in and build custom trucks, you know, they'll take a old pickup truck and put a diesel engine in it and and make it nice. But they said a gas powered engine will hit the wall faster, but a diesel engine will drag it farther once you hit it. Hmm. Diesel is all about power versus versus speed. And then going back to the original clue I gave out there, Vin Diesel, not related. Is that his real last name? His real name is Mark since Sinclair. Oh, yeah, Vin Diesel. Vin Diesel was the stage name. So, yeah. So, yeah. I just thought, wow, there is a name that we hear all the time, a word that we hear all the time, and we don't even think about a person, but we all know the word. We all know what it's about. And so I thought I had to dig a little deeper, and probably won't make a comeback, just in the we're going the other direction right now, hopefully with with cleaner things. So that probably won't it's probably as already been, as popular as he'll be. Yeah, true, although, although, we're probably still a ways off from diesel, from replacing things like tractors and busses, you know. I mean Well, busses now are a lot of natural guests Island G run the bus fleets. True, true. Okay, well, Rudolph diesel, he was quite, quite an inventor, lived quite an interesting life, quite a brilliant man, but sort of an unsung hero. So hopefully, next time you hop on a bus or you're cruising on a on a big ship, a freighter or a cruise ship, you just take a moment to appreciate Mr. Rudolph diesel. Is there, wait a minute, if he faked his own death? Is there a chance that he's not dead? I mean, he was, he was born in 1858 so he'd be genetically pretty amazing if he what, if you faked your own death and then live to be 150 and you couldn't tell anybody about it, you'd be a vampire. Yeah? Well, let's assume he can go to dirt nap city. Then I think he's there. He's there TINKERING AWAY WITH with all the other inventors. Yeah. Vin Diesel's cruising in a shiny car. He's got muscles bigger than a protein bar, but let me tell you something that'll make you wheez. He's got no relation to the guy with the diesel grills. No Rudolph diesel in his family tree. Finn's not an inventor of machinery. He's fast and furious, but let's be clear, Rudolph's engines won't run on movie game. Finn's all about action and saving the day. Rudolph built engines in a whole different way. One's pumping fist, the other pump fuel. Finn's not an engineer. He's just super cool. No, Rudolph diesel in his family tree. Ben's not an inventor of machinery. He's fast and furious. But let's be clear, Rudolph's engines won't run on movie gear, so don't mix your diesels. They're not the same ones Hollywood fame. One's an engineering name. Ben's got torpor, not the mechanical kind Pluto's got pistons running through his mind. You no Rudolph diesel in his family tree. Ben's not an inventor of machine eatery. He's fast and furious. But let's be clear, Rudolph's engines won't run on to begin you.