RUDOLF CHRISTIAN KARL DIESEL, born in 1858, the son of an expatriate Augsburg craftsman, and brought up in poverty, passed out of the Technical University in Munich with the most brilliant examination results in the Institution's history.
One of his teachers was the founder of modern refrigeration engineering, Carl von Linde, and, from him, Diesel learned a lot of the theory of heat engines. Contemplating this, Diesel saw that he could make an engine four times as efficient as the abysmal steamers of the time, by generating the heat of combustion actually inside the working cylinder, and subjecting the working fluid (air) to as wide a temperature range as possible by utmost compression and expansion.
According to his theory, extremely high pressures would be necessary since the temperature reached would partly depend on the pressure-and so the air would have to be compressed before any fuel was introduced, lest combustion be premature. It was this feature that distinguished the diesel engine from the conventional, spark-ignited,
internal-combustion engine that was enjoying contemporaneous development.
In the spark-ignition engine, the fuel was mixed with the air before admission to the cylinder, wherein it was compressed as much as was safe before ignition; in the diesel engine, only air was admitted to the cylinder, where it was compressed as much as was necessary to raise it to the temperature at which fuel, then injected into it, would ignite spontaneously.
The first diesel patent was taken out in 1892 in Berlin. His first engine ran on coal dust, but it was when he converted to partially refined oil ' that it became a success. Unfortunately, Diesel had no business talent, although he might ultimately have profited greatly from the enormous commercial exploitation of his type of engine. He died in 1913 in the North Sea after falling from a ship in which he was travelling for consultations with the British Admiralty.
Also see: Honour Roll - Founding Fathers Of The Automotive Industry
