Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Benz here sitting in for Jerry, and this is stuff you should know?
What you know?
I kind of pick up the.
Ball the baton. We are doing an episode today on Rudolph Diesel, invention of our inventor of the diesel engine. And this was prepared for us by Anna Green, one of our writers, and edited 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 like a 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 Coiner and then very mysteriously Leo and Jenny Oh No, last name yeah, Leo and Jenny. The last name isn't in Jenny.
Right, No, the middle initial is in in the last name is Jenny.
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 that Diesel engine, the d should be capitalized because it was invented. It's named after its inventor, Rudolph Diesel, who was working around the turn of the last century and a little bit before, a little bit after.
And he was a German kid born in Paris to a father who well, his father was a bit of a character, as we'll see in some of the worst ways. But who was 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 we 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 the 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 eighteen sixty seven came across his first internal combustion engine at the Paris World's Fair when he saw the auto engine, Nicholas Auto'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 Auto's was like the culmination of it. It was like the real deal. So the fact that it really struck young Rudolph Diesel, this would have been oh he would have been fifteen, nineteen, No, he would have been nine.
Yeah.
Imagine being a nine year old kid and seeing an internal combustion engine and saying to yourself, this is what I want to dedicate my life.
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 eighteen sixty seven. 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 and 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 twelve at the time and uncle said, come back to Germany, come back to Ausburg, live with us. Your uncle here, Christophe Barnacle, 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 eighteen sixty five, his dad said, hey, need you to come back to London and get some get a job and help us out, like your schooling is over. Rudolph said nine, I'm gonna 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 Technicia Hochschuler Munschen there in what we call Munich, Germany.
He got a scholarship to go there and very the word I'm looking for when something happens, it's very important and auspicious.
No, resolute, No.
Not that sort of the opposite of coincidence. Uh, purposefully yeah, yeah, perpendicularly, just very importantly. There, I will say, met one Carl von Linda, who would be his 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.
Auspiciously, like auspicious as fate would have it. No, it is auspicious, right, predetermination, predestination someone 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 epic engine, the steam engine invented by Danny Steam.
Right. No, he came across the Carnov cycle, Right, Wasn't that another thing that really kind of struck him floated his boat?
Yeah, besides Danny Steam's invention.
Yeah, well, the Carno cycle is this It is a theoretical engine external combustion engine that where every bit of energy put into it produces work, so it's one hundred percent efficient. It's essentially impossible, but it's theoretically possible. And that combined with auto's internal combustion engine, really kind of came together to give Rudolph Diesel like his his purpose in life, his mission in life. And then, like you said, when he fortuitously met Carl von Linz.
The word yeah.
Everything came together because now he had a mentor of Haron, a guy who gave him a job right out of 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. 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 Rudolph Diesel in his invention for that. It's it's just mind boggling the series of events that happened to do that, and the effect that it had on the world.
No.
Absolutely. He moved back to Paris eventually in eighteen eighty and like you said, he went to work for Carl von Linde. I think it said Linda and I had.
I just imagine him being like a seventies mom.
I think German. It wouldn't be lend I think it would be lind like with Ah at the end.
Sure, but I don't know about Linda.
You know, like Linda's bagels. He worked for for Lynd 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. Ye, 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 had Theodore Diesel not come along or Rudolph Diesel not come along.
That's a good point.
So he graduated like like we kind of put the car 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 his 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 n w A and I guess prevent from just being tea.
Right, or hot tea sure, or even tepid ta.
Right, tepid t. That's that's your refer name.
Reallypid t.
Yeah, neither hot nor cold.
You have to say it like you're slightly annoying, tepid tea.
Yeah, exactly. He started working on engines again, this this idea popped back into his head, this memory of the Carno cycle of like, gosh, there's got to be a way to make Danny Steam's engine more efficient. And for about six or seven years he worked on and 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 eighteen ninety two.
Uh 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? And when he was trying to come up with his diesel engine.
All right, let's do it.
Stop you know, stop stop stop here? Should know no stop you know stop stop stop here? Shouldn't know stuff? You should know as w s K.
You should know, 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 five hundred thousand people, there were probably one hundred thousand horses, and all of them were walking around, pooping and peeing everywhere,
all over the place. So an alternative to horse power 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 powers 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 eighteen sixties a book by a guy named Stanley Jevin or Jivaon 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. Rudolph Diesel was exactly the kind of person who this 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 in this drive.
Yeah. Absolutely. He went back idea wise, at least to the auto engine again an internal combustion engine, but auto'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. 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, and ended up sort of using this idea from a tinder box that he saw that was a base a sparkless way to ignite tender and it was like a sort of like a syringe. It was larger, it was about the size of a like a bicycle pump, but like a glass syringe 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 ten percent efficient. So ninety percent of the energy in the coal is lost to heat to the environment, only ten percent.
Terrible.
Actually, 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 the stuff that led up to that piston moving and just like make the engine that piston. 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 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 uh, you know, while while Danny Steam's invention may have powered the industrial Revolution, what what did it do for the artisan in the countryside, or the craftsmen 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 that it can revitalize the countryside and make people in rural areas give them the same sort of chance to succeed by having the power of an engine at their disposal.
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. And so if you have a light, portable, efficient engine that people in the rural areas can use, yeah, like you said, it give them 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 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 fares.
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 Krup to give him some money. Von Botz, for his part, was a managing director at Machine Fabric Alsberg and also said, hey, you can take some of my factory space to work on this stuff. So Rudolph moved to Alsberg in eighteen ninety three 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, a, no, compressing air can ignite this thing, but I just don't know how much pressure I'm gonna need. And for a little while it got a little dangerous in that machine shop.
Yeah there, 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, it's essentially adding some combustible fluid to 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 demonstration. I think they just tried it the first time and the it compressed air so much I guess, and produced so much heat that the engine blew up and like you said, blue throughout the lab like pieces
of the engine went flying. 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 and there's smoke coming off of there. He's like it worked. In that he proved that if you compressed air you could create he ate 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, 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 thirty nine years old, which is pretty incredible to think about, and felt comfortable enough to do a public test on February seventeenth, eighteen ninety seven, in front of an audience there at the Machine Fabric Factory for the employees and engineers. A few other firms were there,
and it was a really big, big success. And he in that he achieved not only a working engine, but it was had a basically invisible and almost odorless exhaust and reached an efficiency of twenty six point two percent compared with Danny Steams measly ten percent.
Yeah, and you're like, well that's you know, not that much better. That is a mind boggling improvement in efficiency over the existing technology that was just out of the gate. It was revolutionary. And like you said, I think Friedrich Krup. Is that how you pronounced 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 Krupper Krup family that gave rise to the Tyson Krup International mega conglomerate from Europe. It might be okay, so Tyson Krup, you're familiar with that company, right, They're just enormous?
Sure?
Two, Yeah, that's right. And so I was reading a little bit about Friedrich Croup on Wikipedia and little known fact he used to write a giraffe everywhere he went.
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 this was in technology. One of his biographers, a man named It's last name is a Brunt, said it was the most disruptive technology in history. 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. And then no less than Edison said it was one of the greatest achievements of mankind. So that's how big of a deal the diesel engine was.
Yeah, And again, so Rudolph is like, like, this is happening, Like I'm making this happen like this, 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 smooth dover, 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 he had wincient triciall 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 twenty two different licenses over a two year period in eighteen ninety seven and eighteen ninety eight alone to people like Watson and
Yarn and Yarien in Scotland. Augustus Bush bought the United States and Canadian license for what would be nine million dollars 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 US dollars in twenty twenty four.
What did you get?
Did you try?
Yeah?
What did you get?
I got eleven and a half million US dollars today?
Oh boy, I got three hundred and fifty million dollars.
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 eighteen ninety eight to two twenty three or twenty four dollars.
Marks and then all the euros now though.
Right, But there was a selection you could chase convert it to euros or Marx Deutsche marks.
Oh okay, and I clicked deutsch marks.
I'm almost positive. And then I took that and exchanged at today's rate for US dollars. That's how I came up with it. But I mean, you know, me and math, you're proud wrecking buttons and stuff like that. I'm not that good.
No, I think your methodology was better. What I did was I went back to see what the Deutsche mark to the US dollar was in nineteen or in eighteen ninety.
Eight, and pulled a few economists.
I converted that to US dollars front to eighteen ninety eight US dollars and then did a calculation. So that's probably that's good, the wrong methodology, but.
I mean it's crazy that they would be so wildly, so wildly off. So what was yours? Like three hundred million? Yeah, and mine was like eleven year. Let's split the difference and saved about one hundred and sixty million marks or US dollars today.
Well, I think your 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 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, intentions 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, Rudolph Diesel was not a fan of the Kaiser, was not a fan of the ultranationalism that was starting to develop in Germany that helped lead
the world to World War One. 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 helped them with their arms race to create the diesel engines that will be used to power this new scary technology called submarines.
Yeah. In nineteen twelve he co founded the Consolidated Diesel Engine Company with a British engineer named George Correll's 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 Correll'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 wikiped but I'm just kidding.
Crap.
I'm sorry. It wasn't intended to mislead you. I I it was really a targeted 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. So I tend to just be like, holy cow, listen to that.
Wow, that's really something. Giggled like a school girl.
You say, I just got joshed.
I'm sorry. You got caught in the drag net, is what it was.
So, uh, should we take another break?
Sure?
All right, let's take another break. We'll talk a little bit more about diesel.
Stop you know, stop stood stop here? Shouldn't know no, stop you know stop stood stop here, shouldn't know stop you should know as why why.
Sk sk?
But tough he 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 eighteen ninety. But when he moved to Alsberg, 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 magnificent, most magnificent idea. Aside from that engine, sure will be this mansion from architect Max Littman. And it was. It was
quite a mansion. And 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 arts stuff. One, yeah, two, three, four. Five bathrooms a lot for back then for sure. And I'm not talking out houses, I mean bathroom.
I mean I don't have five bathrooms in his twenty twenty four.
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 like it was a big deal. And not only was it a beautiful, amazing, advanced mansion that he helped design, this put a inder, a punctuation mark on years of living away from his family in different countries, like 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 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 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 it. 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 in Douglas Brunt, one of his recent biographers from twenty twenty four is at odds with a biographer from the seventies named John Frederick Moon. Moons like he was destitute and desperate.
This guy was in dire financial streets. Douglas Brunt, who again wrote much more recently forty years, six fifty years more recently, good God, he was like, No, actually, I think that this was like an eighteen nineties phase and that you know, after the turn of the century, started to make his money back again, and that he was on okay financial footing.
Yeah, he was still really wrapped up in this this big idea of you know, saving the common person. In nineteen oh three, he wrote a book called or published one and at least in nineteen oh three 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 of the class division being you know, not 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 him what that wonder seems like?
I said, Yeah, there was one review that called it a real pain to read.
That's not a glowing review, No know what you're looking for. But in writing that book in conjunction with Create 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 nineteen oh three, nineteen oh three.
Over the next ten 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 one 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 nineteen thirteen September twenty ninth, I believe he went on a fateful trip more than a three hour toer, but it was it's not that much, more like less than twenty four hours, I think, to go do a groundbreaking of the company that he co founded with George Carrell's.
Yeah, I got a named Alfred Laucom, 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. Very mysterious thing to do. But he went to Ghent and got on the S. S. Dresden on the twenty ninth 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 gonna go to bed, and he was never seen again. No.
The next morning, his companions, George Carrell's 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. Just 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, Rudolph Diesel just vanished off the SS Dresden.
That's right. And what was in that leather bag that he gave his wife.
Twenty thousand German marks. No idea how much that is in today's US dollars, but it was a significant amount of money.
Let's say there was a lot of money. And there were also financial records basically showing that they were broke. So that sort of seen, at least at this point in his life, puts to rest the question that they were financial troubles. 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. The 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, no one knew and seemingly no one knows for sure, even though most people agreed that it was suicide.
Yeah, the folded coat kind of says something that it wasn't just falling overboard. That kind of goes away with that one. And that was the initial one too, because he had he had been said to have been in high spirits. George Carrell said that after dinner, as they walked some. They walked him back to his state room. He said, I'll see you tomorrow. Yeah, 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.
You don't drop 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 at my life in a couple hours, that doesn't matter. And then George Crels 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, you know, their engines for the submarines for the war, or Rockefeller. So those generally don't hold up
when you look into him more closely. And like I said, most people say it was suicide, but they're the the what was his first name, Brent's name, Douglas Douglas Brunt, who wrote the Maurice biography as a theory that he did not die at all and that he was it was sort of faked, basically 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 nineteen fourteen that said as much that he'd been rumored to be working in Canada. That is probably not true because about eleven days, I think eleven 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 that turned up at the mouth of a Dutch river and was taken ashore and taken into town and was identified or viewed by one of his sons as almost certainly his dad, but not a positive identification because it was too decomposed.
Or 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, I saw everywhere I saw. It was at the mouth of a Dutch River. He was just pulled out of the water. But I saw in a lot of places, including the 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 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, pin knife to a pillbox, and I even saw one say that 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. Other most places I saw didn't mention an ID card, but they did say that the sun identified the items and said, yeah, those are my Debt's things.
And then mysteriously among his possessions was found the tooth of a giraffe.
I don't believe that.
Good, You're like, no, that's the one truth, right, So, I mean that's no one knows what happened to him. There's no solution to that puzzle. Yeah, I'm going with that was his body, you think, Yeah, 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, 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 you know, the invention of that engine was h you know, you heard the quotes that changed the history of the world in a lot of ways and such that it just a cup years ago. In twenty twenty two, a full ninety six percent of trucks in the EU run on
diesel engines. And here in America it's a little bit different because we've been 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 twenty three percent of fuel in the US is diesel fuel still.
Yeah, And the reason why people say it's superior is because even though there's more CO two, there's more carbon in diesel fuel. Diesel burns more efficiently than gas, so it actually releases less CO two than gas does, even though there's more CO two. And diesel because less is burned over the course of say fifty miles or something like that. So it's true, but still it does it is a polluter. If you're trying to get away from fossil fuels, diesels 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, seventies Mercedes Benz Diesel from their parents or something or their grandpa 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 smokes.
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 the one last time, it's time for listener maw.
I'm gonna call this Harvard follow up with the old Puritans episode. Hey guys, in your recent episode of 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 sixties 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 at the purpose to be educating a quote learned learned clergy end quote. So if they stopped doing that, the
school was no longer following its charter. Another wise choice. Later, the university doubled down at support, and some three decades or so after, it was the institution in which I spent three years on my way to a Master's 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 were 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 are 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 reverends. That's funny that mention of how attendance was down in the sixties so much that they were going to sell the Divinity School reminded me of Reverend Lovejoy's origin story from The Simpsons, and he was saying it was the early seventies. The sixties were over and people were ready to feel bad about themselves again.
So good.
Yeah, 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 Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
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