Stop Knocking Diesel Engines.

"The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel

By Douglas Brunt

(Atria, 384 pages, $28.99)

If America were a saner place, Washington would have more than two political parties, Major League Baseball would never have created the designated hitter, and we'd all be driving cars with clean, highly efficient diesel engines. You can quibble with me on the first two points, but you can't argue in 2023 that diesel isn't the better alternative to gasoline (or batteries). Long gone are the days of your grandfather's Oldsmobile belching black smoke in the driveway every morning. Today's diesel emissions are no worse than those of gasoline engines, mainly because diesels are, on average, 30% more fuel efficient. They're also more reliable and last longer than typical gasoline engines.

The glories of the diesel engine and its inventor are chronicled in Douglas Brunt's excellent biography, "The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel." Diesel's rags-to-riches story is a fascinating one. But Mr. Brunt, a novelist whose books include "Trophy Son" and "The Means," puts the man and his revolutionary technology in the context of the Industrial Age, World War I, and the intertwined geopolitics of England, France, Germany, Russia and the U.S. at the beginning of the 20th century. The result is a well-researched and well-written biography of an inventor who, in 1897, created a new type of internal-combustion engine that quickly supplanted the steam engine and changed the way we move and make things.

Diesel was born in Paris in 1858. His father, an immigrant from Bavaria, was a tinkerer who crafted handmade purses and children's toys. As anti-Prussian animosity began to rise in France in 1870, the Diesels fled to England; there, we are told, 12-year-old Rudolf encountered horrors "that haunted him the rest of his life: tenement housing of the London industry laborers, factories with poor lighting and no ventilation, the foul smells of wretched humans mixed with the smog of coal smoke from belching machines." Luckily, sponsors in Bavaria agreed to take in young Rudolf. He soon displayed a proficiency for engineering and graduated at the head of his class at a polytechnic school. Eventually he turned his mind to creating a more efficient internal-combustion engine.

To convey the importance of Diesel's creation, Mr. Brunt explains what the world was like, and how work got done, before the advent of the internal-combustion engine. Most machines at the time were powered by external combustion through a process that heated water -- primarily by coal in Europe and wood in North America -- to create the steam needed to drive an engine's pistons and gears. This applied to ships, trains and large manufacturing machines.

The steam engine, however, was highly inefficient, losing much of the heat that was generated to boil water. The early gasoline engines of Karl Benz and others sought to address this problem, but the heavy-fuel, compression-ignition engine that Diesel developed in the 1890s proved so efficient and mechanically sound that it became the engine of choice for most industries, particularly shipbuilding.

Indeed, prior to Diesel's innovations, ships had to "raise steam" before they could be put to sea, a process that could take hours. With a diesel engine, a ship could get under way in minutes. Diesel engines also eliminated the need for dozens of men shoveling coal into boilers; freed of all those men and all that coal, ships could take on more cargo. "Diesel burned a viscous fuel that had no fumes, was safe to store, and the engine consumed its fuel so efficiently that a ship could circumnavigate the globe without stopping to refuel, and it did so with no discernible exhaust to give away the ship's presence on the horizon," Mr. Brunt writes. "What's more, the fuel for a Diesel engine came from the natural resources that were abundant nearly everywhere," including vegetable oils and other biofuels.

What, then, of automobiles? Diesel's work was mainly focused on large engines, and as a result the automotive industry went with gasoline. Gas was cheap, akin to the kerosene that had been lighting streets and homes for decades; meanwhile, the automobile engines of the early 20th century didn't require the horsepower and torque that the diesel engine produced. In 1910, the gas engine's chief competitor wasn't diesel but steam and electric engines.

The diesel engine's smokeless efficiency over long distances also breathed new life into the submarine, something navies had long been trying to figure out. Suddenly, with the world on the brink of war, the submarine became a much more viable -- and more deadly -- weapons platform.

Rudolf Diesel was celebrated for his invention and stood alongside Thomas Edison and Henry Ford as a pioneer of industry. He did business with Adolphus Busch -- whose factories needed engines to pump water and cool beer -- as well the Nobels and Rothschilds and their oil-producing companies. But Diesel made an enemy of John D. Rockefeller, whose Standard Oil was already losing market share to electricity companies thanks to Edison's lightbulb. Rockefeller, Mr. Brunt tells us, "viewed Diesel's revolutionary technology -- an engine that didn't require gasoline or any product derived from crude oil -- to be an existential threat."

Diesel disappeared at sea in 1913, giving rise to the "mysterious case" of the title. Mr. Brunt speculates -- based on rumor, anecdote and conspiracy theories -- that Diesel may have been killed by the industrialists who stood to lose from the growing popularity of his engine. There's also a theory that Diesel's death may have been faked by British intelligence, which wanted to spirit him off to Canada to develop diesel engines for the British navy.

So why isn't Rudolf Diesel better known, and why aren't more of us driving cars powered by his revolutionary invention? Diesels were popular in Europe for decades thanks to exorbitant gasoline prices, something Americans haven't had to contend with until recently. I'd like to think that diesels could enjoy a renaissance, but the Volkswagen scandal of a few years ago, when the carmaker was caught fooling EPA emissions tests, once again gave diesel a black eye in America. And that's too bad. Both the engine and the man deserve another look." [1]

1. Stop Knocking Diesel Engines. Yost, Mark. 
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 20 Sep 2023: A.17.