Rudolph Diesel's Most Clever Creation, Part One

His Engine is Civilization's Heart and His Fuel Is Her Blood

Nikola Tesla may have created the 20th Century, but it is Rudolf Diesel's weird trick that does all the moving. This man deserves far more credit for the Civilization we share. The Diesel Engine is Civilization's Heart and Diesel Fuel is Civilization's Blood.

Civilization's Number One energy problem is tied up in Rudolph Diesel's weird trick. It can be fairly easily solved with effort and innovation. But so far, we aren't asking the right questions. If we don't ask the right questions, we will never get to solutions that actually matter. Let’s think about the proper questions to ask.

The proper questions can be deduced from this scary-looking chart if you can see it for what it is. It shows global energy consumption 1965 to 2020. And it’s mostly black. Daunting. Depressing. It looks like we are all going to die very soon indeed.

To see what this chart is showing, it helps to start with the history of the development of the diesel engine. You see, Diesel invented the most perfect engine ever devised by humans. To understand why, we need to go back to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

Thomas Savery (1650 – 1715) was, as far as we know, the first human being to create a commercially-used steam machine (a pump) (patented 1698) to perform useful work, for draining mines and providing water supply, even though technically it was not an engine.

Thomas Newcomen (1664-1729, England), an ironmonger, created the first practical steam engine that had commercial value. His “atmospheric engine” works like this:

This simple Conversion Technology—an engine converting heat into work—changed Civilization forever, slowly at first, then suddenly. Hundreds of Newcomen engines were produced in the 1700s, primarily to drain mines. James Watt made efficiency improvements that eventually led to the development of the steam locomotive. But that’s a different story. Rudolf diesel was not interested in locomotion. He was on a mission to make industrial horsepower affordable for the masses.

One of Rudolf Diesel’s mentors, albeit indirectly, was another Frenchman (Diesel himself was born in Paris), named Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot (1796 – 1832). He was a mechanical engineer, scientist, and physicist and is known as the “father of thermodynamics.”

In his 1824 book on engines, published when he was but 27 years of age, Carnot offered the first correct theory about the maximum efficiency of a character known as a “heat engine.” A heat engine is any system that converts heat into kinetic or mechanical energy to do work. This is the cover page of Carnot’s reflections. He probably had no idea what possessed him to write this book. At the time, nobody read it. But we should be grateful he did because he died just a few short years later in 1832.

Carnot's principle states that no engine can be more efficient than a reversible engine (a Carnot heat engine) operating between the same high temperature and low-temperature reservoirs. In other words, Carnot imagined a perfect engine that converted 100% of the heat energy into 100% of the equivalent of motion energy. No friction. No heat loss.

Born in 1858 in Paris, Rudolf Diesel made a difference. By the time he entered the Technische Hochschule (Technical School) in Munich in the 1870s, the steam engine had seen significant development far beyond its use on rail. In fact, it would be no exaggeration to say that the stationary steam engine was every bit as much the heart of the Industrial Revolution as was the steam locomotive.

The steam engine seems quaint to us today, but it is literally the Revolution in the Industrial Revolution. Work suddenly became easy. All humans needed was to find heat and presto, they could eat all the bread they wanted for the cost of the fuel to feed their new mechanical work horse. The only thing it needed—besides the capital to make the machine—was the fuel to feed it.

Problem was, the Steam Engine was a hungry beast. As powerful as it was, it was wildly inefficient compared to modern engines. It consumed mountains of coal and forests of wood. The famous Jupiter steam locomotive—the Central Pacific engine at the Golden Spike ceremony at Promontory, Utah, ran on redwood from California forests. The replica is true to its history. The Union Pacific engine ran on Coal. But to the people at the time, the engine was simply miraculous. Fuel was abundant and the world’s population small.

And yet the inefficiency and high cost of the steam engine were the very problems young Rudolf Diesel set out to change. It seems fair to say that young Rudolph Diesel was both an idealist and a humanist: His life goal was to crack the steam engine. Why? Because of its poor thermodynamic efficiency, the steam engine was only available to the rich. Diesel had compassion on the less-fortunate and disenfranchised who could not afford the benefits of steam power but who rather worked to feed it.

To bring affordable engines to the common ranks, Diesel had to better the steam engine. So successful was his achievement that the only place we see steam engines is in museums and history books.

This humble invention is even more important to Civilization than Edison's light bulb and Tesla's alternating current, as important as it is. We don't pay enough attention to it and what's really happening.