Late Great Engineers: Rudolf Diesel - Powering the modern world

Diesel engines play a part in the lives of us all. They generate electricity. Pump water and gas. Propel ships, trucks and buses. Power railway locomotives, farming, military and construction machinery. We may live in an age where the focus has shifted to the use of renewable energy and green fuels, but diesel engines are still with us, and they will be for years to come. In fact, the man behind the engine that powered the modern world was also a visionary who foresaw the use of sustainable fuels when he said: ‘The use of vegetable oils for engine fuels may seem insignificant today. But such oils may become in course of time as important as petroleum and the coal tar products of the present time.’ That man was of course Rudolf Diesel, the engineer whose name will be for ever linked with his sparkless compression-ignition engine that extracted the maximum amount of work from a given heat source. In his biography Rudolf Diesel and the Diesel Engine John F Moon, writing in the 1970s, claimed that the invention ‘has yet to be bettered commercially.’ Half a century on, and despite new and competing alternative technologies, that claim still has merit.