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Rudolf Diesel The Inventor Who Vanished at Sea
On the night of 29 September 1913, a famous inventor boarded a steamship to England. He had dinner, said goodnight and went to his cabin. In the morning he was gone. Ten days later, a body was found in the North Sea.
Rudolf Diesel was born in Paris in 1858 to poor German parents. He was a brilliant student in Munich, where a professor taught him that steam engines wasted almost all of their fuel. Diesel set out to build an engine that wasted almost nothing: one that squeezed air until it was hot enough to ignite the fuel by itself. In 1893 his first engine exploded and nearly killed him. In 1897 it finally worked, and it made him a millionaire. At the 1900 World's Fair in Paris he showed it running on peanut oil.
But by 1913 he was deep in debt, and he hid it from his family. Before his last trip he gave his wife a bag she was not to open for a week. Inside were about 200,000 marks and papers that showed how much money was gone. Did he take his own life? Or, as newspapers wrote with Europe close to war, was he thrown overboard to stop him sharing his engine with the British? No one has ever proven what happened.
The facts behind this file
What the record shows
- Born 18 March 1858 in Paris. At the start of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 the family was expelled to London, and he was sent to relatives in Augsburg.
- An engine exploded during testing in Augsburg in 1893; he had a working engine by 1897.
- A diesel engine ran on peanut oil at the Paris Exposition of 1900.
- He disappeared from the steamer SS Dresden, Antwerp to Harwich, on the night of 29–30 September 1913. About ten days later a Dutch boat found a body; his son identified his belongings.
Legends, disputes & careful wording
- That his eyesight was damaged in the 1893 explosion is widely reported.
- The bag with about 200,000 marks and his financial papers was reported by his family.
- Suicide (debts, depression) is the most common view; newspapers at the time suggested murder. No one has proven what happened.
Spotted a mistake or know a better source? Tell us.
Further reading
- The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel The inventor who vanished from a ship in 1913. View on Amazon →
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Image & film credits
- First Diesel engine (MAN Museum): CC BY-SA 3.0 · Second prototype, 1894: CC BY-SA 4.0 · Diesel engine, Deutsches Museum: CC BY-SA 3.0.
- Other images are public domain (Diesel portraits, 1892 patent drawing, Harwich Line steamer, Paris 1900, U-boats at Kiel 1914). Video clips from Pexels. Music and sound made for this video.
