No. 1, 2008

The inventor of the Diesel engine is 150 years old

The famous inventor Rudolf Diesel created an original engine of his own design in 1893 which made a breakthrough in mechanical engineering. Few remember now, however, that he and the well-known Russian industrialist Emmanuel Nobel joined hands in getting the mass production of internal combustion engines under way in this country. Their joint effort pushed Russia to the forefront in the field of engineering and had a tremendous role to play in promoting the development of motor transport in the early 20th century.

Early years

Rudolf Christian Karl Diesel was born on March 18, 1858 in Paris into the family of German immigrants. In 1870, the Franco-Prussian war broke out, and the Diesel family had to move to Britain. Later, Rudolf’s parents sent him to relatives who resided in Augsburg, Germany, where he finished a technical school with honors in 1873 and entered the local polytechnical college. In 1875, Rudolf Diesel passed a colloquium and was admitted to the Higher Polytechnical School in Munich which he graduated in 1877. In 1878, the young engineer moved to France where Professor Karl von Linde offered him the directorship of an industrial plant in Paris which belonged to the Le refrigerateur joint stock company. In 1890, after a 12-year spell with the company’s Paris branch, Rudolf Diesel, then already a Board Member of the refrigerating machines manufacturing company, moved to Berlin.

Over those 12 years, Rudolf Diesel designed numerous absorption-type engines operating on ammonium and other original devices ranging from miniature sewing machine engines to huge stationary units depending on solar energy for their operation. As he wrote later, “my untiring endeavors and endless analyses finally gave birth to an idea which filled me with enormous joy: it occurred to me that atomized fuel should be injected into compressed hot air instead of ammonia and, as it ignites, expanded in such a way that maximum heat could be put to useful work.”

On February 28, 1892, Rudolf Diesel took out a patent for The Operational Process and Method of One-Cylinder and Multi-Cylinder Engine Construction. The patent was bought by the German company Karel Bros, and later the Diesel Joint Stock Company was set up in France. The first pilot engine was constructed in Augsburg in 1893 under the guidance of Diesel himself. Trial runs began right away, with new pilot models already on the drawing boards. Three of them materialized over three years but only the third one proved operational. “The first engine does not work, the second is not quite up to the mark, but the third one will be good!” Diesel wrote to Vogel, a colleague of his.

The “Diesel” brand wins world renown

The first engine was designed to burn coal dust without water-cooling the cylinders. Coal dust had to be given up, and the second pilot model used kerosene instead. As distinct from the first engine, the second one, tested in 1894, put in a steady no-load performance.

Diesel’s third pilot model embodied the trial run results to work 30 minutes running on May 1, 1895 and underwent hot testing some time later.

The fourth and final engine, rated at 20 hp and suitable for commercial use, came into being in December 1896. Its cylinder pressure amounted to 35 atm, and compressed air temperature was about 600-800°C. The new engine’s performance efficiency factor was about 34% as compared with the best steam engines’ 15. At February 1897 trials the engine consumed 0.24 g of kerosene per one hp an hour. Its net efficiency was 0.26, and its thermal cycle efficiency, 0.29, which put it in a class by itself by the late-19th century standards. In the same year of 1897, the first Diesel engine was constructed by the Augsburg plant. It was three meters tall, could be revved up to 172 rpm, its only cylinder was 250 mm across, its piston stroke was 400 mm, its rating, from 17.8 to 19.8 hp, and it consumed 258 g of gasoline per one hp per hour. The engine’s thermal cycle efficiency amounted to 26.2%, i.e. was much higher than that of steam engines.

The 1898 steam engines exhibition in Munich highlighted Rudolf Diesel’s career, successful as it was. He gained world renown and fame. Licenses for the manufacturing of Diesel engines sold like hot cakes in Germany and abroad. At the 1900 World Exhibition in Paris, the Diesel engines took the Grand Prix. The advent of an inexpensive-to-run engine signified oil’s triumph over coal, but for Rudolf Diesel things did not run altogether smoothly. In Germany, many manufacturers dismissed the Diesel engine as a bad job. Having failed to gain recognition at home, Rudolf Diesel established strong business contacts with French, Swiss, Austrian, Belgian, Russian and American industrialists. In 1898, Emmanuel Nobel, one of the earliest Diesel engine enthusiasts, decided to retool his St. Petersburg-based Ludvig Novel plant for its production and was granted a monopoly to manufacture the Diesel engine in Russia. Emmanuel Nobel paid Rudolf Diesel 800,000 marks in cash, and the rest, in shares of the Russian Diesel joint stock company set up in Nuremberg.

The Diesel engine takes Russia by storm

Nuremberg’s Russian Diesel company received working drawings of a 20-hp engine and forwarded them on to the Ludvig Nobel plant in St. Petersburg, its Russian licensee, to go by in manufacturing Russia’s first Diesel engine. A member of the Nobel family suggested that an oil-burning model of the engine be developed. Emmanuel Nobel and his team of gifted engineers modified the original engine design on franchise terms. Anton Karlsund promptly made it reversible – a feature of utmost importance for vehicular power plants. A pilot model was refined and tested in late 1898 and early 1899. In 1898, the world’s first fuel injection engine, an improvement on Diesel’s invention, was built in cooperation with the Nobel plant’s specialists and put into operation as early as 1899. In 1900, the plant turned out seven such engines rated at 30 and 40 hp. In 1912, the plant employed nearly 1,000 workers and had an output capacity of over 300 engines a year. “Russian Diesel engines” powered the St. Petersburg municipal waterworks’ pumping station, the lighting system of the Yeliseyev Bros Food Emporium in Nevsky Prospekt, and the city’s electric power plants that catered for municipal energy needs.

“Internal combustion engines produced by Russian plants are in no way inferior to foreign makes in structural precision and manufacturing quality. At present, Diesel engines are being made in Russia by five plants (Kolomna, St. Petersburg, Riga, Sormovo and Nikolayev) each of them bent on continuous engine improvement in immediate response to user demands,” Emmanuel Nobel told a meeting of the Ludvig Nobel Mechanical Engineering Company’s stockholders. In the early 1900s, the Ludvig Nobel plant that belonged to the Company, became a diesel engine manufacturing center. As licenses were sold to other plants – diesel engine production gained in scale, and public interest in the novelty rose nationwide amid oil production boom in Russia.

From 1903 on, steam engines began to cede place to Diesel ones in the river fleet. When a patent sale contract was being negotiated with Rudolf Diesel in St. Petersburg, the inventor stipulated that his engine be manufactured by a plant fitted out with appropriate process equipment and manned with top-skilled personnel. In order to get Russian entrepreneurs interested in buying the patent (which was in the Branobel Company’s interests) Rudolf Diesel came to St. Petersburg specially to make sure that his terms and conditions were meticulously observed by Russian engineers and technicians.

A commercial heavy-fuel internal combustion engine constructed in Russia created a sensation in the business world. That was a turning point in the history of vehicular propulsion technology. Oil fuel demand in Russia, as elsewhere in the world, began to rise dramatically. The Diesel engine became the most economical and, consequently, one of the environment-friendliest prime movers of the 20th century. As Rudolf Diesel himself wrote about his “brainchild”: “An invention has never been just a product of creative imagination: it comes from a conflict between abstract thought and the material world… An inventor who holds a pride of place in the history of technological progress has not merely pioneered certain thoughts and ideas but materialized an idea of his which had probably crossed many other people’s minds…”