I’m starting to read more about characters of the industrial age, perhaps spurred on by my recent adventures in machining and manufacturing, and just finished Douglas Brunt’s “The Mysterious Case of Rudolph Diesel.” Diesel, the inventor of the engine type that bears his name, lived an interesting life and also had an interesting death. Although I’m not sure I agree with the author on the circumstances of Diesel’s disappearance I enjoyed how the book weaved science, personalities, an pre-World War I era politics to tell a fascinating story.

A couple of things struck me about Diesel, the first was his motivation. He came from a lower class family. His father started as a independent craftsman but was eventually forced into factory labor as the industrial revolution progressed. At the time, factories often produced machanical power onsite using huge steam engines. Diesel saw factories as dirty and evil, and his great dream was to develop a power source that was small, clean, and reliable enough to enable independent craftsmen to make a living running their own shops. This, of course, led to the invention of the Diesel engine. Diesel, the man, never saw his dream come to reality, but the singular focus motivated him throughout his life.

Diesel was also an idealist and published “Solidarismus,” a treatise explaining his theories on how to solve the “social problems” of the age. The book flopped and Diesel could not understand why, after all, it was “developed and calculated strictly logically and numerically from life and facts” according to himself. Regardless, the point is that Diesel and other scientists of the day weren’t just engineers, but were very much “concernedwith the connection between their scientific achievements and the resulting affects on society once industry applied the achievements” in a way that I tend to think is lacking in today’s circles of innovation.

Another part of the book that stood out was Diesel’s meeting with Thomas Edison which, by all accounts, went poorly. Diesel believed in scientific training, was a talented mathematician and theorist, and worked on the premise that one needs to understand the theory of how something should work before continuing to the field. Edison, on the other hand, described himself as proudly self educated and “was more of a field scientist, tinkering with vaguely farmed concepts and sharpening his focus through trial and error.” (Perhaps Edison only found 1,000 ways to not make a lightbulb because he was bad at theory?) The contrast between these archetypes is fascinating and is something I will be thinking more about next time I need to take an idea from the drawing board to the real world.