Douglas Brunt’s The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel uncovers the 1913 vanishing of the diesel engine inventor, whose 40% fuel-efficient tech revolutionized ships and submarines but was allegedly suppressed by Kaiser Wilhelm II (to hide U-boat secrets) or John D. Rockefeller (to protect his oil monopoly). Brunt links Diesel’s disappearance to geopolitical tensions—his canceled Titanic voyage and meeting with Adolphus Bush—and suggests his death silenced a threat to both war machines and petroleum dominance, leaving modern industry built on an erased legacy. [Automatically generated summary]
Welcome to this week's interview with Douglas Brunt.
He's a historian and a novelist, but he's written this book.
You know, usually these interviews, we talk about issues that you've heard of.
This is an issue you've never heard of.
And until I started reading this book, which I just finished yesterday, I had never heard of.
It's one of the loopiest stories I've ever heard.
It's an amazing true story.
The fact that I've never heard of it or heard of the person involved just really got me as I started reading it.
Every few pages, I was going, you got to be kidding me.
So I'm just going to bring Douglas on to tell you about it.
The name of the book is The Mysterious Case of Rudolph Diesel.
It is already a New York Times bestseller, and I can understand why.
It's incredibly gripping.
And like I said, one of the craziest stories you'll ever hear.
Doug, thanks so much for coming on.
It's a real pleasure, Andrew.
Thanks for having me on.
And I have to say, it's funny that you were reading it just yesterday because if I'm at all bleary-eyed today, it's because last night I started this, your latest Cameron Winter, and couldn't put it down.
So I got very little sleep last night.
And so darn you, Andrew Clavin, your terrific writing for keeping me up all night.
You know, having a guest unplug my book is actually terrific.
I appreciate it.
Thank you very much.
Sorry to turn the tables on you.
Oh, yeah, a little bit, dude.
Diesel.
Diesel, yeah, I, like you, I, you know, it's a word we know.
We all know the name diesel, but it's, it's always misspelled with a lowercase D, unlike Ford.
You know, when you never see Ford with a lowercase F.
So we all know it, but there's a whole story behind it.
Almost no one knows there's a man, Rudolf Diesel, who invented this engine because, and it's really for reasons explained in the book that his history has been paved over these last hundred years, but he disappeared mysteriously on the eve of World War I in 1913.
This is the thing.
Like when I looked at it, I thought, I didn't know there was a guy named Rudolph Diesel, and I didn't know there was a mysterious case of Rudolph Diesel.
But there actually is both.
Let's just begin with this.
I mean, this takes place basically in the years leading up to World War I.
So it's before the turn of the century, and then it's into the turn of the century.
I have to be honest, like I always knew, thought I knew what a diesel engine is, but really I didn't.
I mean, I just knew it was the thing that you didn't put in your car when you stopped at the gas station.
Explain why it matters that there was a diesel engine and why it mattered that there wasn't one before.
The way I came into it actually is to understand the engine.
I bought an old boat and I was going to fix it up.
And so I was at the boat yard and I was talking to the guy who was a slightly larger boat and needed a bunch of work.
And he said, the first thing you should do with this boat is get rid of these old gasoline engines and put in diesels.
And I always thought diesel referred to a fuel.
So I said, well, what do you mean?
What is that going to do for me?
And he said, 100% of boat fires come from gasoline engines, none from diesel.
And you can take a lit match and drop it into a barrel of diesel fuel, nothing will happen.
The fuel is stable and you'll get four times the efficiency, you'll have four times as far in your tank.
So I did change it out to diesels.
And what it meant back 100 years ago, and it's hard to imagine, given that we don't know who Rudolph Diesel is today, but he was a huge celebrity back then.
It really would be like, in present day terms, if Elon Musk suddenly went disappearing, and then for weeks, everyone's sort of wondering where Elon went.
That's what was going on in 1913, because the diesel engine had emerged as this technological game changer at the sort of peak of the Industrial Revolution when we were really mired in the steam engine era.
We had these colossal steam engines that burned coal in these furnaces that would heat water.
And in the book, as you know, I try to paint the scene of the movie Titanic with Leonardo DiCaprio, when the camera pans down into the belly of the ship and they show these dozens of men with sweaty backs and they're heaving coal into these orange fiery furnaces that are heating vats of water.
Literally the same kind of technology as a pot on a stove.
You boil water on your stove to make things.
It's boiling water to create steam to move the engine parts.
And then they also need a chimney and a whole furnace stack to get the smog and partially burnt particles of coal out of the ship.
I mean, it's just incredibly inefficient technology.
And, you know, when it first came about in the era of James Watt in the 1770s, they could get about 2% of energy out of a unit of fuel.
By the time Rudolph is inventing in the 1880s and 1890s, steam technology is up to 6%, 7%, 8%.
What Diesel created with a fundamentally different approach was approaching 40% fuel efficiency with all these other subsidiary benefits.
You didn't need guys shoveling coal into furnaces.
It drew liquid fuel automatically down from a tank.
It didn't need a whole chimney stack apparatus.
It barely had smoke coming out at all.
It just vent out the side of ships or out the side of factories.
So it was an incredible game changer.
And the technology, I don't know if you want to go down this try and give a very quick explanation of how the technology worked because it wasn't spark ignition.
Well, did it come before the spark ignition engine?
Did it come before the internal combustion engine?
It was concurrent, really.
There was the auto cycle engine, which emerged first in the 1860s.
And that was kind of a rinky-dink little engine at the time.
But it's what Benz would use, for example, in his motor cars that looked like sort of an oversized tricycle at the time, but they would have a half horsepower or a one or two horsepower engine.
The diesel engine used more sophisticated metal casting, was a much more robust, more heavy, and more sophisticated engine, but it could deliver much more horsepower, much more torque for bigger jobs.
And it didn't use spark ignition in the way that the auto cycle engine, or what we now think of as the traditional gasoline internal combustion engine that we use in cars often now.
It used a very stable fuel and it worked on compression.
So it's almost like if you imagine a bicycle tire pump, just a simple bicycle tire, as you pump a few tires, you recognize sometimes the pump gets a little warm.
That was the whole concept of the diesel engine.
When Rudolph was in university in Munich, they had a tinder lighter, and these are still around today, like a cigar lighter.
Diesel's Revolution00:11:27
And it's just a glass cylinder.
And at the bottom, it's enclosed, though, as opposed to a bicycle pump where the air sort of leaks out into the bike tire.
Here they enclose it.
And you can take a little piece of tinder at the bottom of it.
And as you jam down that plunger, all that air compresses into a tiny space and highly compressed air gets hot.
And if you do that enough, it gets hot enough to light this ember in a tinder lighter, a cigar lighter.
And that's the concept of diesel engine.
And the piston comes cramming down in the cylinder to 1,000 pounds per square inch.
You introduce fuel and the fuel explodes inside the cylinder.
So just to put this in context, it's coming to the end of the 19th century.
And there's this tension growing up between Germany and especially Britain because Germany is trying to build a navy.
They want to become a European power and they're trying to build a navy.
And now suddenly this guy who's a native German, right?
He invents this powerful, powerful engine.
What does this mean to the balance of power?
It's a game changer in particular for submarines and U-boats, which are now emerging as Kaiser Wilhelm, the emperor of Germany's new tack in his Anglo-German naval arms race.
Because Germany had, through the end of the 19th century, from Bismarck on now to Kaiser Wilhelm, they had emerged as a huge power in Europe.
They had the largest, strongest continental army, and their industry was growing.
And Kaiser Wilhelm felt in order to continue the growth of the German Empire, he needed colonies around the world, in fairness, much like Britain had and France and Spain and others.
But he felt in order to have colonies, he needed a strong navy.
Well, Britain, as this island nation, had dominated the seas since the time of Napoleon, and they feel it's an existential threat for anyone to challenge their naval supremacy.
So here's Wilhelm, who, by the way, is such a complicated, fascinating character in the book.
He's Queen Victoria's favorite grandson.
And so he's related to the British and half loves them, half envies and hates them.
So as he aspires to have this great navy, of course, now Great Britain is very anxious about the growing threat of the German Empire.
But Britain really has the advantage in terms of the infrastructure to build quickly and capably these great capital ships, the dreadnoughts and battleships of the age.
And once Wilhelm realizes he can't keep up that, because he's also got to maintain his huge army, you know, being a landlocked power, he realizes suddenly that because of the diesel engine and because of his home advantage with diesel technology, he can take the lead in what has emerged as the greatest threat in the oceans now, the U-boat.
And as diesel is still a new engine, I mean, Rudolph introduced this in 1897, by 1910, 11, 12, 13, it's still young technology, and Rudolph is still the main sort of master of making it work for these very difficult requirements of undersea use.
So the naval, the navies of every major power by 1913 are scrambling for diesel expertise.
Rudolph is still the man.
And when he disappeared, where he was going on that day, September 29, 1913, he was traveling across the North Sea from Belgium to Great Britain because he was the co-founder and board director of a new British diesel engine manufacturing company whose mandate it was to build diesels for the Royal Navy's submarine fleet.
So you can imagine Kaiser Wilhelm's upset in learning this.
So Kaiser Wilhelm, yeah, he's basically like an Oppenheimer guy.
He's a guy who can turn the tide of war, whichever way he goes.
That's the way the tide of war is going to go.
At the same time, you've got John Rockefeller, who I have to say, I hadn't quite realized how corrupt he was.
I mean, he is the oil magnate.
You told stories in there that made me, I was laughing because I have no soul, but I have to say.
They were just amazing stories.
Give a little bit of an outline.
This is a guy who's also threatened by the diesel engine, right?
Yes, yes.
So when diesel disappeared, and by the way, so getting back to the Musk analogy, newspaper headlines around the world were going crazy about the disappearance of the great inventor, headlines in the New York Times, papers around Western Europe, into Russia.
The two theories of murder.
So it was presumed suicide, but there were two theories of murder.
One was Kaiser Wilhelm, the other was John Rockefeller.
And it's a fascinating reason why he viewed diesel as an existential threat.
The interesting thing about Rockefeller, he founded Standard Oil in 1870.
By 1900, he was the richest man in the world.
But we forget that he was really in the illumination business.
He was selling kerosene.
Gasoline was a waste product that he'd throw away.
And then by 1900, Edison and others have invented the light bulb with improving efficiency and quality so that the kerosene market is about to fall away from Rockefeller.
The light bulb is going to do to Rockefeller what Rockefeller did to the whaling industry.
You know, we don't use whale blower anymore.
We went to kerosene.
Now we're going to go from kerosene to the light bulb.
So Rockefeller's got a very uncertain future.
And it was not certain at all that the combustion engine, the gasoline combustion engine, and the automobile were going to be a revenue place for him.
Because in 1905, the New York City, New York City had a fleet of taxicabs, hundreds of taxicabs, all electric.
And there was a charging station on Broadway in Times Square.
And so the idea that we were just going to have this gasoline burning combustion engine in automobile market for Rockefeller to land on was very uncertain at that time.
And then along comes Diesel.
And his proposition was you don't need petroleum at all.
He had won the 1900 Paris World's Fair on a diesel engine running peanut oil.
And that's what he advocated.
He wanted to run peanut oil, vegetable oil, or even coal tar.
And he had a trip in 1912 throughout America.
And he was saying, I can end the American fuel monopoly, and I don't need a law to do it.
I don't need the Sherman Antitrust Act.
I can do it on the power of this technology.
Every country that has farmers can therefore grow its own fuel.
We don't need to run around the world and fight wars over places that have petroleum in the ground.
So that was an existential threat for Rockefeller, who was already desperate at having lost the kerosene market and was determined to make sure that the internal combustion engine became a market for his gasoline.
And just, you know, I don't want to give away too much of the book, but just to make it clear what kind of guy John Rockefeller was, can you tell this story about how he used the Pinkertons during a strike?
What that meant exactly.
Yes, yeah.
Unlike Rudolph Diesel, who was advocating for reasonable workday hours and encouraging his employees to save and even doing sort of like worker ownership participation of the company.
For Rockefeller, when workers were advocating for the eight-hour workday and other worker benefits and went on strike, in those days, the Pinkerton Detective Agency, you know, we usually think of them as like taking photos for cheating spouses and things like that.
But Pinkerton's Baldwin Phelps was another.
These agencies, quote-unquote detective agencies, were really the paramilitary wing of big business.
And so the Ludlow massacre example that you raised from Ludlow, Colorado was when a bunch of miners went on strike.
It was a mine owned by Rockefeller.
So in came Baldwin Phelts, this detective agency, much like the Pinkerton, lesser known, but same thing.
And they show up armed to the teeth and they're monitoring the striking lines, making sure, you know, non-strikers can get through the picket lines.
And eventually, of course, there's an outbreak of gunfire and about 30 miners on strike and their families, women and children too, were killed by gunfire and also arson.
So it was a very, very ruthless form of worker intimidation.
Yeah.
One of my literary heroes, Dashel Hamet, was one of the Pinkertons and actually did beat up strikers, which was hard to explain to the leftist Lillian Hellman that he was sleeping with.
But it's an amazing story.
All right.
So you've got the emperor of Germany and basically the emperor of America, the big oil magnet, both threatened by this guy.
And this is the last thing I'll make you tell from the book, but Diesel, who, like you said, is an Elon Musk type figure.
He almost gets on the Titanic, but he gets on a different ship.
What happens?
No, I'm so glad you brought that one up because it's so fun.
And it goes to this crazy cast of characters in this book of this gilded age.
You sort of realize how the world was run by these very few powerful men.
So the way the diesel engine worked in that time in terms of a licensing matter is you would license the exclusive rights to manufacture and market the engine by national territory.
And the person who took the diesel rights in North America was Adolphus Bush.
And Bush used this engine to power his breweries, to pump water in his breweries and power refrigeration and things like that.
And he became great friends of Rudolph Diesel.
He was a German nationalist.
He had emigrated from Germany to America as well, moved out to St. Louis and founded his beer business and became the national beer.
And the reason Diesel did not take a Titanic, he actually had tickets for the Titanic.
Thank goodness he didn't get on.
But he had a business meeting with Bush where they were celebrating the groundbreaking ceremony of a new factory out there.
So he had to be in America all the way in St. Louis too soon.
So he had to get an earlier ship.
And then he was still on his American tour, though.
He was back in New York by the time he read in the newspaper headlines that the Titanic went down.
And I got his journal from Archives in Germany where he had pasted in the newspaper headlines in his journal during his trip in America about the Titanic going down.
Of course, he was completely thrown by this, especially knowing that he nearly was on that ship.
Yeah.
And then, but he got on this other ship and basically vanished without a trace.
So, yeah.
And that's, and that's all.
The name of the book is the mysterious case of Rudolf Diesel, Genius Power and Deception on the Eve of World War I.
And as you can tell, it's a mystery.
What happened to one of the richest men, most famous men in the world, that he just slipped out of sight.
And I'm convinced, I have to say, usually when authors come up with these theories about what happened, I don't believe them, but you make a really, really strong case for having solved this mystery.
Oh, well, thanks.
If I could say one more thing, too.
The other half of the Anglo-German naval arms race, of course, was Winston Churchill, who plays a key role in the book as well.
And there's just, if I could just say one thing about the man, there's such a deficit of appreciation for Rudolf Diesel.
And the one way I try to deliver this piece of information for present day thinkers is imagine a piece of fruit grown in a tropical region.
Every piece of farm equipment and heavy machinery used to grow that piece of fruit is diesel-powered.
It then gets loaded onto a truck, anything larger than a passenger car, diesel.
Goes into port where a crane, diesel-powered, loads it onto a cargo ship.
100% of cargo ships around the world, diesel.
Goes across the seas, it's loaded off onto another truck, onto a train.
Throughout the 20th century, all trains, diesel electric.
Nothing moves in our global economy to this day without diesel.
It's amazing.
Like I said, amazing.
I didn't realize he was a person and had never heard of the story yet.
Just an incredible thing.
Research Revelations00:03:51
Now, so you're a novelist.
You've made the same mistake I've made in life.
You became a novelist.
Was it tough to switch over to doing a work like this?
I mean, the research is very intense and very complete.
It was intense.
I mean, my gosh, there were so many nights pulling my hair out.
Where did I put that note?
I'm like searching for a unicorn, trying to find where the source material was for this line I needed to use.
I'd be up on Etlingport.
It was intense, but I love the act of writing generally.
My novels, I've always done a fair amount of research for those as well.
They're all set more present day, so it'd be more primary research of interviewing folks and things like this.
And this is obviously much more archival.
But I love that too.
You know, just that act of discovery when you find something, particularly in the context of the story I'm telling when I would find that, you know, Diesel said this two weeks before Churchill said that.
And then he can make links to other pieces of the story.
It was like the nerd side of Indiana Jones when I could put these sort of things together.
And I really did love it.
So I enjoyed the research, you know.
But you know, it's funny.
I'm glad you said that you like writing because it always annoys me when writers say it's such a struggle because I love the written word.
I love reading and I love writing.
It's a wonderful life if you can make it.
But one of the things that has been kind of haunting me a little bit is a lot of people have stopped reading almost entirely.
Now, maybe that's not, in some ways, that's not that big a change.
I mean, people, through most of history, the mass of people were illiterate.
And so maybe more people are actually reading.
But you have a podcast.
And forgive me, I've forgotten the name of your podcast.
What is the name?
It's called Dedicated.
Dedicated, right.
And you interview all these authors.
And in fact, I think I'm coming on.
You're coming very soon.
All right, good.
Yes, excellent.
Do you have this feeling that the tide of readership is receding or is it simply changing?
I think it's simply changing.
There certainly are more alternatives to the novel and the nonfiction books as well that with Netflix in this sort of golden age, as everyone calls it, of this golden age of TV.
There are more things competing for your time.
So there are more alternatives, but there'll never be a substitute for the novel.
Nothing can do everything that the novel can do.
I mean, nothing would keep me up all night like your book did last night.
There's nothing else.
No TV show does that for me.
And I do think there is still a huge part of the population that reads.
And in fact, doesn't even read Kindle, but prefers the actual book.
I think there's still something tactile about that that works.
And we see it in the numbers.
Book sales are not going away.
Stephen King still sells hundreds of thousands of books.
And it's tough for a new writer to break out.
You're a huge success already.
I think it's tough for someone unpublished to sort of break through.
It's still there.
One of the really positive developments I find, partially from doing a podcast, is Audible and just the audio book, is that a lot of younger people love to listen to books and they do it while they're doing other stuff.
And it actually, and to me, it makes no difference.
People have asked me numerous times, is it still reading your book if I listen to it?
And I'm like, absolutely.
You know, that's a, you know, that's even an older form of telling stories.
So that works too.
Yeah, yeah.
Radio is the theater of the mind.
And so that's great.
Interestingly, I listen to podcasts.
I listen to your show.
I listen to Megan Kelly's show and others, but I have never listened to an audio book even once.
I don't know what it is.
I do like seeing the words.
I also think there's some benefit to, I don't know, building your vocabulary a little bit to do the printed word.
I suppose audio can get that done too, but and you don't need to worry about spelling anymore.
Before And After Europe War00:04:44
Spell checks there to either help you or annoy the hell out of you.
So, but yeah, audiobook is a fast, fast growing segment.
And actually, Scott Brick did the audio for Diesel, and he's terrific.
I mean, he's like a theater performer.
You know, it's really amazing.
You know, what changed me was I lived in LA for seven years and I was stuck in traffic all the time.
And I just thought, I can't let my life slip by sitting here.
You know, because in real life, it's not like La La Land where everybody gets out and dances.
You just sit there.
And so I just thought, I'll listen to audiobooks.
And I like it.
Now I would say about 15 of the books I read during the course of a year, I read a lot of books and about 15 of them are audio books.
And it's grown on me a lot.
That's right.
That's right.
You know, I'm spending more time on trains and things these days.
So maybe I'll give it a whirl.
It's worth it.
So now you've gone from writing a novel to writing this book and it's already on the New York Times list.
You want to stay in this lane?
Do you want to do more history?
Or is this just this story that grabbed you?
I do want to do more of this.
And more than that, I want to stay in exactly this time period.
I love this quarter century lead up to World War I.
I used to be more of a World War II guy, but it's less complicated in World War II.
You know, it's very good and evil.
Empire strikes back.
World War I is so nuanced.
And it's also this incredible point in history.
I call the, I jokingly refer to the period of this book as Downton Abbey, the early seasons, before we got to World War I, which is really such a hinge point in history of how we lived.
You know, the urbanization in Central East was already happening with the Industrial Revolution, but World War I really accelerated that.
And think of all the empires that collapsed.
Austria, German Empire, Russia, Ottoman Empire, all changed.
And the way governments changed and the way we live our daily lives.
And Downton Eddie actually gets a half decent job of conveying that, you know, as you get to World War I.
And there's the sort of before and after.
But I love this quarter century before World War I.
So my next book, I would like to remain in the narrative nonfiction lane, really telling history, but in a novelistic way.
And I think there's a saying out there.
This isn't just a joke between my editor and me.
I think this is out there.
You know, often people will say that one writer's footnote could be another writer's whole book.
And there are a number of really wonderful footnotes in this book.
I tried to skinny it down to just, because it's very annoying to sort of come off the page and go down and then back up.
You don't want to have too many.
You can overdo it.
So I want to make it special when there is one.
And there is a footnote in my book that may become my own next book is currently what I'm thinking.
You know, I couldn't agree with you more about the run-up to World War I.
And you depict it in the mysterious case of Rudolf Diesel.
You depict how high flying Europe was just before the war started.
And basically, it's the end of Europe.
It really ends the great civilization of Europe, begins the end of the great civilization of Europe.
And what you said about, I mean, Winston Churchill said that he was in a room with the top people in Europe before the war and with the top people of Europe after the war, and they were all different people.
I mean, just the entire leadership change.
And I have to tell you, I've read, you know, I must have read 30 books on World War I.
I still don't know why they fought it or how it started.
I still cannot tell.
I think the crazy thing.
None of them did.
They all sort of got around the end.
I'm like, why the hell did we just do all this?
It was over something so crazy.
I mean, there were, of course, decades of tension and the monarchs were, most of them, related to one another, and some petty things were also in the way.
It was just crazy.
And it also seemed like almost like a game of musical chairs.
It was far more likely 15 years prior that Germany and England could be on the same side.
Nobody really liked Russia very much.
They wound up with France because they were scared of Germany.
All these reasons.
And then when the shot went off in Sarajevo, it was like the end of musical chairs.
Like, we're going to stop here.
And depending on how we're in the city, like, this is how we're going to fight it out.
Like, these are the teams.
But the teams could have been very different five or 10 years before or after, you know?
It's amazing stuff.
The book is The Mysterious Case of Rudolph Diesel, Genius, Power, and Deception on the Eve of World War I by Douglas Brunt.
Just, like I said, one of the loopiest stories I ever heard and just fascinating.
Doug, thanks so much for coming on.
Thank you for the plug for my book.
I truly appreciate it.
And I look forward to seeing you on your podcast.
Yes, Andrew, thanks so much.
It was a pleasure talking to you.
It was great talking to you.
Thanks.
All right.
A wild story.
You want to get the mysterious case of Rudolph Diesel by Douglas Brunt.
You also want to come on Friday for the Andrew Clavin Show, when I will be plugging my book.
But you'll have to be there to see what it is because it's a big secret.