Mystery on the High Seas

Like many of you, I’m a busy fella.  When not working or writing, I spend time doing important things – raising a family, spending time with my wife, digging into scripture and church, helping where I can.  I also do a host of things that might not be that important to the world at large, but bring some small pleasure to me.  We raise a steer every year.  We try to hike a mountain or two annually.  Among other activities, I also take down trees and chop firewood.

It was while felling a few big trees this summer that I injured my back.  So much so that for several months I could do very little and wound up in the surgical suite under the surgeon’s knife.  As I type this out, I’m still recovering from that procedure – boy does it hurt.  As a result of all this unheard-of lounging time I’ve been forced into, the pile of books to be read has diminished greatly.

One such book bore the title, The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel, written by Douglas Brunt.  And though it sounds like it might be a cozy mystery novel, the events portrayed between its covers are quite true.

Rudolf was born to German parents living in Paris in 1858.  His father was a tinkerer who had a workshop in their home.  They made a lower middle-class income by selling leather goods and children’s toys made by the senior Diesel.  However, if you are familiar with nineteenth century relations between France and Germany, you might not be surprised that the family had to flee Paris when yet another war broke out between the two countries.

After abandoning everything they owned to Parisian mobs, they traveled to London.  However, due to the influx of refugees, there was no work to be had in England for another batch of foreigners.  His family could no longer afford to raise all of their children.  Twelve-year-old Rudolf then took a two-week journey by himself to be raised by family friends in Germany.

Rudolf quickly demonstrated a remarkable talent at drawing and mathematics.  This new family had the means and connections to get him the education he might never have obtained otherwise.  The boy excelled, even earning scholarships to attend a prestigious engineering school in Germany.  He earned an engineering post with a respected firm and spent years inventing and improving on the then cutting-edge field of refrigeration.

Many mechanical and engineering fields were in their nascent stages at this time.  Giant steam engines dominated industry.  Gasoline engines were tiny, weak, unreliable things.  Rudolf Diesel dreamed of building a new kind of engine that was small, yet powerful, perhaps running a small workshop like the one his father used to own.  It had to be reliable.  He also wanted it to run on nut or vegetable oil so that the engine’s users didn’t have to rely on Rockefeller’s Standard Oil to supply fuel.

After years of toil, Diesel succeeded on all counts, developing what we call a diesel engine.  It produced explosions in its cylinders without spark plugs, but instead with intense pressure on the fuel.  It was capable of running on very stable vegetable and nut oils.

Rudolf’s engine was an overnight sensation among industrial companies and militaries.  Huge piles of coal and the vast numbers of shoveling men were no longer necessary for trains or ships.  Raw power could be extracted from a few gallons of vegetable oil in a tank.  Diesel, the man, became a sought-after celebrity the world over.

But he also made powerful enemies.  J.D. Rockefeller was already losing kerosene business (used for lighting) to Edison’s electric light.  He couldn’t afford to lose more of his budding gasoline business to something as mundane and ubiquitous as vegetable oil.  Perhaps more worrisome than a wealthy oil magnate, Diesel also managed to anger Kaiser Wilhelm II.

In the years leading up to World War I, Wilhelm was asserting Germany’s might in more ways.  It already had the largest and most powerful land army in Europe.  He dreamed of challenging Britain’s dominance over the seas.  But to do so, he needed the best diesel engines in the world.  He needed submarines, scores of them.

But Rudolf, began to speak openly of his opposition to Germany’s direction.  He began to speak in America and Britain about what those countries might do to improve their own new, diesel industries – including in military applications.

One evening, while crossing the English Channel from the Continent just before World War I, Rudolf Diesel disappeared.  The two fellow businessmen with whom he was traveling, reported him missing when he never met them for breakfast.  The ship was halted immediately, and a search was conducted from stem to stern.  His stateroom was discovered with his luggage unpacked and bed unslept in.  His coat and top hat were found next to the railing on the promenade deck.  No witnesses came forward with any definitive information.

Suicide was blamed.  Yet, his devoted wife and three adult children and their own families never saw a single sign that anything was amiss in his life.  His business associates said they, too, never heard or saw anything that would indicate the famous, happy man would do such a thing.

Then, as now, the media coverage of a missing celebrity was salacious.  All sorts of theories and tidbits of so-called information trickled out over the coming months, most everything contradicting everything else.  His body was found, but then sank.  He was going bankrupt.  He was murdered by Rockefeller, or by the Kaiser.

Or, if all the disparate pieces and testimonies and political intrigues are laid out in order, yet another series of events might better explain what happened that cold night.  Perhaps, it was one of the earliest cat and mouse spy games involving none other than Winston Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty.

Britain’s diesel submarine manufacturing facilities in Canada had been considered an also-ran in the world.  Underpowered, unreliable, and untimely, the boats made to cruise beneath the waves for Britain’s mighty navy were not prepared to meet the Kaiser’s own if war came.  However, suddenly, as if a switch had been flipped, immediately after Diesel’s disappearance, they began churning out submarines with cutting edge diesel motors that could go toe to toe with Germany’s.

I’ll not give away all the details that Brunt has uncovered to support his case.  Suffice it to say that I was skeptical at first.  Usually, the simplest answer is the answer.  But as the author explained one news story in Canada and compared it to another one in Germany or another one in the US, the details began to coalesce into a narrative.  He interviewed naval and intelligence experts.  And while we’ll never know what happened to Rudolf Diesel with certainty, I think the 112-year-old mystery now has a suitable explanation.  I suggest you read the book yourself and form your own opinion.

Until next time!