The first diesel engines could run on peanut oil without anyone noticing
At the Paris exhibition of 1900, a small diesel engine built by the Otto company quietly ran on peanut oil at the French government's suggestion. Rudolf Diesel later wrote that it worked so smoothly almost nobody realised, and that the unmodified motor had been designed for ordinary petroleum oils.
Fuel flexibility followed from how the engine worked. Instead of a spark lighting a ready-mixed charge, air alone was squeezed hard inside the cylinder until it grew very hot, and fuel sprayed in at the end of the stroke ignited on contact. Diesel tried coal distillates, petroleum products and even coal dust. His motive was efficiency: he knew a steam engine wasted up to 90 percent of its fuel's energy, and he wanted something approaching the ideal Carnot cycle he had heard about in Carl von Linde's Munich lectures.
The road there was dangerous. Working in Berlin for Linde's firm around 1890, he could not use his employer's refrigeration patents for his own ends, so he experimented with a steam engine running on ammonia vapour, which exploded and nearly killed him. He received German patent DRP 67207 in 1892 and set out his theory in an 1893 treatise. With backing from Heinrich von Buz at Maschinenfabrik Augsburg and from Krupp, the first working model, a single-cylinder engine of 25 horsepower, passed official tests in 1897 and made him rich.
His origins were modest. Born in Paris on 18 March 1858 to Bavarian immigrants, he spent his first nine months with a farming family in Vincennes and later delivered leather goods from his father's workshop by barrow. When the Franco-Prussian War broke out in 1870 the family was expelled to London, and he was sent to relatives in Augsburg, deciding at 14 that he would be an engineer.
On 29 September 1913 he boarded the steamer Dresden at Antwerp, bound for a business meeting in London, went to his cabin around 10 p.m., and was never seen alive again. His bag at home held 20,000 marks and papers showing near-empty bank accounts. How he died has never been settled. In 1957 Magokichi Yamaoka, founder of the Japanese engine maker Yanmar, dedicated a memorial garden to him in Augsburg.
Source: Rudolf Diesel
