August 6, 2024 • 43 mins
Rudolf Diesel was a game changing inventor, though his most famous product was not used how he envisioned it. Listen in and learn about his life and mysterious death.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's
Chuck and Benz here sitting in for Jerry, and this
is stuff you should know?
Speaker 3 (00:21):
What you know?
Speaker 2 (00:23):
I kind of pick up the.
Speaker 4 (00:25):
Ball the baton. We are doing an episode today on
Rudolph Diesel, invention of our inventor of the diesel engine.
And this was prepared for us by Anna Green, one
of our writers, and edited a great job, very exhaustive. Look,
but this was a listener suggestion and I went back
(00:46):
to look at who it was, and it turns out
there were three emails over the past like a couple
of years to investigate Rudolph Diesel. Scott Simpson, I don't
think my friend Scott Simpson, who's also a comedian but
who knows okay, Christian Coiner and then very mysteriously Leo
and Jenny Oh No, last name yeah, Leo and Jenny.
(01:08):
The last name isn't in Jenny.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
Right, No, the middle initial is in in the last
name is Jenny.
Speaker 4 (01:14):
Yeah. So thanks for these suggestions, because this was I
didn't know anything about the guy, didn't know anything about
the diesel engine, and now I feel good enough to
get a Jeopardy answer or two correct.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
For sure, Yeah, call us ken. I had no idea
about this either. I didn't realize that diesel is technically
a proprietary eponym, or at least a proper noun. If
you see like that Diesel engine, the d should be
capitalized because it was invented. It's named after its inventor,
Rudolph Diesel, who was working around the turn of the
(01:44):
last century and a little bit before, a little bit after.
And he was a German kid born in Paris to
a father who well, his father was a bit of
a character, as we'll see in some of the worst ways.
But who was He was an interesting person who made
his own way in the world and changed it radically.
(02:07):
The irony is he changed it in ways that were
the opposite of what he wanted to or how we
wanted to change the world.
Speaker 4 (02:16):
Yeah, for sure. And like many inventors, his story starts
out as a child who was sort of obsessed with
figuring out how things worked. A tinkerer who would take
apart things. We've heard the story kind of time and
time again. Someone who would like disassemble things in their house,
put them back together. As a kid in Paris, he
(02:37):
was working for his dad a lot of the time
or in school, and in eighteen sixty seven came across
his first internal combustion engine at the Paris World's Fair
when he saw the auto engine, Nicholas Auto's coal gas engine,
like I said, at the World's Fair.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
Yeah, and this was a big deal. Other people had
invented internal combustion engines before, but Nicholas Auto's was like
the culmination of it. It was like the real deal. So
the fact that it really struck young Rudolph Diesel, this
would have been oh he would have been fifteen, nineteen, No,
(03:20):
he would have been nine.
Speaker 4 (03:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
Imagine being a nine year old kid and seeing an
internal combustion engine and saying to yourself, this is what
I want to dedicate my life.
Speaker 4 (03:29):
Yeah, that was the.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
Kind of kid. Theodore Diesel was right. And again it
was a big deal that he saw this engine, or
I should say the engine itself was a big deal.
But they didn't stick around Paris for much longer. That
was eighteen sixty seven. Within three years, the Franco Prussian
War broke out and the Diesel family said we need
to get out of France. Let's move to London, and
(03:51):
they did, and the whole family took a downward turn
from there.
Speaker 4 (03:56):
Yeah, I mean, I get the idea that it was
just sort of moved uprooted and moved to a new
country and had a lot of time getting good work
because their family did not live well there, thankfully at
least for Rudolph. A few months after getting there, he
was twelve at the time and uncle said, come back
to Germany, come back to Ausburg, live with us. Your
(04:18):
uncle here, Christophe Barnacle, will help pay for your schooling.
He enrolled at the Royal County Trade School for three
years while his family stayed in London. So when he
graduated in eighteen sixty five, his dad said, hey, need
you to come back to London and get some get
a job and help us out, like your schooling is over.
(04:39):
Rudolph said nine, I'm gonna stay here. I want to
be an engineer, which means I need to keep going
to school. So he denied his father and enrolled at
the Technicia Hochschuler Munschen there in what we call Munich, Germany.
He got a scholarship to go there and very the
(05:00):
word I'm looking for when something happens, it's very important
and auspicious.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
No, resolute, No.
Speaker 4 (05:09):
Not that sort of the opposite of coincidence. Uh, purposefully yeah, yeah, perpendicularly,
just very importantly. There, I will say, met one Carl
von Linda, who would be his a big person in
his life, his employer at one point, and a mentor
and friend.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
I get what you're trying to say. I can't think
of the word either, kind of like.
Speaker 3 (05:30):
Auspiciously, like auspicious as fate would have it. No, it
is auspicious, right, predetermination, predestination someone I know, this is
the kind of stuff people like.
Speaker 2 (05:43):
I'm like, I like stuff, you should know, but there's
a lot that I don't like about it too. You know.
Speaker 4 (05:50):
Where I was leading with that was from that point
where he met von Linda and was in school he
became fascinated by another proprietary epic engine, the steam engine
invented by Danny Steam.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
Right. No, he came across the Carnov cycle, Right, Wasn't
that another thing that really kind of struck him floated
his boat?
Speaker 4 (06:16):
Yeah, besides Danny Steam's invention.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
Yeah, well, the Carno cycle is this It is a
theoretical engine external combustion engine that where every bit of
energy put into it produces work, so it's one hundred
percent efficient. It's essentially impossible, but it's theoretically possible. And
that combined with auto's internal combustion engine, really kind of
(06:44):
came together to give Rudolph Diesel like his his purpose
in life, his mission in life. And then, like you said,
when he fortuitously met Carl von Linz.
Speaker 4 (06:55):
The word yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
Everything came together because now he had a mentor of Haron,
a guy who gave him a job right out of
right out of school. And when you take like the
fact that his family was using their luggage in London
as the furniture in their house, and his aunt and
uncle came a call in and said, let's just pluck
(07:17):
you out of this situation and put you on the
road to your destiny. And then you're going to go
forth and change the world. Literally, your invention is going
to fuel the Second Industrial Revolution and put us where
humans are today. You can largely thank Rudolph Diesel in
his invention for that. It's it's just mind boggling the
(07:40):
series of events that happened to do that, and the
effect that it had on the world.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
No.
Speaker 4 (07:45):
Absolutely. He moved back to Paris eventually in eighteen eighty
and like you said, he went to work for Carl
von Linde. I think it said Linda and I had.
Speaker 2 (07:56):
I just imagine him being like a seventies mom.
Speaker 4 (07:59):
I think German. It wouldn't be lend I think it
would be lind like with Ah at the end.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
Sure, but I don't know about Linda.
Speaker 4 (08:09):
You know, like Linda's bagels. He worked for for Lynd
as an ice guy. He had a ice machine company,
and he was all kinds of things. He was an
apprentice for a little while. He eventually became a salesperson
over this decade that he worked for him. But one
of the other cool facts, and this is the Jeopardy question,
(08:30):
maybe one of them. Ye, it's like, what other famous
thing did Rudolph Diesel invent? He invented and got a
patent for the ice cube.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
Yeah. Yeah. I was like when I saw that, I
was like, well, wait, does that mean he invented the
ice cube? Yes, Indeed, Rudolph Diesel, the inventor of the
Diesel engine, also invented the ice cube.
Speaker 4 (08:49):
Yeah, which I guess is the means of I mean
maybe they just never thought of freezing ice in cubes before.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
I guess. But think about it, Chuck, we would be
lacking one quarter of NWA had Theodore Diesel not come
along or Rudolph Diesel not come along.
Speaker 4 (09:04):
That's a good point.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
So he graduated like like we kind of put the
car in front of the horse. But he graduated and
went on to get that job with Linda Carl von Linda.
But when he did graduate from school, he had the
highest grades in the history of the entire school. One
of the reasons why he was a very serious student.
He was not some even though he was well taken
(09:29):
care of and funded. He was you know, when he
had a scholarship, he worked his tail off and took
his his his studies very seriously. So this kid was
like he was pretty put together for you know, his age,
for sure.
Speaker 4 (09:45):
Yeah, absolutely, So, you know I said he worked there
for a decade. Within that decade, for about six or
seven years of it, he after inventing the ice cube,
which would help found n w A and I guess
prevent from just being tea.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
Right, or hot tea sure, or even tepid ta.
Speaker 4 (10:06):
Right, tepid t. That's that's your refer name.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
Reallypid t.
Speaker 4 (10:12):
Yeah, neither hot nor cold.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
You have to say it like you're slightly annoying, tepid tea.
Speaker 4 (10:18):
Yeah, exactly. He started working on engines again, this this
idea popped back into his head, this memory of the
Carno cycle of like, gosh, there's got to be a
way to make Danny Steam's engine more efficient. And for
about six or seven years he worked on and trying
to develop an ammonia powered heat engine. Ammonia was too volatile,
(10:41):
so he eventually ends up back in Berlin with his
By this time he had a wife, Martha and three
children and started working like in Earnest on the internal
combustion engine and I believe filed a patent in eighteen
ninety two.
Speaker 2 (10:56):
Uh yeah, I feel like we should take a break
and then come back and talk about like, you know,
how what what? Like this guy wasn't working in a vacuum,
so what environment? What world he was working? And when
he was trying to come up with his diesel engine.
Speaker 4 (11:11):
All right, let's do it.
Speaker 1 (11:14):
Stop you know, stop stop stop here? Should know no
stop you know stop stop stop here? Shouldn't know stuff?
You should know as w s K.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
You should know, so, Chuck. I found a BBC article
that kind of put the stakes out there pretty well
about what was driving in part Rudolph Diesel's obsession with
creating a super efficient engine. And one of the things
they said was that there was a ton of horses.
I think they said in a city of five hundred
(11:58):
thousand people, there were probably one hundred thousand horses, and
all of them were walking around, pooping and peeing everywhere,
all over the place. So an alternative to horse power
was very desirable, and we already had steam power, but
steam power had its own thing going on, and in
one way, one of the big weaknesses of steam powers
(12:18):
that it required tons and tons and tons of coal,
because you use coal to heat a boiler, to boil
water to create steam to run a piston, and then
the piston turns the chemical energy of the coal into
the mechanical work that turns something or makes something go
up and down or does whatever. Probably has something to
do with gears. I don't get it, but there was
(12:40):
already back in the eighteen sixties a book by a
guy named Stanley Jevin or Jivaon called The Coal Question,
and this guy was already warning about peak coal, essentially
pointing out like coal is a non renewable resource everybody,
and we are using it really really fast. This guy
was already ringing the alarm about it. Rudolph Diesel was
(13:02):
exactly the kind of person who this whose ear was
out for this kind of thing. So in addition to
replacing the really inefficient steam engine, in addition to replacing
like letting the horses go retire and be put out
to pasture, and then also about you know, coming up
with something that doesn't use coal, all of these things
came together to kind of give him this mission in
(13:23):
this drive.
Speaker 4 (13:25):
Yeah. Absolutely. He went back idea wise, at least to
the auto engine again an internal combustion engine, but auto's
engine used a spark, like you know, a spark plug
to ignite the fuel, and Diesel still thought, there's got
to be a better way. I don't think we need
that spark. I think we can use highly compressed air
(13:48):
that gets so compressed and so hot it will ignite,
and ended up sort of using this idea from a
tinder box that he saw that was a base a
sparkless way to ignite tender and it was like a
sort of like a syringe. It was larger, it was
about the size of a like a bicycle pump, but
(14:09):
like a glass syringe that compressed air such that it
would eventually provide that ignition. And he was like, hey,
if it works there, it could work in an engine.
Speaker 2 (14:19):
Yeah. And the genius of all this is so again,
steam engines are powering the industrial revolution. They've done their thing,
They've completely changed the world. But again, they're really inefficient.
I think they're about ten percent efficient. So ninety percent
of the energy in the coal is lost to heat
to the environment, only ten percent.
Speaker 4 (14:37):
Terrible.
Speaker 2 (14:37):
Actually, yeah, it's really really inefficient. And so one of
the geniuses of an internal combustion engine in the first place,
but also specifically Diesel's engine is it says, what if
we just got rid of all the stuff that led
up to that piston moving and just like make the
(14:57):
engine that piston. If you compress air enough, you're compressing
the molecules really tightly, really quickly. It causes them to
become excited, which causes them to put off heat, and
if you compress it enough, it produces enough heat that
it can ignite fuel in that piston. Causing the piston
to move up and down. And that's ultimately what you're
(15:18):
after is making that piston move up and down. So
he got rid of all that stuff, the piles of coal,
the big boiler full of steam, the steam itself, and
took the whole the whole process right to the piston itself.
And it worked really, really well.
Speaker 4 (15:31):
It turned out, yeah, eventually, And you know, we should
probably talk a little bit about his big idea with this.
It wasn't just he had. He had other drives besides
making an engine that worked more efficiently. He was he
had this idea of helping the common person. And uh,
you know, while while Danny Steam's invention may have powered
(15:54):
the industrial Revolution, what what did it do for the
artisan in the countryside, or the craftsmen or the small
business person. And I think I can build an engine
that's small enough, that runs on cheap fuel, that doesn't
require much, if any maintenance if you're kind of keeping
up with it, or you know, repair as long as
(16:14):
you're maintaining it. Rather that it can revitalize the countryside
and make people in rural areas give them the same
sort of chance to succeed by having the power of
an engine at their disposal.
Speaker 2 (16:27):
Right, Yeah, because those steam engines were so big and
required so much labor, they just sucked people from the
countryside and consolidated them in the cities. And he wanted
to do the opposite. And so if you have a light, portable,
efficient engine that people in the rural areas can use, yeah,
like you said, it give them put them on equal
footing with the industrialists of the city. But also you
(16:47):
mentioned cheap fuel too. One of his dreams was to
make his diesel engine run on vegetable oil. Essentially biodiesel
is essentially what he was trying to do, and it
was a viable idea for a really long time, basically
the entire time he was alive. And that would have
really given people in rural areas a leg up because
(17:08):
they could have grown their own fuel to power the
engines that they had at their disposal to run their
arts and crafts fares.
Speaker 4 (17:17):
Yeah, so he had big ideas he filed his patent,
he went to try and get funding, a lot of
skepticism obviously in the financial marketplace at the time, and
he got a couple of guys, Heinrich von Butz and
Friedrich Krup to give him some money. Von Botz, for
his part, was a managing director at Machine Fabric Alsberg
(17:41):
and also said, hey, you can take some of my
factory space to work on this stuff. So Rudolph moved
to Alsberg in eighteen ninety three started working on this
engine with that sort of tinderbox idea in mind. And
the one thing he couldn't figure out. He was like, a, no,
compressing air can ignite this thing, but I just don't
(18:01):
know how much pressure I'm gonna need. And for a
little while it got a little dangerous in that machine shop.
Speaker 2 (18:08):
Yeah there, I guess. There was no way to work
it out on paper. First. He had to figure it
out like in real.
Speaker 4 (18:15):
Life by compressing air.
Speaker 2 (18:17):
Yeah, it's essentially adding some combustible fluid to or fuel
to it. So he did that. His first working prototype
he demonstrated in the lab. I don't even know if
it was demonstration. I think they just tried it the
first time and the it compressed air so much I guess,
and produced so much heat that the engine blew up
(18:40):
and like you said, blue throughout the lab like pieces
of the engine went flying. But when like you can
just imagine in the movie, like they rise up from
behind like some big crate and everybody's hair standing on
and there's smoke coming off of there. He's like it worked.
In that he proved that if you compressed air you
could create he ate enough heat to ignite something. You
(19:02):
didn't need a spark, you didn't need coal or a boiler.
You like, his engine could work and it had just
been proven.
Speaker 4 (19:10):
Yeah, for sure. The second one went much better. It
did not explode. The third one was the big sort
of moment when the bell rang, it ran on kerosene.
He was thirty nine years old, which is pretty incredible
to think about, and felt comfortable enough to do a
public test on February seventeenth, eighteen ninety seven, in front
(19:32):
of an audience there at the Machine Fabric Factory for
the employees and engineers. A few other firms were there,
and it was a really big, big success. And he
in that he achieved not only a working engine, but
it was had a basically invisible and almost odorless exhaust
and reached an efficiency of twenty six point two percent
(19:53):
compared with Danny Steams measly ten percent.
Speaker 2 (19:57):
Yeah, and you're like, well that's you know, not that
much better. That is a mind boggling improvement in efficiency
over the existing technology that was just out of the gate.
It was revolutionary. And like you said, I think Friedrich Krup.
Is that how you pronounced his last name? Yeah, he
(20:18):
was an early investor, And I was like, that name
sounds very familiar. And I went and looked him up
on Wikipedia, in honor of my reformed view of Wikipedia,
and I found out that it was, in fact who
I've been calling Krupp, the same Krupper Krup family that
gave rise to the Tyson Krup International mega conglomerate from Europe.
(20:43):
It might be okay, so Tyson Krup, you're familiar with
that company, right, They're just enormous?
Speaker 4 (20:49):
Sure?
Speaker 2 (20:49):
Two, Yeah, that's right. And so I was reading a
little bit about Friedrich Croup on Wikipedia and little known
fact he used to write a giraffe everywhere he went.
Speaker 4 (21:01):
As you do. I have a few quotes if I may,
because it's really hard to overstate, like you were saying,
what a leap forward this was in technology. One of
his biographers, a man named It's last name is a Brunt,
said it was the most disruptive technology in history. Winston
(21:25):
Churchill called it the most perfect maritime masterpiece of the century.
And if you're wondering what maritime has to do with it,
we'll get to that. And then no less than Edison
said it was one of the greatest achievements of mankind.
So that's how big of a deal the diesel engine was.
Speaker 2 (21:42):
Yeah, And again, so Rudolph is like, like, this is happening,
Like I'm making this happen like this, the people in
the country, in the rural countryside are going to be saved,
Like this whole industrialization thing is going to be reversed
and kind of mellowed out and smooth dover, and the
world's going to be saved, essentially. And it just did
(22:04):
not quite go that way. I mean, just the very
fact that he had wincient triciall weighing in on how
great it was kind of gives you an indication that
it did not go the way that he wanted.
Speaker 4 (22:15):
Yeah. Well, one thing that did go the way he
wanted was he made a ton of money off this thing.
Once he had a working prototype, people started literally lining
up to get a license for this thing, just a
license to build it. Like they had to figure out
how to build it and how to mass produce it
and everything. But he ended up selling twenty two different
(22:36):
licenses over a two year period in eighteen ninety seven
and eighteen ninety eight alone to people like Watson and
Yarn and Yarien in Scotland. Augustus Bush bought the United
States and Canadian license for what would be nine million
dollars today, basically fiat in Italy, like people are buying
(22:59):
licenses hand over fist basically. And eventually he would even
sell all of his rights and patents to the General
Diesel Company for three and a half million marks. And
I tried to convert that to US dollars in twenty
twenty four.
Speaker 2 (23:16):
What did you get?
Speaker 4 (23:17):
Did you try?
Speaker 2 (23:17):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (23:19):
What did you get?
Speaker 2 (23:19):
I got eleven and a half million US dollars today?
Speaker 4 (23:25):
Oh boy, I got three hundred and fifty million dollars.
Speaker 2 (23:29):
Well, I don't know, you could be right. I went
to a German inflation calculator first and converted three and
a half million marks from eighteen ninety eight to two
twenty three or twenty four dollars.
Speaker 4 (23:41):
Marks and then all the euros now though.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
Right, But there was a selection you could chase convert
it to euros or Marx Deutsche marks.
Speaker 4 (23:48):
Oh okay, and I clicked deutsch marks.
Speaker 2 (23:50):
I'm almost positive. And then I took that and exchanged
at today's rate for US dollars. That's how I came
up with it. But I mean, you know, me and math,
you're proud wrecking buttons and stuff like that. I'm not
that good.
Speaker 4 (24:02):
No, I think your methodology was better. What I did
was I went back to see what the Deutsche mark
to the US dollar was in nineteen or in eighteen ninety.
Speaker 2 (24:12):
Eight, and pulled a few economists.
Speaker 4 (24:14):
I converted that to US dollars front to eighteen ninety
eight US dollars and then did a calculation. So that's
probably that's good, the wrong methodology, but.
Speaker 2 (24:23):
I mean it's crazy that they would be so wildly,
so wildly off. So what was yours? Like three hundred million? Yeah,
and mine was like eleven year. Let's split the difference
and saved about one hundred and sixty million marks or
US dollars today.
Speaker 4 (24:37):
Well, I think your I think your methodology is better.
But either way, he made a lot of money off
of this thing. It ran off of, like you said,
potentially vegetable oil. But you know, kerosene, peanut oil, all
kinds of things, and it was or could have been
a boon to the you know, this big idea that
he had of the people in the countryside, had it
(24:59):
not been for the Yeah.
Speaker 2 (25:01):
So, one of the things that all of these international
companies who had licensed the right to make diesel engines
were supposed to do was, as they were developing their
own versions, any technological breakthroughs were supposed to be shared
with all the other licensees, So the diesel engine itself
would be cooperatively developed internationally, kind of like a human
(25:21):
undertaking among the global community. And I guess that worked
for a little while. But then, like you said, when
the First World War started to come around, intentions rose.
The diesel engine came to be the center of an
arms race between the UK and Germany. And despite being
German of German heritage, a German citizen, having created the
(25:42):
diesel engine in Germany, Rudolph Diesel was not a fan
of the Kaiser, was not a fan of the ultranationalism
that was starting to develop in Germany that helped lead
the world to World War One. And he's like, I
kind of like the UK and where they're coming from
these days, I'm going to move there and actually helped
them with their arms race to create the diesel engines
(26:03):
that will be used to power this new scary technology
called submarines.
Speaker 4 (26:07):
Yeah. In nineteen twelve he co founded the Consolidated Diesel
Engine Company with a British engineer named George Correll's and
the submarine. And that's why Churchill said it's the most
perfect maritime masterpiece of the century. Is all of a sudden,
you had submarines that didn't require tons and tons of
coal on board, tons and tons of soldiers to shovel
(26:30):
that coal, these big dangerous coal ovens. You had this
like super efficient engine inside this thing. It was like
it totally revolutionized how submarines operated and thus how the
war went.
Speaker 2 (26:45):
Yeah. I looked up George Correll's too on Wikipedia, and
apparently he was known to giggle like a schoolgirl at
dirty jokes. Really no, no, I'm making a comment on
wikiped but I'm just kidding.
Speaker 4 (27:02):
Crap.
Speaker 2 (27:03):
I'm sorry. It wasn't intended to mislead you. I I
it was really a targeted It was targeted at Wikipedia.
Speaker 1 (27:11):
Well.
Speaker 4 (27:11):
Part of the reason that always works is because you're
so good at digging up these arcane facts. So I
tend to just be like, holy cow, listen to that.
Speaker 2 (27:19):
Wow, that's really something. Giggled like a school girl.
Speaker 4 (27:21):
You say, I just got joshed.
Speaker 2 (27:24):
I'm sorry. You got caught in the drag net, is
what it was.
Speaker 4 (27:29):
So, uh, should we take another break?
Speaker 2 (27:31):
Sure?
Speaker 4 (27:32):
All right, let's take another break. We'll talk a little
bit more about diesel.
Speaker 1 (27:38):
Stop you know, stop stood stop here? Shouldn't know no,
stop you know stop stood stop here, shouldn't know stop
you should know as why why.
Speaker 3 (27:56):
Sk sk?
Speaker 2 (28:00):
But tough he should know.
Speaker 4 (28:05):
So while all this is happening, I mentioned that he
got married and had three kids. They were all in
Berlin together in eighteen ninety. But when he moved to Alsberg,
like I said, to develop this engine, he left his
family behind for five years. Then the family moved to Munich,
and then finally he said, you know, we got to
(28:25):
reunite the family. I'm going to build my magnificent, most
magnificent idea. Aside from that engine, sure will be this
mansion from architect Max Littman. And it was. It was
quite a mansion. And in fact, even though he had
a lot of money, the way things turned out with
him financially, I dare say that he overdid it a bit.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
There was a bike track, indoor bike track for his kids.
I mean state of the arts stuff. One, yeah, two, three, four.
Five bathrooms a lot for back then for sure. And
I'm not talking out houses, I mean bathroom.
Speaker 4 (29:01):
I mean I don't have five bathrooms in his twenty
twenty four.
Speaker 2 (29:03):
There was a staff. It's not that impressive because everybody
had a staff back then.
Speaker 4 (29:07):
Right, Yeah, I don't have a staff.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
But still it was like it was a big deal.
And not only was it a beautiful, amazing, advanced mansion
that he helped design, this put a inder, a punctuation
mark on years of living away from his family in
different countries, like dedicating his life to this diesel engine
and taking good care of them for what I could understand,
(29:31):
but not being a part of the family. He was
a part of creating the diesel engine. And so by
building this mansion, he was coming back home, coming back
to his family and starting a new chapter, restarting an
important chapter of his life.
Speaker 4 (29:49):
Yeah, but it was a chapter marked by some poor health.
I saw that he got migraines, suffered from migraines, gout.
I know that he dropped a ton of money on
this mansion. I don't think that ruined him or anything.
But he also made some bad financial investments apparently, and
they're kind of conflicting stories about how bad off the
(30:11):
family was. But as we'll see in the end, it
turns out that they weren't doing so great in the
financial department after all.
Speaker 2 (30:18):
No, I saw it. Yeah, I saw a lot of
his early engines did not work very well. They weren't reliable,
and so there was a lot of customers that wanted
their money back initially. So, like you said, there's a
big debate over just how bad off they were in
Douglas Brunt, one of his recent biographers from twenty twenty
(30:39):
four is at odds with a biographer from the seventies
named John Frederick Moon. Moons like he was destitute and desperate.
This guy was in dire financial streets. Douglas Brunt, who
again wrote much more recently forty years, six fifty years
more recently, good God, he was like, No, actually, I
think that this was like an eighteen nineties phase and
(31:02):
that you know, after the turn of the century, started
to make his money back again, and that he was
on okay financial footing.
Speaker 4 (31:08):
Yeah, he was still really wrapped up in this this
big idea of you know, saving the common person. In
nineteen oh three, he wrote a book called or published
one and at least in nineteen oh three called Solidarity
Colon even back then the Rational Economic Salvation of mankind
(31:29):
when he talked about, you know, sort of this basically
socialist ideas that he you know, of of the class
division being you know, not not a good thing. And
unfortunately nobody I don't think it was a very good book.
No one really read it much.
Speaker 2 (31:44):
No tell him what that wonder seems like?
Speaker 4 (31:46):
I said, Yeah, there was one review that called it
a real pain to read.
Speaker 2 (31:51):
That's not a glowing review, No know what you're looking for.
But in writing that book in conjunction with Create the
Diesel Engine, he was quoted as having said that he
solved the social question like he's like, here's the engine,
here's what we're trying to do. I basically just saved
the world. And he said that he was able to
(32:14):
do what all the nations combined were unable to throw
out the Rockefellers, and it just did not happen that way.
As a matter of fact, when did he publish.
Speaker 4 (32:23):
That book nineteen oh three, nineteen oh three.
Speaker 2 (32:26):
Over the next ten years, he was still in a
position and his engine was still in a position that
it wasn't entirely clear which way it was going to go.
It wasn't World War one fully yet, it was just
the very beginning of it. I think there was still
a really good chance that diesel engines would run on
vegetable oil. It was very much up in the air.
(32:48):
And in September of nineteen thirteen September twenty ninth, I
believe he went on a fateful trip more than a
three hour toer, but it was it's not that much,
more like less than twenty four hours, I think, to
go do a groundbreaking of the company that he co
founded with George Carrell's.
Speaker 4 (33:10):
Yeah, I got a named Alfred Laucom, who was another
engineer who was a pal of theirs. And a few
days before this, we should mention that he right before
he went on this trip, he gave his wife a
brand new overnight bag and said, here's this bag, don't
open it until next week. Very mysterious thing to do.
(33:32):
But he went to Ghent and got on the S. S.
Dresden on the twenty ninth with those three other two guys,
had dinner with them. Seemed like they had a good
time and they were all in good spirits. Then he
was like, all right, dinner's over. I'm gonna go to bed,
and he was never seen again. No.
Speaker 2 (33:51):
The next morning, his companions, George Carrell's and Alfred they
went to go rouse him and say hey, let's party
this morning, and he didn't answer. So they went in
his room. His bed was not slept in, His nightclothes
were laid out on the bed, his travel bag was there,
his watch was on his travel bag, and he was
(34:12):
just nowhere to be found. So they informed the captain
who had the ship searched, and in short order they
found his coat and hat on deck near a railing,
and his coat had been neatly folded. Just not a
good sign. And when they made land in London, he
was just not there. He was no longer on the ship.
At some point somewhere in the English Channel, almost to
(34:35):
the North Sea, Rudolph Diesel just vanished off the SS Dresden.
Speaker 4 (34:40):
That's right. And what was in that leather bag that
he gave his wife.
Speaker 2 (34:44):
Twenty thousand German marks. No idea how much that is
in today's US dollars, but it was a significant amount
of money.
Speaker 4 (34:51):
Let's say there was a lot of money. And there
were also financial records basically showing that they were broke.
So that sort of seen, at least at this point
in his life, puts to rest the question that they
were financial troubles. Yeah, so you know, here's some money,
but our accounts are empty. The disappearance was a very
(35:12):
big deal, obviously, and right away because he had made
a lot of enemies. The Kaiser Wilhelm did not like him.
John D. Rockefeller did not like him, and there were,
you know, people saying like, could one of them had
him killed? Is it foul play? Was it just an accident?
Was it a suicide? Like no one, no one knew
(35:32):
and seemingly no one knows for sure, even though most
people agreed that it was suicide.
Speaker 2 (35:39):
Yeah, the folded coat kind of says something that it
wasn't just falling overboard. That kind of goes away with
that one. And that was the initial one too, because
he had he had been said to have been in
high spirits. George Carrell said that after dinner, as they
walked some. They walked him back to his state room.
He said, I'll see you tomorrow. Yeah, another evidence or
(36:02):
another bit against the idea that it was suicide. His watch,
like I said, it was set on his bag, but
it was laid out in such a way that he
could see what time it was when he would be
laying down in bed. Not something you do.
Speaker 4 (36:16):
You don't drop up your watch.
Speaker 2 (36:17):
Yeah, Like you don't really go to that trouble if
you don't think that. If you think like I'm going
to at my life in a couple hours, that doesn't matter.
And then George Crels also told The New York Times
that he did that Rudolph did not suffer from giddiness.
I guess that means that he would not have answered
the call of the void, is what he was saying.
Speaker 4 (36:37):
Yeah, this whole idea of murder, none of it really
holds up to scrutiny when you investigate either the fact
that the Germans came after him because he didn't help
them build, you know, their engines for the submarines for
the war, or Rockefeller. So those generally don't hold up
when you look into him more closely. And like I said,
most people say it was suicide, but they're the the
(36:59):
what was his first name, Brent's name, Douglas Douglas Brunt,
who wrote the Maurice biography as a theory that he
did not die at all and that he was it
was sort of faked, basically by the British, and he
was shuttled away to Canada where he could continue working
on these engines for the war.
Speaker 2 (37:19):
Yeah, there was a New York Times article in nineteen
fourteen that said as much that he'd been rumored to
be working in Canada. That is probably not true because
about eleven days, I think eleven days after he went missing,
a body washed up. So okay, it depends on who
you ask me or Chuck. It turns out his body
(37:41):
that turned up at the mouth of a Dutch river
and was taken ashore and taken into town and was
identified or viewed by one of his sons as almost
certainly his dad, but not a positive identification because it
was too decomposed.
Speaker 4 (37:57):
Or I don't think the Dutch river part is debated.
Speaker 2 (38:03):
Oh, I thought it was. I thought they were out
to sea.
Speaker 4 (38:06):
No, no, no, I saw everywhere I saw. It was
at the mouth of a Dutch River. He was just
pulled out of the water. But I saw in a
lot of places, including the Brunt's biography, that the body
was returned to the water because it was just so
unrecognizable and you know, rotted by that point, which is
(38:28):
really gross that they put the body back in the
sea but kept the belongings that he had. That I
saw also disputed. I saw that there were everything from
glasses case to a pocket, pin knife to a pillbox,
and I even saw one say that was an ID
card recovered. I don't think that's true, because that's literal
(38:50):
positive identification unless it's you know, planted on somebody to
make it seem like a suicide. Other most places I
saw didn't mention an ID card, but they did say
that the sun identified the items and said, yeah, those
are my Debt's things.
Speaker 2 (39:05):
And then mysteriously among his possessions was found the tooth
of a giraffe.
Speaker 4 (39:12):
I don't believe that.
Speaker 2 (39:13):
Good, You're like, no, that's the one truth, right, So,
I mean that's no one knows what happened to him.
There's no solution to that puzzle. Yeah, I'm going with
that was his body, you think, Yeah, suicide probably everything
I saw was that he was in dire financial straits.
(39:36):
And I mean plenty of people have died by suicide
for that reason. Sure, so it's it's entirely possible. I
don't know enough to be like, yep, that's it, but
that's probably where I lean.
Speaker 4 (39:46):
I would say, well, regardless of what happened, the you know,
the invention of that engine was h you know, you
heard the quotes that changed the history of the world
in a lot of ways and such that it just
a cup years ago. In twenty twenty two, a full
ninety six percent of trucks in the EU run on
diesel engines. And here in America it's a little bit
(40:08):
different because we've been had a love hate relationship with
diesel over the years as far as trying to phase
it out or other people saying, no, it's a superior fuel,
But about twenty three percent of fuel in the US
is diesel fuel still.
Speaker 2 (40:23):
Yeah, And the reason why people say it's superior is
because even though there's more CO two, there's more carbon
in diesel fuel. Diesel burns more efficiently than gas, so
it actually releases less CO two than gas does, even
though there's more CO two. And diesel because less is
(40:44):
burned over the course of say fifty miles or something
like that. So it's true, but still it does it
is a polluter. If you're trying to get away from
fossil fuels, diesels included in there too.
Speaker 4 (40:54):
I remember having a couple of friends back in the
day that had like a hand me down old you know,
seventies Mercedes Benz Diesel from their parents or something or
their grandpa grandpa died and they got one of those
you know, chuggy engines. I just remember they were very
loud and it seemed like they just did nothing but
spew black smokes.
Speaker 2 (41:13):
Yeah, I know, the diesel smoke is just so noxious too.
Speaker 4 (41:17):
It seemed like it. I mean, maybe they were old
cars or not running right. I have no idea, but
that's sort of my only memory of diesel engines.
Speaker 2 (41:24):
No, I'm with you, Yeah, they're still like that. If
you want to know more about Diesel and his engine,
then just go read Douglas Brunt's book on it. And
since I mentioned Douglas Brunt for the one last time,
it's time for listener maw.
Speaker 4 (41:40):
I'm gonna call this Harvard follow up with the old
Puritans episode. Hey guys, in your recent episode of Puritans,
you mentioned the founding of Harvard. I'm a graduate of
the Divinity School and learned an interesting tidbit. I believe
it was in the sixties and the Divinity School had
fallen on kind of hard times. Enrollment was down, wasn't
attracting the best students or teachers, so Harvard had the
(42:01):
sensible business idea of selling it off. The court declared, though,
that if Harvard sold the Divinity School, the university would
have to close its doors, because the original charter states
at the purpose to be educating a quote learned learned
clergy end quote. So if they stopped doing that, the
school was no longer following its charter. Another wise choice. Later,
(42:22):
the university doubled down at support, and some three decades
or so after, it was the institution in which I
spent three years on my way to a Master's of Divinity.
During orientation, the dean of the school said to us,
you all belong here. So either we are not as
elite as you had assumed, or you were brighter than
you had thought. Either way, you belong here. Welcome.
Speaker 2 (42:44):
What a great message.
Speaker 4 (42:46):
That's pretty cool. Keep up the great work guys. You
are you guys are a gift in such divided and
divisive times. Thanks for that. That is from Eric Wickstrom.
Speaker 2 (42:56):
Thanks Eric, Reverend Eric Wickstrom, Thanks Reverend reverends. That's funny
that mention of how attendance was down in the sixties
so much that they were going to sell the Divinity
School reminded me of Reverend Lovejoy's origin story from The Simpsons,
and he was saying it was the early seventies. The
sixties were over and people were ready to feel bad
about themselves again.
Speaker 4 (43:20):
So good.
Speaker 2 (43:21):
Yeah, if you want to be like Reverend Eric, you
can email us too, especially with additional info. We didn't know.
That's interesting. We love that stuff. You can send it
to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 4 (43:37):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (43:40):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's
Chuck and Benz here sitting in for Jerry, and this
is stuff you should know?
Speaker 3 (00:21):
What you know?
Speaker 2 (00:23):
I kind of pick up the.
Speaker 4 (00:25):
Ball the baton. We are doing an episode today on
Rudolph Diesel, invention of our inventor of the diesel engine.
And this was prepared for us by Anna Green, one
of our writers, and edited a great job, very exhaustive. Look,
but this was a listener suggestion and I went back
(00:46):
to look at who it was, and it turns out
there were three emails over the past like a couple
of years to investigate Rudolph Diesel. Scott Simpson, I don't
think my friend Scott Simpson, who's also a comedian but
who knows okay, Christian Coiner and then very mysteriously Leo
and Jenny Oh No, last name yeah, Leo and Jenny.
(01:08):
The last name isn't in Jenny.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
Right, No, the middle initial is in in the last
name is Jenny.
Speaker 4 (01:14):
Yeah. So thanks for these suggestions, because this was I
didn't know anything about the guy, didn't know anything about
the diesel engine, and now I feel good enough to
get a Jeopardy answer or two correct.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
For sure, Yeah, call us ken. I had no idea
about this either. I didn't realize that diesel is technically
a proprietary eponym, or at least a proper noun. If
you see like that Diesel engine, the d should be
capitalized because it was invented. It's named after its inventor,
Rudolph Diesel, who was working around the turn of the
(01:44):
last century and a little bit before, a little bit after.
And he was a German kid born in Paris to
a father who well, his father was a bit of
a character, as we'll see in some of the worst ways.
But who was He was an interesting person who made
his own way in the world and changed it radically.
(02:07):
The irony is he changed it in ways that were
the opposite of what he wanted to or how we
wanted to change the world.
Speaker 4 (02:16):
Yeah, for sure. And like many inventors, his story starts
out as a child who was sort of obsessed with
figuring out how things worked. A tinkerer who would take
apart things. We've heard the story kind of time and
time again. Someone who would like disassemble things in their house,
put them back together. As a kid in Paris, he
(02:37):
was working for his dad a lot of the time
or in school, and in eighteen sixty seven came across
his first internal combustion engine at the Paris World's Fair
when he saw the auto engine, Nicholas Auto's coal gas engine,
like I said, at the World's Fair.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
Yeah, and this was a big deal. Other people had
invented internal combustion engines before, but Nicholas Auto's was like
the culmination of it. It was like the real deal. So
the fact that it really struck young Rudolph Diesel, this
would have been oh he would have been fifteen, nineteen, No,
(03:20):
he would have been nine.
Speaker 4 (03:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
Imagine being a nine year old kid and seeing an
internal combustion engine and saying to yourself, this is what
I want to dedicate my life.
Speaker 4 (03:29):
Yeah, that was the.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
Kind of kid. Theodore Diesel was right. And again it
was a big deal that he saw this engine, or
I should say the engine itself was a big deal.
But they didn't stick around Paris for much longer. That
was eighteen sixty seven. Within three years, the Franco Prussian
War broke out and the Diesel family said we need
to get out of France. Let's move to London, and
(03:51):
they did, and the whole family took a downward turn
from there.
Speaker 4 (03:56):
Yeah, I mean, I get the idea that it was
just sort of moved uprooted and moved to a new
country and had a lot of time getting good work
because their family did not live well there, thankfully at
least for Rudolph. A few months after getting there, he
was twelve at the time and uncle said, come back
to Germany, come back to Ausburg, live with us. Your
(04:18):
uncle here, Christophe Barnacle, will help pay for your schooling.
He enrolled at the Royal County Trade School for three
years while his family stayed in London. So when he
graduated in eighteen sixty five, his dad said, hey, need
you to come back to London and get some get
a job and help us out, like your schooling is over.
(04:39):
Rudolph said nine, I'm gonna stay here. I want to
be an engineer, which means I need to keep going
to school. So he denied his father and enrolled at
the Technicia Hochschuler Munschen there in what we call Munich, Germany.
He got a scholarship to go there and very the
(05:00):
word I'm looking for when something happens, it's very important
and auspicious.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
No, resolute, No.
Speaker 4 (05:09):
Not that sort of the opposite of coincidence. Uh, purposefully yeah, yeah, perpendicularly,
just very importantly. There, I will say, met one Carl
von Linda, who would be his a big person in
his life, his employer at one point, and a mentor
and friend.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
I get what you're trying to say. I can't think
of the word either, kind of like.
Speaker 3 (05:30):
Auspiciously, like auspicious as fate would have it. No, it
is auspicious, right, predetermination, predestination someone I know, this is
the kind of stuff people like.
Speaker 2 (05:43):
I'm like, I like stuff, you should know, but there's
a lot that I don't like about it too. You know.
Speaker 4 (05:50):
Where I was leading with that was from that point
where he met von Linda and was in school he
became fascinated by another proprietary epic engine, the steam engine
invented by Danny Steam.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
Right. No, he came across the Carnov cycle, Right, Wasn't
that another thing that really kind of struck him floated
his boat?
Speaker 4 (06:16):
Yeah, besides Danny Steam's invention.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
Yeah, well, the Carno cycle is this It is a
theoretical engine external combustion engine that where every bit of
energy put into it produces work, so it's one hundred
percent efficient. It's essentially impossible, but it's theoretically possible. And
that combined with auto's internal combustion engine, really kind of
(06:44):
came together to give Rudolph Diesel like his his purpose
in life, his mission in life. And then, like you said,
when he fortuitously met Carl von Linz.
Speaker 4 (06:55):
The word yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
Everything came together because now he had a mentor of Haron,
a guy who gave him a job right out of
right out of school. And when you take like the
fact that his family was using their luggage in London
as the furniture in their house, and his aunt and
uncle came a call in and said, let's just pluck
(07:17):
you out of this situation and put you on the
road to your destiny. And then you're going to go
forth and change the world. Literally, your invention is going
to fuel the Second Industrial Revolution and put us where
humans are today. You can largely thank Rudolph Diesel in
his invention for that. It's it's just mind boggling the
(07:40):
series of events that happened to do that, and the
effect that it had on the world.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
No.
Speaker 4 (07:45):
Absolutely. He moved back to Paris eventually in eighteen eighty
and like you said, he went to work for Carl
von Linde. I think it said Linda and I had.
Speaker 2 (07:56):
I just imagine him being like a seventies mom.
Speaker 4 (07:59):
I think German. It wouldn't be lend I think it
would be lind like with Ah at the end.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
Sure, but I don't know about Linda.
Speaker 4 (08:09):
You know, like Linda's bagels. He worked for for Lynd
as an ice guy. He had a ice machine company,
and he was all kinds of things. He was an
apprentice for a little while. He eventually became a salesperson
over this decade that he worked for him. But one
of the other cool facts, and this is the Jeopardy question,
(08:30):
maybe one of them. Ye, it's like, what other famous
thing did Rudolph Diesel invent? He invented and got a
patent for the ice cube.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
Yeah. Yeah. I was like when I saw that, I
was like, well, wait, does that mean he invented the
ice cube? Yes, Indeed, Rudolph Diesel, the inventor of the
Diesel engine, also invented the ice cube.
Speaker 4 (08:49):
Yeah, which I guess is the means of I mean
maybe they just never thought of freezing ice in cubes before.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
I guess. But think about it, Chuck, we would be
lacking one quarter of NWA had Theodore Diesel not come
along or Rudolph Diesel not come along.
Speaker 4 (09:04):
That's a good point.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
So he graduated like like we kind of put the
car in front of the horse. But he graduated and
went on to get that job with Linda Carl von Linda.
But when he did graduate from school, he had the
highest grades in the history of the entire school. One
of the reasons why he was a very serious student.
He was not some even though he was well taken
(09:29):
care of and funded. He was you know, when he
had a scholarship, he worked his tail off and took
his his his studies very seriously. So this kid was
like he was pretty put together for you know, his age,
for sure.
Speaker 4 (09:45):
Yeah, absolutely, So, you know I said he worked there
for a decade. Within that decade, for about six or
seven years of it, he after inventing the ice cube,
which would help found n w A and I guess
prevent from just being tea.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
Right, or hot tea sure, or even tepid ta.
Speaker 4 (10:06):
Right, tepid t. That's that's your refer name.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
Reallypid t.
Speaker 4 (10:12):
Yeah, neither hot nor cold.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
You have to say it like you're slightly annoying, tepid tea.
Speaker 4 (10:18):
Yeah, exactly. He started working on engines again, this this
idea popped back into his head, this memory of the
Carno cycle of like, gosh, there's got to be a
way to make Danny Steam's engine more efficient. And for
about six or seven years he worked on and trying
to develop an ammonia powered heat engine. Ammonia was too volatile,
(10:41):
so he eventually ends up back in Berlin with his
By this time he had a wife, Martha and three
children and started working like in Earnest on the internal
combustion engine and I believe filed a patent in eighteen
ninety two.
Speaker 2 (10:56):
Uh yeah, I feel like we should take a break
and then come back and talk about like, you know,
how what what? Like this guy wasn't working in a vacuum,
so what environment? What world he was working? And when
he was trying to come up with his diesel engine.
Speaker 4 (11:11):
All right, let's do it.
Speaker 1 (11:14):
Stop you know, stop stop stop here? Should know no
stop you know stop stop stop here? Shouldn't know stuff?
You should know as w s K.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
You should know, so, Chuck. I found a BBC article
that kind of put the stakes out there pretty well
about what was driving in part Rudolph Diesel's obsession with
creating a super efficient engine. And one of the things
they said was that there was a ton of horses.
I think they said in a city of five hundred
(11:58):
thousand people, there were probably one hundred thousand horses, and
all of them were walking around, pooping and peeing everywhere,
all over the place. So an alternative to horse power
was very desirable, and we already had steam power, but
steam power had its own thing going on, and in
one way, one of the big weaknesses of steam powers
(12:18):
that it required tons and tons and tons of coal,
because you use coal to heat a boiler, to boil
water to create steam to run a piston, and then
the piston turns the chemical energy of the coal into
the mechanical work that turns something or makes something go
up and down or does whatever. Probably has something to
do with gears. I don't get it, but there was
(12:40):
already back in the eighteen sixties a book by a
guy named Stanley Jevin or Jivaon called The Coal Question,
and this guy was already warning about peak coal, essentially
pointing out like coal is a non renewable resource everybody,
and we are using it really really fast. This guy
was already ringing the alarm about it. Rudolph Diesel was
(13:02):
exactly the kind of person who this whose ear was
out for this kind of thing. So in addition to
replacing the really inefficient steam engine, in addition to replacing
like letting the horses go retire and be put out
to pasture, and then also about you know, coming up
with something that doesn't use coal, all of these things
came together to kind of give him this mission in
(13:23):
this drive.
Speaker 4 (13:25):
Yeah. Absolutely. He went back idea wise, at least to
the auto engine again an internal combustion engine, but auto's
engine used a spark, like you know, a spark plug
to ignite the fuel, and Diesel still thought, there's got
to be a better way. I don't think we need
that spark. I think we can use highly compressed air
(13:48):
that gets so compressed and so hot it will ignite,
and ended up sort of using this idea from a
tinder box that he saw that was a base a
sparkless way to ignite tender and it was like a
sort of like a syringe. It was larger, it was
about the size of a like a bicycle pump, but
(14:09):
like a glass syringe that compressed air such that it
would eventually provide that ignition. And he was like, hey,
if it works there, it could work in an engine.
Speaker 2 (14:19):
Yeah. And the genius of all this is so again,
steam engines are powering the industrial revolution. They've done their thing,
They've completely changed the world. But again, they're really inefficient.
I think they're about ten percent efficient. So ninety percent
of the energy in the coal is lost to heat
to the environment, only ten percent.
Speaker 4 (14:37):
Terrible.
Speaker 2 (14:37):
Actually, yeah, it's really really inefficient. And so one of
the geniuses of an internal combustion engine in the first place,
but also specifically Diesel's engine is it says, what if
we just got rid of all the stuff that led
up to that piston moving and just like make the
(14:57):
engine that piston. If you compress air enough, you're compressing
the molecules really tightly, really quickly. It causes them to
become excited, which causes them to put off heat, and
if you compress it enough, it produces enough heat that
it can ignite fuel in that piston. Causing the piston
to move up and down. And that's ultimately what you're
(15:18):
after is making that piston move up and down. So
he got rid of all that stuff, the piles of coal,
the big boiler full of steam, the steam itself, and
took the whole the whole process right to the piston itself.
And it worked really, really well.
Speaker 4 (15:31):
It turned out, yeah, eventually, And you know, we should
probably talk a little bit about his big idea with this.
It wasn't just he had. He had other drives besides
making an engine that worked more efficiently. He was he
had this idea of helping the common person. And uh,
you know, while while Danny Steam's invention may have powered
(15:54):
the industrial Revolution, what what did it do for the
artisan in the countryside, or the craftsmen or the small
business person. And I think I can build an engine
that's small enough, that runs on cheap fuel, that doesn't
require much, if any maintenance if you're kind of keeping
up with it, or you know, repair as long as
(16:14):
you're maintaining it. Rather that it can revitalize the countryside
and make people in rural areas give them the same
sort of chance to succeed by having the power of
an engine at their disposal.
Speaker 2 (16:27):
Right, Yeah, because those steam engines were so big and
required so much labor, they just sucked people from the
countryside and consolidated them in the cities. And he wanted
to do the opposite. And so if you have a light, portable,
efficient engine that people in the rural areas can use, yeah,
like you said, it give them put them on equal
footing with the industrialists of the city. But also you
(16:47):
mentioned cheap fuel too. One of his dreams was to
make his diesel engine run on vegetable oil. Essentially biodiesel
is essentially what he was trying to do, and it
was a viable idea for a really long time, basically
the entire time he was alive. And that would have
really given people in rural areas a leg up because
(17:08):
they could have grown their own fuel to power the
engines that they had at their disposal to run their
arts and crafts fares.
Speaker 4 (17:17):
Yeah, so he had big ideas he filed his patent,
he went to try and get funding, a lot of
skepticism obviously in the financial marketplace at the time, and
he got a couple of guys, Heinrich von Butz and
Friedrich Krup to give him some money. Von Botz, for
his part, was a managing director at Machine Fabric Alsberg
(17:41):
and also said, hey, you can take some of my
factory space to work on this stuff. So Rudolph moved
to Alsberg in eighteen ninety three started working on this
engine with that sort of tinderbox idea in mind. And
the one thing he couldn't figure out. He was like, a, no,
compressing air can ignite this thing, but I just don't
(18:01):
know how much pressure I'm gonna need. And for a
little while it got a little dangerous in that machine shop.
Speaker 2 (18:08):
Yeah there, I guess. There was no way to work
it out on paper. First. He had to figure it
out like in real.
Speaker 4 (18:15):
Life by compressing air.
Speaker 2 (18:17):
Yeah, it's essentially adding some combustible fluid to or fuel
to it. So he did that. His first working prototype
he demonstrated in the lab. I don't even know if
it was demonstration. I think they just tried it the
first time and the it compressed air so much I guess,
and produced so much heat that the engine blew up
(18:40):
and like you said, blue throughout the lab like pieces
of the engine went flying. But when like you can
just imagine in the movie, like they rise up from
behind like some big crate and everybody's hair standing on
and there's smoke coming off of there. He's like it worked.
In that he proved that if you compressed air you
could create he ate enough heat to ignite something. You
(19:02):
didn't need a spark, you didn't need coal or a boiler.
You like, his engine could work and it had just
been proven.
Speaker 4 (19:10):
Yeah, for sure. The second one went much better. It
did not explode. The third one was the big sort
of moment when the bell rang, it ran on kerosene.
He was thirty nine years old, which is pretty incredible
to think about, and felt comfortable enough to do a
public test on February seventeenth, eighteen ninety seven, in front
(19:32):
of an audience there at the Machine Fabric Factory for
the employees and engineers. A few other firms were there,
and it was a really big, big success. And he
in that he achieved not only a working engine, but
it was had a basically invisible and almost odorless exhaust
and reached an efficiency of twenty six point two percent
(19:53):
compared with Danny Steams measly ten percent.
Speaker 2 (19:57):
Yeah, and you're like, well that's you know, not that
much better. That is a mind boggling improvement in efficiency
over the existing technology that was just out of the gate.
It was revolutionary. And like you said, I think Friedrich Krup.
Is that how you pronounced his last name? Yeah, he
(20:18):
was an early investor, And I was like, that name
sounds very familiar. And I went and looked him up
on Wikipedia, in honor of my reformed view of Wikipedia,
and I found out that it was, in fact who
I've been calling Krupp, the same Krupper Krup family that
gave rise to the Tyson Krup International mega conglomerate from Europe.
(20:43):
It might be okay, so Tyson Krup, you're familiar with
that company, right, They're just enormous?
Speaker 4 (20:49):
Sure?
Speaker 2 (20:49):
Two, Yeah, that's right. And so I was reading a
little bit about Friedrich Croup on Wikipedia and little known
fact he used to write a giraffe everywhere he went.
Speaker 4 (21:01):
As you do. I have a few quotes if I may,
because it's really hard to overstate, like you were saying,
what a leap forward this was in technology. One of
his biographers, a man named It's last name is a Brunt,
said it was the most disruptive technology in history. Winston
(21:25):
Churchill called it the most perfect maritime masterpiece of the century.
And if you're wondering what maritime has to do with it,
we'll get to that. And then no less than Edison
said it was one of the greatest achievements of mankind.
So that's how big of a deal the diesel engine was.
Speaker 2 (21:42):
Yeah, And again, so Rudolph is like, like, this is happening,
Like I'm making this happen like this, the people in
the country, in the rural countryside are going to be saved,
Like this whole industrialization thing is going to be reversed
and kind of mellowed out and smooth dover, and the
world's going to be saved, essentially. And it just did
(22:04):
not quite go that way. I mean, just the very
fact that he had wincient triciall weighing in on how
great it was kind of gives you an indication that
it did not go the way that he wanted.
Speaker 4 (22:15):
Yeah. Well, one thing that did go the way he
wanted was he made a ton of money off this thing.
Once he had a working prototype, people started literally lining
up to get a license for this thing, just a
license to build it. Like they had to figure out
how to build it and how to mass produce it
and everything. But he ended up selling twenty two different
(22:36):
licenses over a two year period in eighteen ninety seven
and eighteen ninety eight alone to people like Watson and
Yarn and Yarien in Scotland. Augustus Bush bought the United
States and Canadian license for what would be nine million
dollars today, basically fiat in Italy, like people are buying
(22:59):
licenses hand over fist basically. And eventually he would even
sell all of his rights and patents to the General
Diesel Company for three and a half million marks. And
I tried to convert that to US dollars in twenty
twenty four.
Speaker 2 (23:16):
What did you get?
Speaker 4 (23:17):
Did you try?
Speaker 2 (23:17):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (23:19):
What did you get?
Speaker 2 (23:19):
I got eleven and a half million US dollars today?
Speaker 4 (23:25):
Oh boy, I got three hundred and fifty million dollars.
Speaker 2 (23:29):
Well, I don't know, you could be right. I went
to a German inflation calculator first and converted three and
a half million marks from eighteen ninety eight to two
twenty three or twenty four dollars.
Speaker 4 (23:41):
Marks and then all the euros now though.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
Right, But there was a selection you could chase convert
it to euros or Marx Deutsche marks.
Speaker 4 (23:48):
Oh okay, and I clicked deutsch marks.
Speaker 2 (23:50):
I'm almost positive. And then I took that and exchanged
at today's rate for US dollars. That's how I came
up with it. But I mean, you know, me and math,
you're proud wrecking buttons and stuff like that. I'm not
that good.
Speaker 4 (24:02):
No, I think your methodology was better. What I did
was I went back to see what the Deutsche mark
to the US dollar was in nineteen or in eighteen ninety.
Speaker 2 (24:12):
Eight, and pulled a few economists.
Speaker 4 (24:14):
I converted that to US dollars front to eighteen ninety
eight US dollars and then did a calculation. So that's
probably that's good, the wrong methodology, but.
Speaker 2 (24:23):
I mean it's crazy that they would be so wildly,
so wildly off. So what was yours? Like three hundred million? Yeah,
and mine was like eleven year. Let's split the difference
and saved about one hundred and sixty million marks or
US dollars today.
Speaker 4 (24:37):
Well, I think your I think your methodology is better.
But either way, he made a lot of money off
of this thing. It ran off of, like you said,
potentially vegetable oil. But you know, kerosene, peanut oil, all
kinds of things, and it was or could have been
a boon to the you know, this big idea that
he had of the people in the countryside, had it
(24:59):
not been for the Yeah.
Speaker 2 (25:01):
So, one of the things that all of these international
companies who had licensed the right to make diesel engines
were supposed to do was, as they were developing their
own versions, any technological breakthroughs were supposed to be shared
with all the other licensees, So the diesel engine itself
would be cooperatively developed internationally, kind of like a human
(25:21):
undertaking among the global community. And I guess that worked
for a little while. But then, like you said, when
the First World War started to come around, intentions rose.
The diesel engine came to be the center of an
arms race between the UK and Germany. And despite being
German of German heritage, a German citizen, having created the
(25:42):
diesel engine in Germany, Rudolph Diesel was not a fan
of the Kaiser, was not a fan of the ultranationalism
that was starting to develop in Germany that helped lead
the world to World War One. And he's like, I
kind of like the UK and where they're coming from
these days, I'm going to move there and actually helped
them with their arms race to create the diesel engines
(26:03):
that will be used to power this new scary technology
called submarines.
Speaker 4 (26:07):
Yeah. In nineteen twelve he co founded the Consolidated Diesel
Engine Company with a British engineer named George Correll's and
the submarine. And that's why Churchill said it's the most
perfect maritime masterpiece of the century. Is all of a sudden,
you had submarines that didn't require tons and tons of
coal on board, tons and tons of soldiers to shovel
(26:30):
that coal, these big dangerous coal ovens. You had this
like super efficient engine inside this thing. It was like
it totally revolutionized how submarines operated and thus how the
war went.
Speaker 2 (26:45):
Yeah. I looked up George Correll's too on Wikipedia, and
apparently he was known to giggle like a schoolgirl at
dirty jokes. Really no, no, I'm making a comment on
wikiped but I'm just kidding.
Speaker 4 (27:02):
Crap.
Speaker 2 (27:03):
I'm sorry. It wasn't intended to mislead you. I I
it was really a targeted It was targeted at Wikipedia.
Speaker 1 (27:11):
Well.
Speaker 4 (27:11):
Part of the reason that always works is because you're
so good at digging up these arcane facts. So I
tend to just be like, holy cow, listen to that.
Speaker 2 (27:19):
Wow, that's really something. Giggled like a school girl.
Speaker 4 (27:21):
You say, I just got joshed.
Speaker 2 (27:24):
I'm sorry. You got caught in the drag net, is
what it was.
Speaker 4 (27:29):
So, uh, should we take another break?
Speaker 2 (27:31):
Sure?
Speaker 4 (27:32):
All right, let's take another break. We'll talk a little
bit more about diesel.
Speaker 1 (27:38):
Stop you know, stop stood stop here? Shouldn't know no,
stop you know stop stood stop here, shouldn't know stop
you should know as why why.
Speaker 3 (27:56):
Sk sk?
Speaker 2 (28:00):
But tough he should know.
Speaker 4 (28:05):
So while all this is happening, I mentioned that he
got married and had three kids. They were all in
Berlin together in eighteen ninety. But when he moved to Alsberg,
like I said, to develop this engine, he left his
family behind for five years. Then the family moved to Munich,
and then finally he said, you know, we got to
(28:25):
reunite the family. I'm going to build my magnificent, most
magnificent idea. Aside from that engine, sure will be this
mansion from architect Max Littman. And it was. It was
quite a mansion. And in fact, even though he had
a lot of money, the way things turned out with
him financially, I dare say that he overdid it a bit.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
There was a bike track, indoor bike track for his kids.
I mean state of the arts stuff. One, yeah, two, three, four.
Five bathrooms a lot for back then for sure. And
I'm not talking out houses, I mean bathroom.
Speaker 4 (29:01):
I mean I don't have five bathrooms in his twenty
twenty four.
Speaker 2 (29:03):
There was a staff. It's not that impressive because everybody
had a staff back then.
Speaker 4 (29:07):
Right, Yeah, I don't have a staff.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
But still it was like it was a big deal.
And not only was it a beautiful, amazing, advanced mansion
that he helped design, this put a inder, a punctuation
mark on years of living away from his family in
different countries, like dedicating his life to this diesel engine
and taking good care of them for what I could understand,
(29:31):
but not being a part of the family. He was
a part of creating the diesel engine. And so by
building this mansion, he was coming back home, coming back
to his family and starting a new chapter, restarting an
important chapter of his life.
Speaker 4 (29:49):
Yeah, but it was a chapter marked by some poor health.
I saw that he got migraines, suffered from migraines, gout.
I know that he dropped a ton of money on
this mansion. I don't think that ruined him or anything.
But he also made some bad financial investments apparently, and
they're kind of conflicting stories about how bad off the
(30:11):
family was. But as we'll see in the end, it
turns out that they weren't doing so great in the
financial department after all.
Speaker 2 (30:18):
No, I saw it. Yeah, I saw a lot of
his early engines did not work very well. They weren't reliable,
and so there was a lot of customers that wanted
their money back initially. So, like you said, there's a
big debate over just how bad off they were in
Douglas Brunt, one of his recent biographers from twenty twenty
(30:39):
four is at odds with a biographer from the seventies
named John Frederick Moon. Moons like he was destitute and desperate.
This guy was in dire financial streets. Douglas Brunt, who
again wrote much more recently forty years, six fifty years
more recently, good God, he was like, No, actually, I
think that this was like an eighteen nineties phase and
(31:02):
that you know, after the turn of the century, started
to make his money back again, and that he was
on okay financial footing.
Speaker 4 (31:08):
Yeah, he was still really wrapped up in this this
big idea of you know, saving the common person. In
nineteen oh three, he wrote a book called or published
one and at least in nineteen oh three called Solidarity
Colon even back then the Rational Economic Salvation of mankind
(31:29):
when he talked about, you know, sort of this basically
socialist ideas that he you know, of of the class
division being you know, not not a good thing. And
unfortunately nobody I don't think it was a very good book.
No one really read it much.
Speaker 2 (31:44):
No tell him what that wonder seems like?
Speaker 4 (31:46):
I said, Yeah, there was one review that called it
a real pain to read.
Speaker 2 (31:51):
That's not a glowing review, No know what you're looking for.
But in writing that book in conjunction with Create the
Diesel Engine, he was quoted as having said that he
solved the social question like he's like, here's the engine,
here's what we're trying to do. I basically just saved
the world. And he said that he was able to
(32:14):
do what all the nations combined were unable to throw
out the Rockefellers, and it just did not happen that way.
As a matter of fact, when did he publish.
Speaker 4 (32:23):
That book nineteen oh three, nineteen oh three.
Speaker 2 (32:26):
Over the next ten years, he was still in a
position and his engine was still in a position that
it wasn't entirely clear which way it was going to go.
It wasn't World War one fully yet, it was just
the very beginning of it. I think there was still
a really good chance that diesel engines would run on
vegetable oil. It was very much up in the air.
(32:48):
And in September of nineteen thirteen September twenty ninth, I
believe he went on a fateful trip more than a
three hour toer, but it was it's not that much,
more like less than twenty four hours, I think, to
go do a groundbreaking of the company that he co
founded with George Carrell's.
Speaker 4 (33:10):
Yeah, I got a named Alfred Laucom, who was another
engineer who was a pal of theirs. And a few
days before this, we should mention that he right before
he went on this trip, he gave his wife a
brand new overnight bag and said, here's this bag, don't
open it until next week. Very mysterious thing to do.
(33:32):
But he went to Ghent and got on the S. S.
Dresden on the twenty ninth with those three other two guys,
had dinner with them. Seemed like they had a good
time and they were all in good spirits. Then he
was like, all right, dinner's over. I'm gonna go to bed,
and he was never seen again. No.
Speaker 2 (33:51):
The next morning, his companions, George Carrell's and Alfred they
went to go rouse him and say hey, let's party
this morning, and he didn't answer. So they went in
his room. His bed was not slept in, His nightclothes
were laid out on the bed, his travel bag was there,
his watch was on his travel bag, and he was
(34:12):
just nowhere to be found. So they informed the captain
who had the ship searched, and in short order they
found his coat and hat on deck near a railing,
and his coat had been neatly folded. Just not a
good sign. And when they made land in London, he
was just not there. He was no longer on the ship.
At some point somewhere in the English Channel, almost to
(34:35):
the North Sea, Rudolph Diesel just vanished off the SS Dresden.
Speaker 4 (34:40):
That's right. And what was in that leather bag that
he gave his wife.
Speaker 2 (34:44):
Twenty thousand German marks. No idea how much that is
in today's US dollars, but it was a significant amount
of money.
Speaker 4 (34:51):
Let's say there was a lot of money. And there
were also financial records basically showing that they were broke.
So that sort of seen, at least at this point
in his life, puts to rest the question that they
were financial troubles. Yeah, so you know, here's some money,
but our accounts are empty. The disappearance was a very
(35:12):
big deal, obviously, and right away because he had made
a lot of enemies. The Kaiser Wilhelm did not like him.
John D. Rockefeller did not like him, and there were,
you know, people saying like, could one of them had
him killed? Is it foul play? Was it just an accident?
Was it a suicide? Like no one, no one knew
(35:32):
and seemingly no one knows for sure, even though most
people agreed that it was suicide.
Speaker 2 (35:39):
Yeah, the folded coat kind of says something that it
wasn't just falling overboard. That kind of goes away with
that one. And that was the initial one too, because
he had he had been said to have been in
high spirits. George Carrell said that after dinner, as they
walked some. They walked him back to his state room.
He said, I'll see you tomorrow. Yeah, another evidence or
(36:02):
another bit against the idea that it was suicide. His watch,
like I said, it was set on his bag, but
it was laid out in such a way that he
could see what time it was when he would be
laying down in bed. Not something you do.
Speaker 4 (36:16):
You don't drop up your watch.
Speaker 2 (36:17):
Yeah, Like you don't really go to that trouble if
you don't think that. If you think like I'm going
to at my life in a couple hours, that doesn't matter.
And then George Crels also told The New York Times
that he did that Rudolph did not suffer from giddiness.
I guess that means that he would not have answered
the call of the void, is what he was saying.
Speaker 4 (36:37):
Yeah, this whole idea of murder, none of it really
holds up to scrutiny when you investigate either the fact
that the Germans came after him because he didn't help
them build, you know, their engines for the submarines for
the war, or Rockefeller. So those generally don't hold up
when you look into him more closely. And like I said,
most people say it was suicide, but they're the the
(36:59):
what was his first name, Brent's name, Douglas Douglas Brunt,
who wrote the Maurice biography as a theory that he
did not die at all and that he was it
was sort of faked, basically by the British, and he
was shuttled away to Canada where he could continue working
on these engines for the war.
Speaker 2 (37:19):
Yeah, there was a New York Times article in nineteen
fourteen that said as much that he'd been rumored to
be working in Canada. That is probably not true because
about eleven days, I think eleven days after he went missing,
a body washed up. So okay, it depends on who
you ask me or Chuck. It turns out his body
(37:41):
that turned up at the mouth of a Dutch river
and was taken ashore and taken into town and was
identified or viewed by one of his sons as almost
certainly his dad, but not a positive identification because it
was too decomposed.
Speaker 4 (37:57):
Or I don't think the Dutch river part is debated.
Speaker 2 (38:03):
Oh, I thought it was. I thought they were out
to sea.
Speaker 4 (38:06):
No, no, no, I saw everywhere I saw. It was
at the mouth of a Dutch River. He was just
pulled out of the water. But I saw in a
lot of places, including the Brunt's biography, that the body
was returned to the water because it was just so
unrecognizable and you know, rotted by that point, which is
(38:28):
really gross that they put the body back in the
sea but kept the belongings that he had. That I
saw also disputed. I saw that there were everything from
glasses case to a pocket, pin knife to a pillbox,
and I even saw one say that was an ID
card recovered. I don't think that's true, because that's literal
(38:50):
positive identification unless it's you know, planted on somebody to
make it seem like a suicide. Other most places I
saw didn't mention an ID card, but they did say
that the sun identified the items and said, yeah, those
are my Debt's things.
Speaker 2 (39:05):
And then mysteriously among his possessions was found the tooth
of a giraffe.
Speaker 4 (39:12):
I don't believe that.
Speaker 2 (39:13):
Good, You're like, no, that's the one truth, right, So,
I mean that's no one knows what happened to him.
There's no solution to that puzzle. Yeah, I'm going with
that was his body, you think, Yeah, suicide probably everything
I saw was that he was in dire financial straits.
(39:36):
And I mean plenty of people have died by suicide
for that reason. Sure, so it's it's entirely possible. I
don't know enough to be like, yep, that's it, but
that's probably where I lean.
Speaker 4 (39:46):
I would say, well, regardless of what happened, the you know,
the invention of that engine was h you know, you
heard the quotes that changed the history of the world
in a lot of ways and such that it just
a cup years ago. In twenty twenty two, a full
ninety six percent of trucks in the EU run on
diesel engines. And here in America it's a little bit
(40:08):
different because we've been had a love hate relationship with
diesel over the years as far as trying to phase
it out or other people saying, no, it's a superior fuel,
But about twenty three percent of fuel in the US
is diesel fuel still.
Speaker 2 (40:23):
Yeah, And the reason why people say it's superior is
because even though there's more CO two, there's more carbon
in diesel fuel. Diesel burns more efficiently than gas, so
it actually releases less CO two than gas does, even
though there's more CO two. And diesel because less is
(40:44):
burned over the course of say fifty miles or something
like that. So it's true, but still it does it
is a polluter. If you're trying to get away from
fossil fuels, diesels included in there too.
Speaker 4 (40:54):
I remember having a couple of friends back in the
day that had like a hand me down old you know,
seventies Mercedes Benz Diesel from their parents or something or
their grandpa grandpa died and they got one of those
you know, chuggy engines. I just remember they were very
loud and it seemed like they just did nothing but
spew black smokes.
Speaker 2 (41:13):
Yeah, I know, the diesel smoke is just so noxious too.
Speaker 4 (41:17):
It seemed like it. I mean, maybe they were old
cars or not running right. I have no idea, but
that's sort of my only memory of diesel engines.
Speaker 2 (41:24):
No, I'm with you, Yeah, they're still like that. If
you want to know more about Diesel and his engine,
then just go read Douglas Brunt's book on it. And
since I mentioned Douglas Brunt for the one last time,
it's time for listener maw.
Speaker 4 (41:40):
I'm gonna call this Harvard follow up with the old
Puritans episode. Hey guys, in your recent episode of Puritans,
you mentioned the founding of Harvard. I'm a graduate of
the Divinity School and learned an interesting tidbit. I believe
it was in the sixties and the Divinity School had
fallen on kind of hard times. Enrollment was down, wasn't
attracting the best students or teachers, so Harvard had the
(42:01):
sensible business idea of selling it off. The court declared, though,
that if Harvard sold the Divinity School, the university would
have to close its doors, because the original charter states
at the purpose to be educating a quote learned learned
clergy end quote. So if they stopped doing that, the
school was no longer following its charter. Another wise choice. Later,
(42:22):
the university doubled down at support, and some three decades
or so after, it was the institution in which I
spent three years on my way to a Master's of Divinity.
During orientation, the dean of the school said to us,
you all belong here. So either we are not as
elite as you had assumed, or you were brighter than
you had thought. Either way, you belong here. Welcome.
Speaker 2 (42:44):
What a great message.
Speaker 4 (42:46):
That's pretty cool. Keep up the great work guys. You
are you guys are a gift in such divided and
divisive times. Thanks for that. That is from Eric Wickstrom.
Speaker 2 (42:56):
Thanks Eric, Reverend Eric Wickstrom, Thanks Reverend reverends. That's funny
that mention of how attendance was down in the sixties
so much that they were going to sell the Divinity
School reminded me of Reverend Lovejoy's origin story from The Simpsons,
and he was saying it was the early seventies. The
sixties were over and people were ready to feel bad
about themselves again.
Speaker 4 (43:20):
So good.
Speaker 2 (43:21):
Yeah, if you want to be like Reverend Eric, you
can email us too, especially with additional info. We didn't know.
That's interesting. We love that stuff. You can send it
to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 4 (43:37):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (43:40):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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Josh Clark
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