>
>I am not sure about this, but I do recal something about the patent of
the
>diesel engine beeing German,
>and therefore the allies had to use gas. Seems stupid in a war.
>Can anyone tell anymore abouth this?
>
Hi All,
Bending the rules of topicality a bit but. . . . . . . . .
Owing to the list discussion on the CI engine here's a short(ish)
resume.
Rudolf Christian Karl Diesel was born in Paris in 1858 of Bavarian
parents but was sent to England on the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian
war in 1870 and later was joined by his parents as Germans in France at
the time were unwelcome.
At twelve he was sent back to their home town of Augsberg as London
expenses were high, living with his cousins and earning money giving
English and French tuition, his mechanical interest being sparked by the
Science Museum in London. Fortuitously his cousin was a mathematics
teacher and helped him through trade school and finally four years at
Munich Polytechnic where he first saw the Malayan Firestick; a small
glass tube with a piston and a piece of tinder that ignites with the
compression heat generated by rapidly forcing the piston down.
Diesel was taken by Sadi Carnot's book on heat engines and took a patent
in 1892 but the device was in reality virtually impossible to construct,
Diesel being so involved in near perfect thermal cycles overlooking the
other inefficiencies and impracticalities.
The patent was carefully modified without arousing suspicion or negating
the main original principles and in 1893 M.A.N. were persuaded to build
an example but only because coal dust was proposed for fuel. The first
example ran in 1894 being developed to a marketable power source with an
efficiency of 26% in 1897, making Diesel famous and wealthy.
Arguments raged that the back-tracking on the original patent made it
void but M.A.N. had a steady stream of licensees whilst Diesel lost
quantities of money on poor speculations and became ill, the patents
expiring in 1907.
By 1913 Diesel, at 55 yrs old, was in financial trouble , he boarded the
steamer Dresden in Antwerp on Sept 29 to visit Sir Charles Parsons but
never arrived, his hat and neatly folded coat were found on deck and his
body recovered from the sea a few weeks later.
All the early engines used an inefficient and heavy compressed air
injection system, not until 1919 was a small and lightweight "solid"
fuel injection system available having been developed by a Karl Benz
engineer named Prosper L'Orange; the first production engine so equipped
was marketed in 1920.
The rest, as they say, is history. . . . . . . . . . . .
Richard
(Southampton UK)
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