Tuesday,
HONGKONG TELEGRAPH
April 9, 1940.
MAGAZINE PAGE
The story of Rudolph Diesel's engine and the
mystery of his disappearance →→
DR. Rudolph Diesel was cros- sing the English Channel on the night of September 29, 1913. He was going to London to attend A meeting manufacturers, and to confer with the British Admiralty.
It was ten
by the ship's bell when he Baid good- night to his friends and went to his state room. The noxt morning he did not ap
pear.
of
THE
They found his nightshirt on his watch - pillow, still folded, and his enrefully hung on his bag.
Over a week later, a Dutch boat. pulled a body aboard. It was bat- iered beyond recognition, and after removing the contents of the pockets, they dropped it overboard. Later a
FORGOTTEN
INVENTOR
coin purse, a poc- ketknife, and a spectacle caso were identified as Dr. Diesel's.
Bat with inter- national tension aí fever heat, and diesel - powered submarines strain- Ing at the leash. melodramatio
stories quickly prosc.
It was rumoured that he had been published over-
He was never seen again. His BUT Krupp agreed to finance board by German secret agents. disappearance became an inter-
the
his
invention, and in In a newspaper article a man who national sensation. When the war August, 1803, Diesel's first att he had served on a German sub- marine told how "the traitor Diesel broke out there was a rumour that motor was ready for a test.
met the end he deserved." These Diesel had been killed by the
We see the inventor in an stories are still printed now and then. Germans to keep him from giving Augsburg machine shop, anxiously The truth wan revealed recently technical secrets to the British watching an upright, pumplike in Eugen Diesel's blography of
туля unsolved,
contrivance with a slowly revel- father, so far neglected by English the and man to-day has never this has ever been seen before. Diest's confident manner,
ving flywheel. No engine like trunsintors.
Behind the facade of Rudolph' his big The outlandish thing needs outside house in Munich, and his position of heard of either the story or the engineer.
power to push the piston up and world renown, he was at the end of down. Diesel walts Impatiently. At his rope.
The mystery, gradually forgotten,
average
"There is no adequate account of
his life in English.
the greatest of inventors.
hast, eyes binging with excitement, he All his property was heavily mort-
There is a blast like 2 cannon
GRIN AND BEAR IT
By Lichty
PIERRES "SALON
Yet Rudolph Diesel was one of pulls a lever and the vaporized fuel gaged; he faced bankruptcy, to him "No one understands the problems of a woman of 29 like. Pierre---
spurts into the imprisoned, fery-hot au intolerable disgrace.
ho's understood mino perfectly for 11 years!" His name has become a com• air. mon noun; diesel liners furrow the seven sens, diene trucks shot, and chunks of metal bombard the room. Barely missed by death, rumble along the highways, Diesel leaps to his feet with a shout diesel-powered planes criss- cross the skies, diesel tractors "That's what I wanted to know!" plow our fields.
*
of triumph.
he cries. "It proves I'm on the right track!"
He tolled four more years on
BORN in 1858, of a line of Ger- that track. Then one day the man artisans, young Rudolph world's most famous engineers was trained by his father as a flocked to Augsburg to see a 20- horsepower "dieselmotor" that mechanic.
With a quick, Inventive mind, he amazed them with its efficiency.
Now Diesel's prophecy has come dashed through the Augsburg true. The volume of diesel horse- Trade Schools, and won a scholar power installed in 1037 was 20 times ship at the Munich Technical the total of five years before. Diesel Institute. When he had finished power drives the streamlined trains; there, at the age of 20, he had last year, 125 diesel buses began broken every academic record, and service on the streets of Chicago and the astounded faculty met him in New York.
a body and shook hands with him.
Two things more important than
☆
Curtains for the Black-Out
By Gloria
MANY PEOPLE have been managing with more or less temporary black-out curtains during Hongkong's |periodical blackouts. It
vide a more attractive and permanent arrangement.
Book of been the Week
I recently visited a small house with a large French window which had treated in ли manner.
interesting
that happened to Rudolph Diesel THE diesel engine's advantage would be much better to pro- at Munich. He listened to a tec is that it uses the cruder ture, and he saw a small gadget and cheaper forms of petroleum, that looked like a popgun.
True, the price may go up as The lecture was by Dr. Carl the diesel boom increases demand. Linde, famous pioneer in artificial But the Augsburg genius thought refrigeration. He discussed the of this. His engine will run on atcam engine and pointed out that almost anything. At the start. the best then in use wasted 90 Diesel tried powdered coal. It percent of the energy in the coal, worked, but it scored the cylinder. In a note-book which has been Diesel also used castor oil, palm oil, fish oil, cottonseed oil and peanut preserved Diesel scribbled: "Me- oil. Tar and melted naphalt have chanical theory teaches us that been used. Even
"although "engineers" only a part of the heat in the turn over a diesel, termilk will
. don't recommend it. fuel can now be utilized Doesn't it follow that the utiliza- Tragedy was only a few months tion of steam, or any kind of go away when Dr. Diesel returned home between, is false in principle? after his American visit in 1912. The possibility suggests itself of putting the energy to work direct with him on the night of his disap- One was Georges Carcis, ly. But how can this be done?" sead of the diesel factory at Ghent.
The popgun-like gadget was a The telo dined cheerfully, and then cigar lighter. The air in the stroiled the deck. When they went cylinder, heated by the compres- below, Diesel left the others us they sion of a plunger, ignites a bit of passed his cabin. A moment later, door, shook combustible material.
he tapped on Carels' This gave Diesel a hint as to his hand hearty, and wished him
good-night. It seemed illtle
R how he could "put energy to work directly."
·
*
MARRIED and settled in Faris
as an agent for Professor Linde's ice-machines. Diesel worked nights on plans for the engine of his dream.
Sometimes Mrs. Diesel found him in the morning asleep over his deak.
His pile of blueprints and pages of figures kept mounting.
He knew that the more you compress air; the hotter it be comes. (Put your hand on bicycle pump in action and you got the idea).
Я
Two friends crossed the Channel
pearance,
necessary.
tin-
"I will see you in the morning," he said, and those were his last words.
The curtains were enclosed by a plywood pelmet and side columns whleh-provented-any-danger of. chinks of light. The structure had been put up quite cheaply, and was painted the same colour Is the walls.
•
Another good idea I am passing on is a simple alteration to a room with two windows close together.
By making a pelmet to stretch from one side to the other they can be treated as one window, which will make the blacking-out
more effective.
It a mirror is hung on the wall between the windows, and the window ledge continued under- neath, a very ceclive design is obtained.
QUESTION AND
ANSWER
GUESSING-GAME for an
idle quarter of an hour. Here are extracts from the speeches of three men who have swayed the world. Who are they? Who said which? And when?
Now why not bulld an engine in
(1) "What we possess to-day is which the platon pulls in nothing but pure air in its londing stroke, and of no importance. One thing is
vic- then drives back toward the cylin- definite, that Germany be der hend, compressing the
torious." air to about one sixteenth of its former volume, and, he the air to 1000
heating
*
*
|point Inject compet? At that I nothing but one long struggle for
oil, and its
piston
of oil into the cylinder combustion
hot air will ignite the will drive the pis down. There would be no complicated ignition system.
Many men would have gone into The machine shop at that point and proceeded by trial and error, but that was not. Diesel's way. Every- thing about that engine, down to the last boli, had to be figured out and put down on paper.
It
He was 30; and had been trans- ferred to Linde's office in Berlin before he had his manuscript ready for the printer. He had already taken out patents. In January, 1893, the work was published. Theory a Rational Hent and Construction of a Motor! is a slender pamphlet, but belongs on that small shelf of books which have changed the world. Diesel knew that not more than n score of men on earth would grasp its significance, and was prepared for caldness and ridicule. He got both. Scoffers called it a "paper. engine," for It existed only in a book.
(2) "My whole life has been my people, for its restoration and for Germany."
+
(3) "The war-like spirit stil! livos in the Garman people, that powerful spirit which attacks the enemy wherever it finds them, regardless of the coal,"
·
(4) "You, my troops, are my guarantee that i cun dictate peace to my enemies.",
•
(5) "In a just cause, I am ready to force myself to be
cruel."
*
(0) U-boats are not going to rest until the enemy is beaten with god's help.
(7) "We all want, and I want especially that the German people shall become the freest in the world"
(8) "God's goodness will guide the German people through battle *o victory-to the goal appointed
for the German people by Pro- vidence,"
(9) "I am wrongly judged if my love of peace and my patience are mistaken for weakness or even cowardice."
•
(10). "We only wish that God Almighty, who has blessed our arms, will enlighten other nations."
(11) "If ever in history, the expression can be applied now that the Lord has struck with man, horse and waLEON"."
(12) "The great questions of the day will not be decided by speeches. and resolutions of majorities...but by blood and iron."
You have noticed (I take it) that these quotations all come from leaders of the German people. They are Hitler, the Rolser and Bismarck. The speeches rango from 1803-1040,
Who said which?
I don't think, if I hadn't looked them up myself, I could have dis- tinguished between Wilhelm and Hitler. There's the same brag, the same enlistment of the Almighty's name in both of them.
If you've finished guessing, here are the answers:
The first two quotations are Hiller (September, 1039), Nos. 3, 4, 0, 0, 7 and 8 are the Kaiser (1014- 1010). Then utter again, Nos. 0, 10 and 11.
The last i Bismarcle (1863), soven years before the Franco- Prusalan war,
Hitler-as Seen
His Maid by
By MONICA DICKENS
EVEN dictators have Servant Trouble. Hitler's biggest head- ache this week is coming to him from his ex-housemaid- Pauline Kohler, who reveals closely-guarded secrets of Berch. tesgaden, in "I Was Hitler's Maid” (John Long: 2s. 6d.).
Those peepshows on seaside plers called "What the Butler Saw" are nothing to what Pauline saw while she dusted and swept what she described as "a miniature palace, furnished with every luxury... ringed with three circles of anti-air- craft guns, every approach heavily mined
of
There are cellars. she
SDYF, "where are enacted horrors only exceeded In the concentration camps." At Hitler's
private "Dims cinemo,
Indescribable tortures at prison-camps, or strip- tease acts by his lutost stage favourite, are reeled off for the Fuhrer's besilal enjoyment.”
Pauline, at whom every member the Nazi Parly appears to have tells these stories of some of
of
"made them."
Hitler has often to say to Goer ing and Goebbels: ""I won't have this continual squabbling! You behave like chlidren."
.
Goebbels deliberately hit a man- who stopped in front of his car, sent him flying into the air, to hit the ground a broken, shattered mass of flesh. It was the village prical.
"And that was the most pleasant afternoon's driving I've ever done," sold Goebbels afterwards.
Pauline acted as personal mald to both Unity Mitford and Renate Muller during their visits to Berchtesgaden.
She has seen Hitler's astronom- cal laboratory, "which has never been photographed, and can only ba entered by two people-Hitler and his astrologer, Ossieiz."
She also learned of the exis- tence of a requel to "Mein Kampf." provisionally entitled "How 1 Did It," to be published after the Nazi conquest of Europe. It sets down the names Gauleiters in the conquered ter-
the ritories, and
names of highly-placed Nezis who are on the Fuchrar's black list.
One wonders, en passant, what Chamberlain thought of
this
Palace-cum-Concentration Comp- cum-Parisian Cabaret,
Pauline, unfortunately, Jett just before his eclebrated visit. Öne wonders, too, how the Gestapo, whose
methods she depicts ruthless
can have permitted the vividly, can of a escope a giri in possession of so
So
much knowledge.
I wish she had told of how she fled Berchtesgaden and, eventually, the Reich, with more of the detall sensational she applies to her description of life chez Adolf.
Spotting The Rank
ENGINEER REAR-ADMIRAL
Unloss ho should become Engincor-in-Chief of the Ficot, this is the highest rank which an engineer officer in the Royal Navy can attain. Prior to their being given this titlo carly in the present century, Engineer Rear-Admirals wero known as Chief Inspectors of actually Machinery, which gives a somewhat clearer on- planation of their duties.
There were ton on tho active list of the Royal Navy when war began, mostly om- ployed alther 28 managers of the engineering departments of dockyards or as onginoor- ing specialists on the staffs of Commander-in-Chief, though one was Deputy-Engineer-in- Chief,
On the retired list at tho samo date thero ware 137 Enginoor Rear-Admirals. Asi with the list of oxocutivo flag officers, only a limited number of officari climb so high in rank.
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