Book Review: The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel. Genius, Power and Deception on the Eve of World War I (2023). Douglas Brunt.

During the past year, I've read a number of excellent books that seemed to resonate as part of the backstory to some of the most urgent issues of our time. I will be reviewing several of them over the next few weeks, but this book seemed to be an intriguing place to start exploring some of these missing threads from which our contemporary world has been woven.

Everyone has heard of Diesel engines, the rugged machines that power much of our transportation across the globe, from ships, to trains, to trucks, cars and airplanes, as well as giant electrical generators and many other industrial and military applications. But far fewer of us know the story of the invention of the Diesel engine, or what was so significant about it as opposed to the other internal combustion engine designs of the modern era. 

 

Despite having reached a stage in life where I know quite a bit about history, this fascinating story about a crucial modern technology was almost a complete surprise to me. It begins with an account of the formative years of the inventor, Rudolph Diesel, starting with his impoverished childhood in France, Germany and England in the late nineteenth century, during which he managed to obtain an excellent engineering education despite his family’s poverty,  because of his prodigious and obvious mechanical genius. 

 

The author also introduces us along the way to John D. Rockefeller, founder of Standard Oil, and traces Rockefeller’s drive to create monopolistic control over the miraculous new energy source of the twentieth century: oil. This profile was also very enlightening, in showing us how Rockefeller sought to steer new industrial and popular energy technologies inexorably toward those that used his petroleum products as fuel, even as other possible sources of energy were being discovered and tried at the same time.

For example, Rockefeller first pushed to replace whale oil for city lighting with kerosene, a refined oil product, only to have kerosene’s future in the lighting market rapidly eclipsed by Edison’s electric light bulbs and the creation of early electrical power grids. With the market for kerosene lighting collapsing almost as quickly as it had opened, Rockefeller then became determined to see that all powered means of transportation should use the newly-invented internal combustion engine, which required highly refined petroleum products like kerosene and gasoline to function.   

Diesel’s remarkable engine design came into being at the exact same time the internal combustion engine was being invented. What was different about Diesel’s engine, though, was that rather than relying on the inherently combustible and explosive nature of gasoline, his engine used mechanical pressure on the fuel to create the heat needed to make the fuel combust. 

 

This meant that a diesel engine could run on many different types of inert, safer and more stable fuels, as it still can today, including fuels that could be created without needing to have oil wells or refineries. It could run on many types of vegetable oils, for example, like the bio-diesel fuels of our era made from corn or used cooking oil. And once Diesel had the engine fully designed, and the problems worked out, these engines proved to be simple and utterly reliable.

 

Rudolph Diesel apparently was driven from an early age to develop this engine for two reasons: first, to massively improve the efficiency of an engine’s use of fuel, compared to the pitiful 2% efficiency of the coal-burning steam engines of the nineteenth century. Second, Diesel wanted to provide endless and accessible “clean” power for the betterment of mankind, in contrast to the smoky miasma produced by coal engines. He appears to have been very much an idealist in that sense.

 

Nevertheless, when his engine invention took off on the world stage, he became a very wealthy man, one of the richest and most important men of the age. His story of brilliant invention, and then growing wealthy and famous on the basis of his world-changing new technology, is familiar. It's very much like the stories of the tech titans of our own era. But as with some of the more well-meaning tech entrepreneurs of our age, at a certain point Diesel could not avoid politics, nor business and engineering competition, at a time when the world’s major power technologies of the twentieth century were being invented. 

 

Brunt then explores a number of the important cross-currents Diesel had to navigate throughout his career. Diesel had to compete with the invention and rapid development of the internal combustion engine, and its backing by Rockefeller, who was determined to prevent any power plant type becoming dominant in the world market that did not require his oil. 

 

Diesel also had to keep innovating and improving his engines, managing his licenses and patents in many countries, and solving problems created by foreign engineers as they tried to implement his designs. And eventually, he had to come to terms with the fact that political leaders in numerous countries – especially Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany – were intent on using his marvelous engine design to power war machines, like submarines  and battleships, uses of which he morally disapproved. 

 

This is all fascinating history in its own right, but there is an added twist Brunt unveils toward the end of the story. It turns out that Rudolph Diesel disappeared, at the height of his fame and fortune, just before World War I began, apparently by falling or jumping overboard off a channel ferry on a night trip from France to Britain.

 

You can imagine the public fascination and uproar a mysterious and improbable disappearance like that would set off today if it happened to one of our major tech celebrities, particularly if the stories in the news kept changing and becoming less believable as the days went by. But the mystery was never solved. Brunt does a nice job laying out the threads of the mystery, reviewing the various theories that came and went, and then coming up with a startling but very plausible answer of his own as to what really happened to Rudolph Diesel.

 

This is an excellent piece of historical writing about an essential figure in the development of the modern world, whose remarkable story, and fame and fortune, somehow vanished from popular memory with the passing of time, and with his own mysterious disappearance. He may be gone, and mostly forgotten, but his remarkable invention still powers much of our world, even if in the end most diesel engines are powered by one of the oil-based fuel products Rockefeller and his heirs owned and controlled, and not one of the other non-petroleum fuels Diesel preferred.

 

Reading this book gave me new perspectives on the history of the engine technologies and fuels that power our world, and how those decisions were first made. It also reconfirmed the extent to which Big Oil, since its inception just as today, has been hyper-focused on pushing our society and its technology choices in ways that favor their profits and their political and economic control above all other factors. I didn’t know this particular part of that backstory, and I’m glad I do now. Highly recommended.

 

Book Review: The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource (2025). Chris Hayes.

I heard on the news last night that this brand new book by the popular MSNBC commentator Chris Hayes has zoomed to the #1 position on the New York Times bestseller list, only a couple of weeks after its release. Having now read it, and given the political trends of the past few years, and the chaos flowing out from the new administration since January 20^th, it’s not hard to understand why.

The topic of attention, and the adverse effects that our modern communications and social media technologies have on us as individuals, as well as on our political and social systems, has been much discussed and analyzed recently, in magazine articles, books and on TV. Given all that “attention on attention”, it might be tempting to assume Hayes’ book is just more noise on a by-now tired subject. But it is no such thing. Instead, it is a deeply thoughtful and well-researched volume, written in a clear, honest and accessible style, which is a pleasure to read.

 

Hayes makes clear from the outset that he is bringing two very different sets of eyes and perspectives to his analysis. On the one hand, he is one of us, a person of our time and place, who constantly uses and is frequently disturbed by his own use of social media on his smartphone, and the troubling effects it has on his own mind, his ability to focus and his relationships with family and friends.

 

On the other hand, in his professional role as a cable news host, his success is completely dependent on his ability to understand and use the tools of manipulating and commanding the attention of his viewers, to keep them watching, and his advertisers happy. So he is able to bring both his personal, subjective feelings and his informed, rational understanding of attention in our current media environment to explore many important aspects of attention, and to explain why and how the ability to control attention has become the most important currency of power and control in our society.

 

In the process of his wide-ranging exploration of this vital topic for understanding what is happening right now in our society, our lives and our politics, he writes beautifully and with real insight about many aspects of attention.

 

He begins with an explanation of the book’s title, which is a reference to the scene in the Odyssey, where Circe warns Odysseus to plug the ears of his ship’s crew, and tie himself to the mast, to avoid being lured to death by the Sirens. He continues to revisit that analogy throughout the book, which he uses to portray the constant conflict between our desire to be stimulated by interesting things in our environment, and our need to filter out and block distractions.

 

From there, he’s off on a fascinating trip through many aspects of attention. He talks about “moral panics”, and many of the past instances through history where new technologies were greeted first with delight and amazement, then with fear, because of their perceived harms to existing modes of attention, focus and memory. He compares and contrasts those “moral panics” to the present moment, and the phenomenon of social media on smartphones.

 

Hayes moves on to discuss the purpose of attention in the human and animal worlds, and the forms it takes, including voluntary (when one deliberately focuses), involuntary (when we respond to startling noises or threats in our environment) and social (the conscious and unconscious attention we pay to others, and what they are saying and doing). He does a nice job of surveying some of the earlier theories of psychology and philosophy relating to attention and our human lives, and the strengths, weaknesses and relevance of various ideas from the past.

 

One area I found particularly intriguing was his discussion of fame and celebrity, and how it affects and disrupts social attention for both the famous person, and the people observing and interacting with that famous person. It’s unusual to get such a perceptive, self-aware and relatively modest account of the subjective personal experience of celebrity from someone who is himself quite famous. I appreciated the fact that he recognizes the conflicting responses he and other famous people have to being “important” and instantly recognizable, and could reflect thoughtfully upon both the positive and negative aspects of it.  

 

Inevitably, his narrative leads him to draw conclusions about how social media and our current information and media markets have essentially turned our attention into a commodity, like labor in the Industrial Age, that has been expropriated from us by monopoly capitalism. He then turns to the problem of Donald Trump, and how his mastery of the ability to constantly bring attention back to himself, even if it’s negative attention, has led him to his current domination of the American political scene.

 

This is one of those books that is too sweeping to be fully summarized in a review. But it is well worth reading, both for the pleasure of following Hayes’ ideas and insights, and for the assistance it provides us in thinking about our own lives, and how we might begin to reassert control over the devices and social media apps that have so powerfully captured our own attention. Highly recommended.