Latest / Clay & Buck Recommendations / The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel
Transcript
- 0:00I'll be honest with you, I don't know anything about this mysterious case of
- 0:03mister Rudolph Diesel. So walk us through some of what's going on here,
- 0:06give us the overview. I'll give you the setup. So I, like
- 0:10many didn't know there was someone behind Diesel. I know the word Diesel,
- 0:14and like most people, I was misspelling it with a lowercase D all these
- 0:18years. But reviewers are calling this book the greatest caper of the twentieth century,
- 0:22and it really is, this incredible piece of hidden history. So in
- 0:25September twenty nine, nineteen thirteen, Rudolph Diesel is traveling from Belgium to Great
- 0:29Britain on an overnight passenger ferry and in the night he disappears. He's supposed
- 0:34to meet his companions for breakfast in the morning and he doesn't show up,
- 0:37so they hold the ship at sea. They search the ship. All they
- 0:39find are his hat and his coat folded by the rail at the stern of
- 0:43the ship. Seems to mark where he went overboard. And it's hard to
- 0:46put into terms now because he was a huge celebrity at the time. The
- 0:51history of the man has really been paved over. As you say, but
- 0:54it would be like Elon Musk hopping on a flight to Nantucket and then disappearing,
- 0:57and how bananas the news would go. So that's how it was.
- 1:00Then it was the cover of the New York Times, cover of the papers
- 1:03in London, Western Europe, all through Russia, wondering about this crazy disappearance
- 1:07of the great inventor. And while they presumed suicide, two murder theories also
- 1:12popped in the headlines.