Timeline Thursday 18 March 1858

Events on Thursday 18 March 1858 2

• 1858 – 1913 Rudolf Diesel The engine, the fortune, and the ferry Rudolf Diesel was born in Paris to Bavarian parents, deported as an enemy alien at twelve, and educated in a language he had to learn on arrival. He set out to build an engine that would approach the theoretical limit of thermodynamic efficiency and give small workshops a machine to rival the great steam plants of industry. He succeeded, became a millionaire, spent years in court and in sanatoriums, lost almost everything, and walked off the deck of a Channel ferry in 1913. The engine now moves most of the freight on earth.
• 1858 Rudolf Diesel born in Paris Bavarian parents, French childhood Rudolf Christian Karl Diesel is born on the Rue Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth, second of three children of a Bavarian leather goods maker and a merchant's daughter from Nuremberg. He is a French schoolboy who happens to be German, and he spends his free afternoons at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers looking at machines.