Diesel, Rudolf Christian Karl

Diesel, Rudolf Christian Karl

(born March 18, 1858, Paris, France—died Sept. 29, 1913, at sea in the English Channel) German thermal engineer. In the 1890s he invented the internal-combustion engine that bears his name, producing a series of increasingly successful models of the diesel engine that culminated in his demonstration in 1897 of a 25-horsepower, four-stroke, single vertical cylinder compression engine.