JACOB MORRISON DIESEL PIONEER
The fascinating story of how British inventor Jacob
Morrison actually created the world’s first diesel engine
By Bill Dean
PHOTOGRAPHY VARIOUS / HENRY FORD MUSEUM, DETROIT66 TRUCKING Summer 2019 http://www.truckingmag.co.ukS
team power started the
industrial revolution, but it is
the diesel engine which has
created the modern world.
Diesel’s reliability, instant
starting and cleanness compared to coal
made it the powerplant of choice for
ships, trains and road haulage. Even now
over 95 per cent of the world’s goods
and people move because of Rudolph
Diesel’s invention.
But he didn’t invent the first “diesel”
engine. Jacob Morrison did.
We first came across Jacob Morrison in
a list of inventors who’d had their credit
stolen by more famous names. Inevitably
among the “thieves” was Edison, a shrewd
businessman as well as engineer; Marconi;
and the accepted creator of the diesel
engine, Rudolph Diesel.
Intrigued, we Googled Jacob Morrison.
Nothing. Eventually, after a lot of
searching, up came a photo from Patrick
Knight’s A-Z British Stationary Engines. It
showed the inventor in his best Edwardian
velvet-collared long coat (“You’ve got to
look good for the camera, dear!”), an
oil-soaked fisherman’s cap and scuffed
boots with his hand resting proudly on the
flywheel of Engine No.1. The caption
underneath read: “Built in 1879, the world’s
first oil engine.”This was 14 years before
Diesel’s oil engine spluttered into life. If
correct, why was he not better known?
Why wasn’t this massive advance in
technology seized on and exploited?Digging into the past
By the mid-1800s Britain was at the
forefront of the Industrial Revolution,
powered by steam. Unfortunately, steam
engines are big and slow to fire up. There
was a need for a small powerplant which
was reliable and fast to start.
Piston technology was already well
advanced; it just needed something to
replace steam as the power in the cylinder.
There were four contenders: gas and
petrol, both needing either an unreliable
spark or naked flame; oil using a hot bulb
(a sort of mechanical glow plug) to ignite;
and oil vapour igniting when compressed.
The first three all had timing issues and
gave low compression ratios. The oil (or
‘diesel’) engine, once perfected, was a clear
winner. So why is it not known as the
Morrison engine?
Finding out about the man and the
reason why would take us nearly two
years, in and out of dusty paper archives,
before we found that, amazingly, not only
had the engine survived, but it was in a
museum storehouse in America where its
significance was not realised.TRUE
PIONEER