7 The 100 Most Influential Inventors of All Time 7

Munich he established a brilliant scholastic record in

fields of engineering. At Munich he was a protégé of the

refrigeration engineer Carl von Linde, whose Paris firm

he joined in 1880.

Diesel devoted much of his time to the self-imposed

task of developing an internal combustion engine that

would approach the theoretical efficiency of the Carnot

cycle. For a time he experimented with an expansion engine

using ammonia. About 1890, in which year he moved to a

new post with the Linde firm in Berlin, he conceived the

idea for the diesel engine. He obtained a German develop-

ment patent in 1892 and the following year published a

description of his engine under the title Theorie und

Konstruktion eines rationellen Wäremotors (Theory and

Construction of a Rational Heat Motor). With support from

the Maschinenfabrik Augsburg and the Krupp firms, he

produced a series of increasingly successful models, culmi-

nating in his demonstration in 1897 of a 25-horsepower,

four-stroke, single vertical cylinder compression engine.

The high efficiency of Diesel’s engine, together with its

comparative simplicity of design, made it an immediate

commercial success, and royalty fees brought great wealth

to its inventor.

Diesel disappeared from the deck of the mail steamer

Dresden en route to London and was assumed to have

drowned.

George Washington Carver

(b. 1861?, near Diamond Grove, Mo., U.S.—d. Jan. 5, 1943, Tuskegee, Ala.)

G

eorge Washington Carver was an American agricul-

tural chemist, agronomist, and experimenter whose

development of new products derived from peanuts

(groundnuts), sweet potatoes, and soybeans helped