Rudolf Diesel obtains his patent for the eponymous compression engine, which reaches temperatures sufficient to ignite fuel. He then persuades the two major companies, Maschinenfabrik and Augsburg und Friedrich Krupp, to develop his invention, which takes much longer than he had anticipated. Despite disappointments over the poor quality of the first series of engines, he later becomes one of the richest men in Germany (on paper, the richest). But he believes he will go down in history for the socialist ideas he expounds in his book Solidarismus. He dies in 1913, almost certainly by suicide, falling into the water from the steamship Antwerp-Harwich.
