Im the interlocutor. Im joking. And this is the author, doug. And were here to talk about the mysterious case of Rudolf Diesel. I wouldnt. This is amanda appeared in september 29, 1913, and went off a boat that was going between belgium and britain. The obvious question is, did he jump or was he pushed . I wouldnt dream of trying to answer that because otherwise you wont have any fun reading the book. Its a little like reading the last chapter of an Agatha Christie in, you know, whats the point you need to get should the build up . And i recommend the build up because its a really terrific read. But lets start somewhere else. Im curious. I mean, i and i think maybe other people in the audience know you as a novelist and indeed not an historical novelist. Very contemporary. Wall street professional tennis. Main topic of today, etc. And though its true that this book still has the novelists eye for detail and concerned with character and above all, pacing that reads if there can be such a thing as page turning history, this is page turning history, but its still a different animal. And im curious about the process. What was the process like for you to go from one to the other and why did you i mean, why this story . Why this book . How did it come about . Okay. Before i fully answer that question in my tangent here, ashley will be relevant, but i, i want to say that you are part of this. This is a bit of a full circle tangent because joe and i have been friends for about ten years and i just want to make sure i think most of the people in the room already know who we are in the presence of, but some may not. And so before joe is writing big blockbuster bestsellers like the good german, which was made into a movie with George Clooney and cate blanchett, he was also one of the most prior to the writing. He was one of the most powerful editing executives in the city. He ran Houghton Mifflin and other other big posts. And so ive always really valued his counsel. And i spoke to him, you know, over this period of friendship of ten years. And i had heard the name Peter Borland from from joe on numerous occasions. He always spoke highly of peter and from other circles. Id heard the name as well. So i knew peter by reputation only. And when i had my agent said, you know, as you do these days with the email, you can blast the proposal to 30 people and then a number respond. And then you have meetings and things. My agent said, you know, Peter Borland did. S. A. Is interest. I thought, oh my gosh. And i if my agent were here, he would swear to this. I said, look, if this is it, all things being even close to equal, i would love this to land with peter s. A. Because it is my first go at nonfiction and i would like to have a really strong editor who will dig in with me and make this a great book. And so of course, i did land with peter boylan, who was in the room and a terrific editor, and really had played a huge bob role, particularly with the structure of the book. But to answer your question on why nonfiction, i came to diesel and the story about eight years ago when i bought a boat and it was a larger boat. It needed some work and i was going to fix the boat up and i was talking to the guy, the boat yard and i said, what should i do with this old boat . And he said, well, the first thing you ought to do is switch these old gasoline engines out for diesel and like many people, maybe in the room at that time, i didnt know much about diesel. I remember seeing it at the fueling station. You can get diesel or gas. I just sort of thought it referred to a fuel and not any particularly different engine at that time. And so i said, why diesel . And he said, well, because the fuel is more stable that it wont there wont be fumes. 100 of boat fires come from gasoline engines, zero from diesel. I could take a lit match and drop it into a barrel of diesel fuel and nothing will happen. The fuel efficiency is four times on your 200 gallon tank of fuel. You go four times as far. So we repower two diesel and about a year later i was in between novels. Ive, as joe said, i had previously written mostly fiction. And so i was goofing around on the internet as i do, looking for ideas and hoping something will will catch on and i came across this list of mysterious disappearances at sea. And on the list was Rudolf Diesel. And i thought, i wonder if this has anything to do with these diesels. I just bought. And so i clicked on the events. And you alluded to he disappears in 1913 on the eve of world war one. And its its a crazy, crazy story of disappearance. And its hard to imagine what it was like at that time. What a what a global celebrity he was. Todays equivalent would be if elon musk suddenly disappeared overnight and newspaper headlines were splashed all over new york city in western europe and russia with the that the mysterious disappearance of this great inventor. So i mean reels at that you. Yeah yeah yeah. So i, i at first was thinking i might do it as historical fiction and i read more about it and i thought, well, theres so little written, i mean, alarmingly little written about Rudolf Diesel in the english language. There are a couple sort of academic biographies from the sixties and seventies and eighties, and i thought, well, ive got the scaffolding of a story. You know, maybe i can just make up the dialog and well do historical fiction, but the more i got into it, the more i had a vision of what it could be. And i realized this needs to be told as nonfiction. And as you know, from some of my novels in the past, ive always done a lot of research for my books. I wrote a book called trophy son, which is about tennis, and its really about our societys increasing emphasis on single sport specialization for early youth. And tennis is really at the extreme end of that. And, you know, if youre a good tennis player, you sometimes get pulled out of school and go to a Tennis Academy or Something Like that. And so i interviewed james blake and john isner and did dozens and dozens of interviews and lots of research. So i loved the Research Piece and the more that i found, the more that i found that my theory of the case was right. So the book, it starts out as a biography of diesel and and the suspects and we can get into that. But it also becomes an investigative of what happened. And it was sort of like the geeky side of indiana jones. It wasnt the whips and the boulders, you know, chasing around, but it was finding these weird little pieces of paper in an archive that, in the context of the case, were treasure. And so peter helped me along quite a bit on the nonfiction piece, and i was aware that figuring out the notes section and all my sourcing and stuff was going to be challenging. So i tried to be diligent about that through the process and theres some technical differences as well. If you you know, with fiction, i write by hand, i write on a yellow legal pad and i, i can cross things out and, you know, move them around with the nonfiction. And i could write, you know, in a number on a plane or a cafe, which i would often do as joe and i met writing at the New York Public Library in midtown. But with nonfiction, i write. I key it all in, right in the laptop. I have to be in my place. Ive got stacks of secondary materials, all around me and i need an interconnect internet connection. Whereas with fiction i try not to have that. But you know, you want to. If hes crossing the London Bridge in 1880, you want to know where i was . There a gas lab . And what did that look like . And just little tangent pieces of Quick Research youd want to know. So it was a very different process. But the research and the love of the research was the same in both cases. I must say one of the nice things about reading a book by a friend is that youre constantly surprised at what theyre pulling off on the page. I mean, particularly enjoyed the technical aspects of this book, which surprised me because im probably the least mechanical person doug knows. And i thought, if i can understand this engine, anybody can understand it. And there would be from time to time the moments when id go, whoa, doug, how do you know this . I mean, you have to go to an auto body shop to know stuff like this. I didnt. I thought too, that diesel, in fact, was just another gas that you got at the pump. But i had no idea. But since you took this on and since i get to ask the questions, just to show that you really do know this, could you explain to people who like me, probably didnt know what is a Diesel Engine exactly and how does it work . Joe said, if i dont like the question, i can just pivot to whatever i want so that. Its its very different in the sense of, well, for example, the gasoline engines are well, theyre you got to sort of back up and think about the era. So its sort of a steam engines, which is external combustion. And so these great ships, if you think about the titanic or the lusitania in one image, i try to evoke in the book is if you remember that scene in the movie titanic, they go down into the belly of the ship and there are dozens of sweating backs and men shoveling coal into these orange fiery furnaces. And those furnaces burn the coal and heat the giant vats of water. Literally the same concept as a pot on a stove to make the water boil and create steam that moves the gears of the engine. I mean, its incredibly inefficient. How much heat is lost in that situation. It requires a whole chimney apparatus to get the smoke and smog and partially burnt particles of coal out of the ship. These dozens i mean, in the case of those titanic, hundreds of men need to sleep on the ship and eat food. Their rooms full of coal. So, so much space is wasted to this, whereas the Diesel Engine draws fuel automated, not liquid fuel automatically down from a tank. Theres no chimney apparatus required at all. Theres very little exhaust that is just vented out the side of the ship. So on the deck of the ship, you dont have giant furnaces or tunnels of smokestacks. You know, the funnels for the for the smoke is just a clear deck for cargo or in the case of a warship for guns to be able to point to any point on the horizon. And its two, three, four times more efficient than gas and and from the steam engine more like five times six times more efficient the way that the engine itself works. So it is internal combustion and Rudolf Diesel wrote in his notes that he first got the idea for this from his University Days when they were looking at a a tinder lighter, which is really the shape of like a bicycle tire pump. So its a cylinder, a glass cylinder and with a tinder lighter, you, you insert at the end a piece of tinder thats easily lit, and then you jam down the plunger and that quick compression of air create a High Temperature. So then the tinder starts to glow and light. And that was his idea for the engine. Its its as simple as that. Like a bicycle tire pump on the extremely High Pressure. So the pressure comes down to 900, 1,000 pounds per square inch. And only then does the fuel combust. So it wont it wont light with a match or anything like that. But that High Temperature under that High Pressure, it then explodes and blows the piston back out. So thats the concept of the of the Diesel Engine. And you dont have to start the fires to get it going. You dont you dont no spark ignition and exactly for for a steamship with one of the one of the ideas with the Diesel Engine is theres it can be on a cold start so you can just start it right up in your often running with the steamship you need to get the coal burning, generate the heat, get the water hot, get the water boiling. And so if youre a ship of war in port, it might be 3 hours before you can go out and engage the enemy. So with diesel, you just say, lets go and youre off. And so its a huge Strategic Military advantage to have the cold start to the engine as opposed to steam in that era. So didnt i say it would be easy to understand . It really is. I mean, this was like 15 drafts with peter to try to get this down and you get it. If you read the book, it sounds even better. It all became clear to me when i read about the bicycle pump, because its true that if you pump it once or twice, its hot. It just gets the heat is conducted there. And i thought, oh, is that how it works . After all these years of seeing it . Its amazing. And so 120 years, its still essentially the same technology. There are many improvements to the to the pollution aspects of it. And but the fundamental aspect of the engine is still the same as High Pressure engine. The fuel explodes inside the cylinder under High Pressure. One of the entertaining aspects of this book is simply that period of engineering and invention and development of these kinds of machines. I guess it would be the early equivalent of the apple five or, you know, the new cell phone thats coming out. And there was a great deal of excitement. Youd go to paris exhibitions and people would look at giant turbines and say, you know, isnt this cool . Isnt this swift. Insofar as that is the case, though, there was an interesting line early on in the book where you say it was the most Disruptive Technology in history. Who did it disrupt and now this gets a little bit into the murder suspects. Is it okay to go there, do you think its your book . Yeah. So when diesel disappeared september 29, 1913, hes traveling on an overnight passenger ferry from belgium to Great Britain. And in the night he disappears. Its a calm window. This night the seas are coming. Its not like he got washed overboard in the morning. He is supposed to meet his traveling companions for breakfast at 6 a. M. And they go to look for him and hes not there. And theyll check a state room and hes not there. They hold the ship at sea, search it all. They find is his hat and his coat neatly folded by the stern of the ship, by the rail, seeming to mark where he went over. So, of course, the newspaper headlines do their thing. They they speculate suicide. But two other theories of murder emerged. One suspect was kaiser wilhelm. The second the emperor of germany and the other was john rockefeller, the richest man in the world and and founder of standard oil. And both had a motive to do it. Both viewed him as an existential threat. And so to get to the disruptive point, taking standard oil first, rockefeller had become the richest man in the world. Standard oil was found in 1870. By 1900, hes the richest man in the world selling kerosene he drilled for petroleum, distilled kerosene for illumination. Rockefeller was really in the illumination business at that time. Gasoline was a wasteful byproduct that they threw away and by the 1900 edison and others had come along with electric light bulb, which was going to completely cripple the Kerosene Market for illumination. Clearly, the light bulb was the future. So they were going to do to rockefeller. What rockefeller had done to the whaling business. You know, we used to get whale blubber for elimination, then kerosene came along. Now is the light bulb. So rockefeller scrambling for a new revenue market. And at that time, it really was not settled in the 20th century that our fuel for the century was going to be petroleum and gasoline line. In 1905 here in new york city, we had a fleet of hundreds of new york city taxicabs, all elected. Rik there was a charging station on broadway in times square and so now we think elon musk and these newfangled electric cars will know that was going on 120 years ago and edison was trying to figure out the Battery Technology and struggled to do so. So just as rockefeller is losing his illumination business and trying to get the internal Combustion Engine market to accept gasoline and become addicted to gasoline, along comes Rudolf Diesel, who has an engine that can run on a range of fuels. Diesel won the 1900 paris worlds fair on a Diesel Engine running peanut oil. And he advocated that we have farmers. We can grow our own fuel. Every nation can. We can essentially have fuel independence. We dont need to run around two areas. The war of the world, where theres petroleum and then fight wars over that. And so this was an existential threat to rockefellers future, who was already vulnerable because of the end of the Kerosene Market and who turns out not to be quite as noble is the foundation that he later funded. There was several nemeses and in this book you would think that a man is perfectly nice as Rudolf Diesel. I mean, theres nothing in the record that says that he was in any way nasty or means spirited. He acquired a lot of enemies who truly were and one of the fun parts of the book, i think, was just to be reminded of how really rapacious and violent that period in American Economic ex was. I mean, we know laughingly referred to the robber barons and, you know, they made the country what it is and they thought, well, but they did with a lot of crackheads going into it. And we forget this. The pinkertons were practically an army unleashed on unions. And i thought, now or we think of pinkertons, as, you know, were Dashiell Hammett worked and it was all fun, but it wasnt fun. Shall we go to the kaiser from brock rockefeller . It turns out to be a really bad and to. Yeah, yeah you know tier tier thought there ill make one more point on rockefeller before going to the kaiser because the pinkertons is a great example and you can see why headlines would make the leap that that someone like rockefeller or big oil would hire the Pinkerton Detective agency or baldwin felts was another that essentially acted as the param