Douglas brunt biography wikipedia

Interview

Inside Hook's Tobias Carroll in conversation with Douglas Brunt about his novel, The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel.

InsideHook: Early on in The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel, you mention that most people spell diesel with a lowercase "d" when they're talking about the engine. And as you pointed out, it should be capitalized because it was named after its inventor. When was the first moment you became aware that this engine's inventor had been somewhat overlooked in technological history?

Douglas Brunt: Seven years ago, I bought an old boat, which was a little run down and needed a refresh. I was going to redo the boat a little bit, and I asked an expert what I should do. He said that I should get rid of these gasoline engines and repower them with Diesel. At the time, I didn't know the difference between types of engines.

He said, "One hundred percent of boat fires come from gasoline engines, zero from diesel. There's no fumes. The fuel is stable. You can drop a lit match into a barrel full of diesel fuel and nothing will happen. And the efficiency is three to four times, so if you have this 200-gallon fuel tank, you go four times as far on diesel." So I repowered it to Diesel, still not knowing anything about this figure named Rudolf Diesel who had invented it way back in 1897.

A couple of years later, I was in-between novels. I've mainly ...

Full Interview

Books by this Author

Books by Douglas Brunt at BookBrowse