His proposed engine would compress air to a temperature that exceeded the ignition temperature of the fuel, thus eliminating the need of an outside source of ignition (i.e. sparkplug).

Rudolf Diesel was born in Paris in 1858. His parents were Bavarian immigrants an he was educated at Munich Polytechnic. After graduation he was employed as a refrigerator engineer.

Rudolf Diesel received financial support to develop his engine from the Baron von Krupp and Machinenfabrik Augsburg Nurnberg Company in Germany. These companies provided engineers to work with him on the development of an engine that would burn coal dust (there were mountains of useless coal dust piled up in the Ruhr valley).

The first experimental engine was built in 1893 and used high pressure air to blast the coal dust into the combustion chamber. Things didn?t go too well as this engine exploded and further developments of using coal dust as a fuel failed (Rudolf was almost killed by his engine when it exploded). However, a compression ignition engine that used oil as fuel was successful and a number of manufacturers were licensed to build similar engines.

The original oil burning engines used very crude mechanical injection equipment so Rudolf Diesel again began using air blast to provide atomization of the fuel as well as turbulence of the mixture. This was very successful and utilized in Rudolf Diesel's third engine built in 1895.

This third engine was very similar to engines being used today. It was a four-stroke cycle with 450psi compression. Progress in diesel engine development has since depended on improvements in fuel injection technology.

By 1898 Diesel was a millionaire from franchise fees in great part international.

In 1922 Robert Bosch began the development of a fuel injection system for the diesel engine. By 1927 they finally had an acceptable injection pump. The demand for this pump was so great that Bosch in Germany was unable to keep up. In 1931 agreements were made with companies in France and England to produce injection pumps. In 1934 a company in the U.S. began manufacturing under the name of American Bosch and in 1938 the Diesel Kiki company in Japan was founded.

Since then licenses have been granted to numerous manufacturing companies in several countries, most of which us Robert Bosch's designs to build injection pumps.