Diesel Power's art director Mark Snyder lent me this book called "Diesel's Engine" for a little light reading this weekend.
It is over 700 pages long so it might take awhile before I can give a full report.
One thing I've always wondered about is how Rudolf Diesel died. I've heard he was thrown overboard a ship?
A few interesting things I learned:
The original patent called for water injection
No artificial cooling (since compression was originally planned at 52:1 peak temperature was a result of compression not adding fuel). As the cylinder decompressed it cooled at the same rate as fuel burned keeping things constant.
According to this book vegetable oil was not a fuel priority for Diesel it just worked out that way.
Compression ignition was also not a priority it just worked out that way.
The pictures are my attempt to learn thermodynamics the driving force behind Rudolf's invention.