Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
Speaker 1: of I Heart Radio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Holly
Speaker 1: Frying and I'm Tracy Vie Wilson. One of the things
Speaker 1: we talked about this week, it was Rudolph Diesel and
Speaker 1: his Diesel engine and really the vanishing of Rudolph Diesel,
Speaker 1: which is really what I wanted to talk about. Um,
Speaker 1: listen Borderline Spooky Time. Yeah, I think based on my
Speaker 1: vague memory that back when I was on also that
Speaker 1: other podcasts in addition to this one called This Day
Speaker 1: in History Class, I feel like I did an episode
Speaker 1: that was about the day that Rudolph Diesel disappeared. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: and I think I had had uh this on my
Speaker 1: short list. A short is like I'm total miss number
Speaker 1: number like this. This is a short list of eight things. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And clearly it was not a priority to me because
Speaker 1: in all of that time it never moved up to
Speaker 1: the top. But also when I went on there today
Speaker 1: to delete it, since we were recording this, I realized
Speaker 1: I didn't even have his actual name on there. It
Speaker 1: just said guy who invented Diesel question mark, I love it,
Speaker 1: I love it. I did check with Tracy Usually if
Speaker 1: something comes up and we think the other might be interested,
Speaker 1: we'll say like, hey, I'm the thing about wearing on
Speaker 1: this are you? And Tracy was like, well I had
Speaker 1: him on a list. I was like, oh, then I
Speaker 1: won't do it. She said, no, I haven't touched it
Speaker 1: in years. Go ahead, So not a priority. I mean
Speaker 1: every once in a while I would kind of return
Speaker 1: to it and then just get distracted by something else.
Speaker 1: And similarly, the thing that was really drawing me to
Speaker 1: it was the questions around his disappearance and death. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's um, it is interesting. So I I mentioned during
Speaker 1: the episode that I wanted to talk a little bit
Speaker 1: about press coverage of it and also the way his
Speaker 1: family and colleagues talked about it, like they were so
Speaker 1: insistent that nope, no way, not our loved one would
Speaker 1: never ever take their own life, and that I think
Speaker 1: is I mean, obviously it's unfortunate, Like we know, we
Speaker 1: know now a lot more about depression and anxiety and
Speaker 1: what leads people to do grave things. Um, but it
Speaker 1: does sort of break my heart that, like that denial
Speaker 1: is probably what led so many people to feel like
Speaker 1: they could never get any help, even when help started
Speaker 1: to be more readily available in the mental health sciences,
Speaker 1: which is so weird. But from the journalistic standpoint, it
Speaker 1: is such a strange and abrupt thing to me, the
Speaker 1: way the headlines in particular change because they are very
Speaker 1: they're much worthier when we don't know what happened to Diesel, right,
Speaker 1: when they're like mysteries surround the disappearance of Rudolph Diesel,
Speaker 1: no clues have become available, Um, you know, Dr Rudolph
Speaker 1: Diesel dead. It is feared like these are literal things
Speaker 1: I'm I'm reading, and then suddenly it's like Diesel was bankrupt,
Speaker 1: and it's so almost accusatory and it's bluntness at that
Speaker 1: point that again it's that thing of like we have
Speaker 1: always had this culture where failure it's the worst sin,
Speaker 1: and it's so strange to me because they're also I think,
Speaker 1: I hope, listen, this is my Pollyanna side coming out.
Speaker 1: I hope that there is more recognition that like failure
Speaker 1: is really a way people can learn. Obviously, if you
Speaker 1: fail in a way that harms others, that's a little
Speaker 1: more grave and serious. But like, I don't know anybody
Speaker 1: who always gets everything right. If they claim they do,
Speaker 1: they're probably fibben um So I really I'm I have
Speaker 1: in my my later years, certainly not when I was younger,
Speaker 1: because I wasn't being as thoughtful about much of anything.
Speaker 1: But you know, try to embrace the idea that failure
Speaker 1: is not bad, it is a good thing, like you
Speaker 1: can make peace with it and recognize that it's part
Speaker 1: of growth. But the fact that as a society that
Speaker 1: was not an avenue of possibility for so many people
Speaker 1: for so many years that I really wonder how many
Speaker 1: people found themselves in circumstances like this where they might
Speaker 1: have considered doing something dire or did do something dire,
Speaker 1: just because we had not evolved in our thinking about
Speaker 1: such things. Just troubling, and it wouldn't help if you
Speaker 1: were someone who was depressed and seeing the press then
Speaker 1: drag all of his financial affairs through the pages of
Speaker 1: their papers to sell more copies. Anyway, it just makes
Speaker 1: me wax a little bit pensive about how we look
Speaker 1: at celebrities, uh and inventors and scientists today and talk
Speaker 1: about their work, because clearly this was not a person
Speaker 1: that was um the least bit claiming he had done
Speaker 1: things he hadn't right, He was so troubled and upset
Speaker 1: when people were like no, but it was a mechanics
Speaker 1: that figured out the problems, And it's like, yes, but
Speaker 1: in a thing he created, um, you know, which was
Speaker 1: really quite revolutionary at the time, and I think he
Speaker 1: felt like he was being discredited, which could not have
Speaker 1: helped any of these other issues that were going on. Anyway,
Speaker 1: It just makes me want to be my I mean,
Speaker 1: I try to be more thoughtful certainly than I was
Speaker 1: when I was younger about how I talked about anybody publicly. Um,
Speaker 1: you don't know what you know. You're the thing you
Speaker 1: say on even Twitter or Instagram or whatever about a person. Um,
Speaker 1: you don't know what life that those words have beyond
Speaker 1: your keyboard. And I think it's important to consider at
Speaker 1: a time when we can kind of see how this
Speaker 1: this atmosphere where things like a financial failure became sort
Speaker 1: of gossipy and a little list us in the way
Speaker 1: they were covered, when really that's just a thing that
Speaker 1: happens to people. Sometimes he made bad business decisions. No
Speaker 1: one's arguing that, but like, yeah, I also think like
Speaker 1: in a lot of ways, most people's minds are primed
Speaker 1: to fill in gaps and information, and frequently there is
Speaker 1: a big gap between the thing that happens and the
Speaker 1: like sort of backstory yes that a person's mind will
Speaker 1: fill in the blanks, and sometimes that invented backstory then
Speaker 1: becomes circulated as fact and we don't actually now. Um yeah, anyway,
Speaker 1: so that was Rudolph Diesel. There's part of me that
Speaker 1: hopes some piece of unearthed level information appears that he
Speaker 1: was in fact living in Canada. But I don't think
Speaker 1: that's going to happen alas I certainly, I mean, I
Speaker 1: I understand the desire to to uh entertain conspiracy theories
Speaker 1: and be like, well, isn't it interesting that sudden me
Speaker 1: Like I The first thing that I thought the conspiracy
Speaker 1: theorist in my brain went, do we know that he
Speaker 1: put that black mark in his calendar? Or did somebody
Speaker 1: else do it when they were handling? Like a lot
Speaker 1: of things like that are still question marks. We're never
Speaker 1: going to know really what happened to him or what
Speaker 1: his mental state was at night. He may have been fine.
Speaker 1: He may have slipped after folding his coat carefully and
Speaker 1: placing it on the deck. We don't know. He may
Speaker 1: have felt lightheaded and stumbled right. Any number of things
Speaker 1: could have happened. But um it also is just a
Speaker 1: good thing to challenge any assumptions that one makes. Granted,
Speaker 1: there was a ruling in his cause of death, but
Speaker 1: it seems like that was made without maybe a ton
Speaker 1: of evidence one way or the other. It's okay to question.
Speaker 1: One of our episodes this week was on Emman Caldan.
Speaker 1: I still wish I could remember what led me to
Speaker 1: put the extremely inadequate description of Iman Caldune, Muslim historian
Speaker 1: onto my episode short list. I don't remember at all. Well,
Speaker 1: that's more than I usually put on any of mine.
Speaker 1: I just put like a name. Yeah, sometimes I put
Speaker 1: them in the Halloween subcategory with a name, and then
Speaker 1: I'll come back and be like, I just put this
Speaker 1: in the wrong place. This isn't the least bit HALLOWEENI
Speaker 1: I have clarifiers on some of the things on my
Speaker 1: short list, and sometimes it's because like it's I say
Speaker 1: short list, it's probably a hundred things, Like it's more
Speaker 1: than a year worth of episodes on that short list.
Speaker 1: But that means sometimes I will come back to it
Speaker 1: when I'm trying to figure out what I want to
Speaker 1: add to like the immediate pipeline, and I will not
Speaker 1: remember who somebody is, and so sometimes after having that
Speaker 1: happen once or twice, I will put in that clarifying
Speaker 1: note to be like, this is who the person is
Speaker 1: that I put on the list. Something we did not
Speaker 1: really talk about that I find interesting is that, possibly
Speaker 1: because there was a gap in how well known and
Speaker 1: well distributed his work was from the time that he
Speaker 1: died until it was rediscovered centuries later, a lot of
Speaker 1: the discussion of it, particularly in terms of his work
Speaker 1: in economics, has been more focused on like comparing him
Speaker 1: to figures from Europe in particular, or talking about how
Speaker 1: he sort of predicted the work of European economists. I
Speaker 1: think we used that term at the show at one point.
Speaker 1: There has not been as much analysis of like his
Speaker 1: economic theories as their own thing, Like not as much
Speaker 1: deep dive into like let's look at sort of an
Speaker 1: even Caldoonian theory of economics and see what that means.
Speaker 1: There's a lot more of like this is an idea
Speaker 1: that later shows up in Adam Smith, or this is
Speaker 1: an idea that later shows up in Reaganomics or whatever. Um.
Speaker 1: I don't know that I would have fully understood it
Speaker 1: had there been a lot of exploration of his economics
Speaker 1: work as its own thing, because that is not a
Speaker 1: field I have spent a lot of time on. Yeah. No, no,
Speaker 1: that wouldn't wouldn't necessarily be illuminating for me. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: will say that I had to chuckle a little bit because, um,
Speaker 1: as we mentioned at the beginning of that episode, right,
Speaker 1: he lived at a time that was pretty chaotic, constantly
Speaker 1: shifting power structures, uh, and that impacted his work. And
Speaker 1: I was like, so, it's like academics, but but because
Speaker 1: everyone I know that's in academia at like higher learning
Speaker 1: institutions is always reporting how did you know drum attic
Speaker 1: and and whatnot? Their jobs are, in their departments, various
Speaker 1: intrigues that are going on. And I was like, it's
Speaker 1: always been there. That's very very um diminishing view of it.
Speaker 1: I don't mean to send any academics. I just you know,
Speaker 1: when you're gossiping with your friends and they're like, ah,
Speaker 1: and then this in my department chair, and then and
Speaker 1: then this and that this person is jockeying for this,
Speaker 1: And I was like, oh, it's like that's just say
Speaker 1: it's always been that way. One of the things that
Speaker 1: I've for some strange reasons remember from college, even though
Speaker 1: this was half my life ago. At this point, I
Speaker 1: had a humanities teacher who was in the history department,
Speaker 1: and occasionally he would tell these stories about faculty meeting
Speaker 1: and then he would like, part of the story was
Speaker 1: one of the time, and then we had a knockdown,
Speaker 1: drag out fight about it. As Like, as a student,
Speaker 1: I was like, how can there be this many not
Speaker 1: drag knockdown drag out fights in the history department faculty meeting.
Speaker 1: I'm now I understand this more as an adult who has,
Speaker 1: you know, many years of adult experience, not in academia
Speaker 1: but in any workplace setting where people don't agree on
Speaker 1: how to do something. But I still just kind of
Speaker 1: part of me is like, I want to ask that guy,
Speaker 1: what were all these not down drag out fights about it,
Speaker 1: which at this point might would require a seance because
Speaker 1: it's people are not with us anymore. That would be
Speaker 1: funny a seance of academics who then get into a knockdown,
Speaker 1: drag out fight from the afterlife. Yeah yeah, uh. Anyway,
Speaker 1: I find I find really interesting and it's again not
Speaker 1: atypical at all that there would have just been no
Speaker 1: mention at all of his wife and daughters. Did he
Speaker 1: have sons, I'm not actually sure, but he definitely had
Speaker 1: five daughters who were killed in the shipwreck. And it's
Speaker 1: just like his mention of them and his autobiography is
Speaker 1: almost off hand about it. I mean, of course, I
Speaker 1: would be like, I have not read any of this
Speaker 1: work in the original Arabic because that is not a
Speaker 1: language that I know, and I have heard in one
Speaker 1: of the interviews that I listened to that was about
Speaker 1: this work, which was with a historian who I think
Speaker 1: speaks Arabic is a first language. Um, Like the English
Speaker 1: translations I have heard just don't compare to what the
Speaker 1: language of the original is like at all. Like the
Speaker 1: original language is just a lot more poetic and meta
Speaker 1: metaphorical in a way that a lot of the English
Speaker 1: translations are not. But um, his description of this shipwreck
Speaker 1: is described as almost just offhand, like it gets kind
Speaker 1: of mentioned in passing. So it's he had so many
Speaker 1: tragedies in his life apart from all of the political
Speaker 1: chaos and instability that he was part of. You know, look,
Speaker 1: a lot of his family to the black death, and
Speaker 1: you know, other friends and family members being either murdered,
Speaker 1: murdered for political reasons or executed. Uh. And then the
Speaker 1: loss of his wife and daughters just so much and
Speaker 1: it seems like logically that would have all affected him,
Speaker 1: and we just have no real documentation of his thoughts
Speaker 1: on any of it. Well, and it's worth noting, right
Speaker 1: Like you you mentioned in the episode that it was
Speaker 1: not it would not have been unusual for writings at
Speaker 1: the time by a scholar of his nature to to
Speaker 1: not really focus on that. But also everybody deals with
Speaker 1: tragedy differently, Like I definitely have family members who will
Speaker 1: talk about someone who they were utterly devoted to and
Speaker 1: they're passing and it's like a quick drive by mention
Speaker 1: and then you move on. I don't think that's uncommon either, right, So,
Speaker 1: like there are layers of like what's probably going on
Speaker 1: in his very minimal discussions of it. Not everyone is
Speaker 1: a big feeling sharer, so that may inform that as well.
Speaker 1: We just don't know. Yeah, So anyway, I find them
Speaker 1: really interesting and I'm glad I finally got to correct
Speaker 1: my overly reductive description of him in Metal episode short
Speaker 1: List If you want to send us a note about
Speaker 1: this more history podcast that I heart radio dot com.
Speaker 1: It's Friday. I hope your Friday is going well. I
Speaker 1: hope your weekend goes well whatever is on your plate. Uh,
Speaker 1: We'll be back Saturday with a Saturday Classic and something
Speaker 1: brand new will be in your feet on Monday. Stuff
Speaker 1: you Missed in History Class is a production of I
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