Why exactly was Clessie Cummins running around America trying to sell the ingenious diesel engine when Rudolf Diesel had already designed and more importantly, patented the diesel cycle combustion engine around the turn of the century…?
Please remember to link to the column or staff report being discussed.
The original inventor isn’t the only one who can patent something. Cummins found a way to improve on the original design and patented the improvement.
From this page about the history of Cummins, Inc., http://www.cummins.com/na/pages/en/whoweare/cumminshistory.cfm
So it sounds like Cummins was playing by the rules and had a legal right to make Diesel engines from the start.
*I wonder if “Hvid” really was Dutch. A quick Google search turns up lots of hits for “Hvid” on Danish language websites, but I didn’t see any for Dutch sites. I also note that later in the article it says that “with the assistance of a bright former Hvid engineer named H.L. Knudsen, Clessie began working on his own designs.” “Knudsen” sounds a lot more like a Danish name than a Dutch one to me…
I HATE these things by the way… I grew up with a Sand & Gravel pit at the end of my street, and my childhood home was 2 lots away from the main road which they got to the world by.
So, of course, I’d hear them activate right at the parent’s propertly line, and it’s the loudest damn thing going… I couldn’t hear a TV, phone, or human while those things rumbled by.
I still cringe when I hear one on the road near me, it makes me want to swerve right into the truck and cause him a whole world of trouble… the biggest problem is that in an 18Wheel vs VW Golf collision, I know who really wins…