I’ve been out of town for a week, which means among other things that I did a lot of reading on the plane, and in the airport waiting, and at other moments.
Without actually planning this, I ended up reading three books set in the late 1800’s.
The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel by Douglas Brunt (secret history whodunit about Rudolf Diesel, 1858-1913, who invented Diesel engines) was published in September 2023 and Sisi, Empress on Her Own by Allison Pataki (historical fiction about Empress Elizabeth, 1837-1898, wife of Emperor Franz Joseph) was published in 2016. Book #3, The Johnstown Flood by David McCullough, was published in 1968, and I think it’s the book that made his reputation. It is an amazing, minute-by-minute, description of the 1819 flood that destroyed Johnstown, Pennsylvania, plus detailed before and after commentary.
Sisi, Empress on Her Own includes a reasonable amount of information about the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and events in Europe from around 1860 to 1898. Sisi was a cousin of Mad King Ludwig so there’s a description of the castle at Neuschwanstein that he built. A description of Bismarck and the changing German position in the world provides a counterpoint to the view in the book about Rudolf Diesel. From the Austrian Hapsburg viewpoint, Germany as a united nation was a bit of a newcomer, although pieces of it were very old.
The book comments on the incredible amount of work the emperor had to do every day. I remember watching a movie about Queen Victoria which made the same point; royalty sits down every day to stacks and stacks of paperwork. Sisi hated that aspect of being royalty. She traveled constantly to avoid the court, one assumes. She was not a great mother, though the book spends a fair amount of time trying to excuse her for this.
In fact, from a writing point of view the book did something very interesting. The opening setup has the empress in Hungary, taking a vacation and riding horses every day. She receives a letter telling her that her son is being abused by his tutor, and she needs to fix this. She goes back to Vienna and succeeds in changing her son’s circumstances. This left me thinking that she was going to be a good mother from now on.
Absolutely false.
I spent quite a bit of time balancing her actual actions with this expectation, as I read on. Then I stopped, and went and read about her elsewhere. I concluded that she was unbelievably selfish, but of course, a book about a selfish woman, who ignored three of her children and tried to smother the fourth with maternal affection, might not have a large audience. But by starting as she did, the author followed a good writing precept, trying to make a villain seem human. Or maybe she didn’t think Sisi was so bad.
Sisi, Empress on Her Own includes a letter that “seeped sad resignation.” Another letter “blurted” and tears “hurled” from someone’s eyes. Pataki’s picture of the empress is inconsistent, saying on the one hand that she was “beloved the world over,” and on the other, quoting from Austrian papers criticizing the empress quite viciously, on page after page of the book. Thumbs down.

Onward…
The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel forced me to realize that I knew nothing about Diesel engines or how they had come about. This particular book spends a great deal of energy pointing out that Diesel engines can use alternative fuels, but does not explain whether that is actually the case anywhere nowadays. Diesel engines currently run on fuel made from petroleum derivatives. If they can run on nut oil do they need to be designed differently?
And, is using farmland for energy a good thing? There’s a lot of argument currently about using ethanol derived from corn. Some people say that ethanol comes from the byproducts of other corn uses, so it isn’t using land that would otherwise feed people. Others say other things. I haven’t investigated enough to understand the corn question, but I can pretty much guarantee that nut oil used in an engine is using food for energy, instead of nourishment.

Diesel showed how to make an engine that uses very high pressure to create an explosion, but the specific applications of this technology took years to appear. One reason Diesel engines were not invented long ago, so to speak, is that they require very high quality metals to withstand the enormous pressure placed on the chambers that spark. Like the transatlantic cable, you can’t have some things until Henry Bessemer learns how to make really strong steel in the 1850’s. One of the ideas that the book made crystal clear was how difficult it was to scale the Diesel idea. Each kind of engine, for a ship or submarine or factory or car, required a lot of very specific engineering. At various world fairs, the engines that were on display broke down, and only the personal application of Rudolf’s mind saved those days. Ultimately, when the engine did work, it was great. The author did not give much detail about how the engines differed as they were scaled up. The only bit of science I got out of the explanations was the basic necessity for high quality metal.
The book makes clear that, though cars run on internal combustion engines, the rest of our civilization runs on Diesel. (With nuclear a possible competitor.) Diesel himself was a bit utopian and wanted his invention to help small artisans. However, he never developed the small engine that would have made that life possible.
I liked the description of the German emperors, Bismarck, and the run-up to World War I. The author described Emperor Wilhelm II and his rejection of Bismarck’s ways of thinking, that led to WWI. It was entertaining to meet the royalty of Germany and England in two very different books. Thumbs up.

The Johnstown Flood takes place time-wise in the middle of the other two books, 1889. Andrew Carnegie, briefly mentioned in The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel, was a shareholder in the recreational area, whose lake dam broke, and flooded Johnstown. A play that was being done in Pennsylvania at that time, was also seen in Austria by Sisi. But this book was quite the antidote to the concentration on royalty and upper crust in the other two books. Although it’s getting the least amount of space here, this is the book I would recommend most highly. You know the end, the town floods. And yet, the book is absolutely riveting, hard to put down, excellent writing, full of details about interesting people.