Rudolph Christian Karl Diesel Rudolph Diesel was born on March 18, 1858 in Paris. On September 4, 1870 Rudolph's family moved to England. In late November they decided it would be better for Rudolph to continue his schooling in Germany so he moved there on his own and stayed with a young professor. The problems Rudolph was trying to solve were the noise, size and unreliability of the steam engine. he wanted to create something that superheated ammonia gas could take the place of steam in a steam engine. He wanted to enable much higher compression pressures to be used than was able with conventional steam engines. In this way he could ma