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DuPont, Mellon, and Hearst:Diesel expected that his engine would be powered by vegetable oils (including hemp) and seed oils. At the 1900 World's Fair, Diesel ran his engines on peanut oil. Later, George Schlichten invented a hemp 'decorticating' machine that stood poised to revolutionize paper making. Henry Ford demonstrated that cars can be made of, and run on, hemp. Evidence suggests a special-interest group that included the DuPont petrochemical company, Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon (Dupont's major financial backer), and the newspaper man William Randolph Hearst mounted a yellow journalism campaign against hemp. Hearst deliberately confused psychoactive marijuana with industrial hemp, one of humankind's oldest and most useful resources. DuPont and Hearst were heavily invested in timber and petroleum resources, and saw hemp as a threat to their empires. Petroleum companies also knew that petroleum emits noxious, toxic byproducts when incompletely burned, as in an auto engine. Pollution was important to Diesel and he saw his engine as a solution to the inefficient, highly polluting engines of his time. In 1937 DuPont, Mellen and Hearst were able to push a "marijuana" prohibition bill through Congress in less than three months, which destroyed the domestic hemp industry.A Mystery:Diesel died under mysterious circumstances in 1913, vanishing during an overnight crossing of the English Channel on the mail steamer Dresden from Antwerp to Harwich. Diesel's death might have been suicide, accidental or an assassination. Proponents of the assassination theory point out that shortly after Diesel's death, a diesel-powered German submarine fleet became the scourge of the seas. Diesel had been friendly to France, Britain and the United States.
