Rudolf Diesel

A single one of his ten planets sits in a fire sign and not one sits in air. Water takes five and earth four, with five of the ten fixed. The Sun, Mercury and Neptune sit inside seven degrees of Pisces, which is a tight group of three, and Jupiter, Uranus and Pluto spread across twenty one degrees of Taurus. Saturn was the only retrograde planet. The record says Diesel invented the compression ignition engine and intended it to run on peanut oil so small workshops could compete with big steam plants, and that he vanished from a ferry in the English Channel.

The site's reading of a Pisces Sun names its own cost, and the cost is drift: a Pisces Sun without something to be devoted to tends to be pulled by whatever is nearest. The condition in that sentence is the interesting part, because the record describes a man with exactly one devotion, pursued far enough to carry his name into every lorry and ship afterwards. Having the Sun, Mercury and Neptune inside seven degrees of the sign puts identity, thinking and imagination in one place, which is a chart with very little in it pulling the other way.

Saturn sits in easy contact with Neptune at just over a degree, imagination made durable, read as faith that survives scrutiny and as artists who finish things, and Mercury sits in easy contact with that same Saturn at under three quarters of a degree, organisation, patience and long concentration. Those two together are about as close as this vocabulary comes to describing an inventor, and the honest note is that the vocabulary is doing a great deal of the work: imagination made durable is a phrase, and a compression ignition engine is a machine. The record supplies the machine and the chart supplies the phrase.

His Moon sits on the seventh degree of Taurus at noon with Aries still possible, so it is left out, three of the six closest contacts go with it, and a four planet group in Taurus comes down to three. Mercury sits in mild friction with Pluto at under half a degree, thought becoming compulsion, glossed as rumination and as using knowledge as leverage, which the record gives nothing to test. His death is dated to 29 September 1913, when he vanished from a ferry in the English Channel, at fifty five, and the record says vanished rather than died, which is a distinction worth keeping. Neptune stood in easy contact with his natal Sun at a third of a degree that day. The Moon was balsamic and one per cent lit.