We often hear about the “big name” inventors who are credited with this or that major innovation, but not about the many others whose work refines “big ideas” into things that are actually usable. One of the people you may not have heard of is Charles Kettering, who was born August 29, 1876 in Ohio in the US.
Kettering was a good student, as a boy, and went directly into teaching after he graduated from high school. While he was teaching he also took classes in the evenings at the College of Wooster. Before graduating, he transferred to Ohio State University, but his eyesight, which was always poor, forced him to withdraw. His eyes eventually improved, and he returned to school and finally graduated in 1904, when he was 28.
He got a job with National Cash Register (NCR) right away, where he invented a precursor to credit cards, as well as an electric cash register in 1906. He stayed at NCR for five years, and was awarded 23 patents. When asked where he got his ideas, he said “I didn’t hang around much with other inventors and the executive fellows. I lived with the sales gang. They had some real notion of what people wanted.”
Midway through his NCR career, Kettering began spending nights and weekends tinkering with automobiles, which were quite new at the time. Some of the other NCR engineers joined in. They called themselves the “Barn Gang” because they met at the barn owned by one of them, Edward Deeds. Their first idea was to improve on the “magneto,” the device used in early cars to provide an electric spark. They were pretty successful, too — enough so that Kettering resigned from NCR in 1909 and incorporated the Barn Gang as Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company. The short name of the company was Delco, and it’s still around. It’s now AC Delco, part of General Motors, and designs and manufactures electrical systems and components for General Motors autos.
Delco got its first contract from the Cadillac car company (which is also part of General Motors nowadays). It had to do with the often-dangerous method used to start early cars: hand cranking. The crank was connected directly to the car’s engine, and sometimes it would “kick back,” resulting in injuries and even death. The president of Cadillac, Henry Leland, had an acquaintance who had died from a crank-starting accident, and asked Kettering to design an electric self-starter.
Delco delivered a practical starter in early 1911, incorporating Kettering’s idea that cars need three electrical systems: for starting the engine, producing a spark, and providing headlights. His starter did all three — and then Delco was suddenly faced with an order for 12,000 starters. At the time they were an R&D team that didn’t manufacture anything.
Kettering managed to establish a factory and deliver the starters, and Delco began designing and manufacturing a number of electrical components for cars. Kettering also helped found another company in 1914, the Flxible Sidecar Company (you didn’t think dropping vowels was a recent idea, did you?). Flxible began by manufacturing sidecars for motorcycles, and survived until 1996 by becoming one of the largest bus manufacturers in North America. Kettering helped fund Flxible, particularly after 1916 when he sold Delco for over $2 million. He then served as the president of Flxible, and became chairman of the board in 1940.
He was still inventing, though, and joined General Motors in 1920 (while still leading Flxible) and led their research into air-cooled engines. He also did research into automotive fuels, and concluded that oil was going to become scarce (he was evidently wrong about that at the time). Adding something to gasoline, he thought, would enable engines to be more efficient. He was right, and came up with two effective additives: ethanol and, unfortunately, tetraethyl lead. Ethanol couldn’t be patented, but tetraethyl lead could, and Kettering did so, forming still another company the Ethyl Corporation that produced the additive and, tragically as it turned out, promoted its use. Kettering was apparently aware of some of the risks of lead, and hired Robert Kehoe, a leading toxicologist, to study its effects. Kehoe reported that adding tetraethyl lead to gasoline would be perfectly safe. It was an ecological and public health disaster, of course.
Kettering eventually amassed 186 patents. In addition to electrical systems for cars, he invented one of the first missiles (he called it an “arial torpedo,” and it looks more like a pilotless biplane), an incubator for premature babies, the first kind of paint that was practical for mass-producing cars in different colors, and several early solar energy systems. He also helped found the Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. The former General Motors Institute was renamed Kettering University in 1988, and there’s a town outside Dayton, Ohio called Kettering. There are at least seven schools across the US named for Kettering. And one of the measures of fame in the mid-century US was appearing on the cover of Time magazine. Kettering was on the cover multiple times.
