Charles F. Kettering
CHARLES F. KETTERING
Scientist, engineer, inventor, philosopher, organizer of scientific efforts, developer of engineering devices and techniques, leader in industrial research, whose ideals and accomplishments have been inspirations to the men of many countries.
Charles Franklin Kettering, American inventor and manu facturer, a director and former vice president of General Motors and former general manager of the General Motors Research Laboratories, was born on a farm near Loudonville, in Ashland County, Ohio, on Aug. 29, 1876. At present, having retired June 2, 1947, as head of the GM Research Laboratories, he retains the status of research consultant.
Like all farm boys, Charles Kettering was responsible for a number of daily chores, and his spare time was spent in milking, cultivating corn and digging potatoes. The first money he earned, $14 for cutting a neighbor’s wheat crop, was spent on a telephone purchased from a mail-order house. On the day of its arrival, Mr. Kettering dismantled the apparatus to study it. He attended the district school near his home and later graduated from the Loudonville High School. Though not a spectacular student, his scholastic standing was quite high.
At 19 Mr. Kettering was teacher of go children in a one-room country school at Bunker Hill, Ohio. His ambition, however, was to acquire a college education, and in the summer of 1896, he entered the College of Wooster to study the classical languages. While he was at Wooster, Mr. Kettering learned of the engineering courses offered at Ohio State University, and he was fired with ambition to attend the electrical engineering classes there.
But toward the end of that summer at Wooster College his weak eyes failed, and he became almost blind as a result of eyestrain from overstudy. His hope of becoming an electrical engineer temporarily shattered, Mr. Kettering returned to his home to wait for his eyes to recover from the strain to which they had been subjected.
Several months afterwards, Mr. Kettering worked as a teacher in the grade school at Mifflin, Ohio. With him was his sister, Emma, who taught the younger children. Mr. Kettering’s interest in scientific research developed very rapidly at this time. His evenings were spent with a local druggist friend, John C. Robinson, with whom he conducted many experiments in chemistry and electricity.
In 1898, when he was 22, Mr. Kettering’s eyes had recovered sufficiently to permit him to register in the engineering school at Ohio State University. One of his first teachers was Dr. F. O. Clements, who was closely associated with him in later life. From 1916 until his retirement in 1939, Dr. Clements was retained by Mr. Kettering as technical director of his research laboratories.
During his freshman year, Mr. Kettering’s weak eyes were a great handicap to him. Although he went back in the fall for his sophomore year his eyesight became so bad that he found it necessary to interrupt his education once more. In 1900, he began work for the Star Telephone Company of Ashland, Ohio, as a laborer with a telephone-line gang. By the middle of the summer he was made foreman of that gang and his eyes had regained much of their strength. He went on from there to do everything in the operation of a small telephone company. His principal achievement was installing a centralbattery telephone exchange in Ashland. This was one of the first central-battery systems in Ohio.
In 1901, Mr. Kettering returned once more to the Ohio State University as a sophomore. He was then 25. He continued to work as a telephone trouble-shooter and installation man in his spare time, and in this way was able to support himself through college. In 1904, he graduated at the age of 28 with the degree of mechanical engineer in electrical engineering. According to tradition, he is supposed to have thrown away his diploma, because he did not want to think his education was finished.
Immediately after graduation, Mr. Kettering became associated with the inventions department of the National Cash Register Company at Dayton, Ohio. His first assignment was to develop an electric drive for the cash register. The experts had said that this job could not be done, because it would require an electric motor as large as the cash register itself to do the job. Mr. Kettering knew, however, that he could overload a small motor if it ran for only an instant and had rather long periods to cool down between times. Using this fact as the basis of his design, he produced his first electric cash register in 1904. Today — so years later — the electric drive on the cash register is essentially unchanged from the original model.
From 1904 to 1909, Mr. Kettering remained as an inventor with the National Cash Register Company. In this five-year period, he completely revolutionized the cash register business with his inventions and improvements on accounting and calculating equipment. Another one of his contributions was the development of the O.K. Charge Phone System, which provided for a rapid authorization of customers’ charge orders in large department stores. Twenty-five years later, in 1936, Mr. Kettering was elected to the board of directors of the National Cash Register Company in recognition of the services which he had rendered to it during the five years of his employ.
By 1909, Mr. Kettering left the National Cash Register Company and organized his own laboratory, the Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company, later abbreviated to “Delco.” His partner in this venture was Edward A. Deeds, who was associated with the National Cash Register Company in an official capacity and also with the Republic Motor Car Company of Hamilton, Ohio. Through their close association with the automobile industry of that day, both Mr. Kettering and Mr. Deeds had acquired a knowledge of the shortcomings of the electrical equipment used in the automobile. It was one of their purposes in founding Delco to redesign this equipment and improve automobile performance.
Among the first of the problems to which Mr. Kettering turned his attention was the ignition system. Two types of ignition were then in use —the magneto system and the battery system. In the battery system, dry cells were used in connection with a master vibrator to provide a stream of sparks in the cylinder for ignition purposes, but only at the expense of avery heavy drain on the dry cells, causing their early depletion. The best that could be expected from a single set of cells was a possible three hundred miles.
Mr. Kettering had done considerable research on electrical relays in his work for the telephone company and at National Cash Register, and the possibility of using a controlling relay instead of vibrators in the ignition system suggested itself to him as a means of eliminating some of the more troublesome defects in the battery ignition system. In this way, he was able to substitute one positive spark per power stroke for the shower of sparks that had been used before, thus reducing the drain on the dry cells. An experimental model incorporating this idea was constructed and found to be superior in all respects to the vibrator system. As a result of this improvement, the driving range of the automobile was increased from a possible 300 miles to over 2,000 miles on a single set of dry cells.
The first automobile manufacturer to use Mr. Kettering's new ignition system was the Republic Motor Car Company, which fitted a portion of its 1gog output with the system. Two other motorcars — the Stoddard-Dayton and the Speedwell — used it as optional equipment. The most important user, however, was the Cadillac Motor Car Company, which investigated the system in 190g and offered it as standard equipment on its 1910 model.
Meanwhile, Mr. Kettering had been searching for an electrical generator suitable for automobile lighting. From his experiments, he became convinced that such a generator could be converted into an electric motor, having a relatively high torque so that it could be used for cranking purposes as well as for battery charging. About this time, Henry Leland, general manager of the Cadillac Motor Company, was mourning the death of a personal friend who had broken his jaw while cranking an automobile. Mr. Leland at once encouraged Mr. Kettering to develop his idea and submit a working model.
Within a year, Mr. Kettering’s electrical starting, lighting and ignition system was established fact. Preliminary construction work on the new starter commenced early in September, 1910. By the middle of the month, Mr. Kettering and his assistants were making their first tests and sketching plans for the final assembly. On the night of Dec. 17, 1910, the first starter was completed and assembled on a Cadillac car. After two months of feverish redesigning and testing this car was shipped to Mr. Leland in Detroit, Feb. 16, 1911.
In Detroit the new starter was subjected to a series of exacting tests by the Cadillac engineers and was found to perform in a satisfactory manner. The next few weeks, however, brought with them one disaster after another. First Mr. Kettering suffered a broken leg while testing an experimental car and was ordered to stay in bed for some weeks. Then the Leland garage in Detroit caught on fire and the only car equipped with the self-starter was badly damaged. Faced now with imminent failure of his plans, Mr. Kettering scrambled out of his sick bed against doctor’s orders and took a train to Detroit, where with his leg in a plaster cast, he was able to get the damaged self-starter and the car on which it was installed back into operation.
After further tests, Cadillac accepted Mr. Kettering's design and a two-year contract was awarded to Delco. Though it had been his desire to confine Delco’s activities to research and development and not to enter the manufacturing field, Mr. Kettering could find no electrical manufacturer at this time willing to produce the self-starter, as he had been able to do with his system of battery ignitions. It was therefore necessary to subcontract the production of some of the parts and to do the remaining manufacture and the assembly in a factory set up in Dayton. Deliveries of the self-starter on a commercial scale began in August and September. Twelve thousand selfstarters were installed on Cadillac cars in 1912.
Despite the opposition of certain technical men who were quite outspoken in their criticism, public acceptance of the self-starter was instantaneous and complete. In 1912 Cadillac received its second Dewar trophy, the highest award in motordom, for pioneering the electric starting, lighting and ignition system. In 1913, 46 per cent of the cars exhibited at the motor show in New York’s Grand Central Palace were equipped with electrical starters. Other makers got into the business, and by 1914 the proportion of cars using electrical starters had increased to 85%. Of the 141 cars with self-starters exhibited in 1914, 141 were provided with electrical starters as standard equipment, four with electrical starters as optional, five with compressed air starters, and one with an explosion system utilizing compressed acetylene gas.
The effect of the starting, lighting and ignition system on the industry as a whole was equally stimulating. Automobile production was nearly doubled in 1912 and the rate of growth was even more pronounced in the years immediately following popular acceptance of the self-starter in 1918. Naturally, the self-starter was not solely responsible for this continued expansion. There were numerous other factors, among them the six-cylinder engine, the closed body and installment buying — each of which contributed in part to the growth of the industry. But the importance of the self-starter was tremendous. More than any other single innovation on the automobile, it made the owner-driven car a reality. For the first time, women felt confident that they could drive without a man along to crank the engine. This simple fact alone accounted for doubling the number of potential automobile users.
Shortly after the successful establishment of the self-starter, Mr. Kettering began working on the invention of an independent electric generator for use in isolated farm houses, schools, camps and other buildings which could not be economically served by central station power. This work culminated in the Delco Light farm lighting system, which was placed on the market in 1914. The Domestic Engineering Company was founded to manufacture the units.
In 1916, Mr. Kettering and Mr. Deeds sold their interest in the Delco Company to the United Motors Corporation, which later became part of General Motors, under an arrangement by which they continued to be the chief officers of it. They then established the Dayton Research Laboratories in Dayton to work on a number of problems of interest and merit. One of these endeavors was the effort to find a cure for knock in the gasoline engine which some years later culminated in the discovery of the antiknock agent, tetraethyl lead.
After the entrance of the U. 8. into World War 1, which
came about that time, the new research laboratory was the