Kettering
TO MOST AMERICANS TODAY THE NAME Charles F. Kettering conjures up little beyond a vague feeling that he had something to do with cancer research. Yet the interest that this remarkable man had in medicine was only a sideline. What enabled him late in life to help found the Sloan-Kettering Institute in New York City was an extraordinarily productive and lucrative career as an automotive inventor. His achievements made him one of the most admired Americans of his day. And in a way he is not really forgotten. Every time you start your car, you are paying tacit tribute to “Boss Ket,” for it was he who invented the self-starter.
That was only one of his innovations. Among other things introduced by this tall, gangling, deceptively easygoing Ohio farm boy were the electric and spring-operated cash registers, the battery-operated ignition system now found in most cars, four-wheel brakes, leaded gasoline, the modern refrigerator, and the diesel engine that powers many of the world’s locomotives. At the time of his death, in 1958, he was responsible for more major inventions than any American except Thomas Edison. In contrast, however, with Edison, who worked independently with his own laboratory staff, Kettering was the model corporate inventor, running the research operations of General Motors for more than a quarter of a century. It was a job he loved, and his steady optimism made him a symbol of his time. Technological progress, he told everyone who would listen, could solve all the world’s problems. If the memory of this relentlessly forward-looking man has faded, it may be because his brand of enthusiasm has too.
Like many legends, Kettering is difficult to size up; the myth tends to obscure the reality. He was equally at home in the laboratory and in the boardroom, as able to discuss scientific principles with engineers as to argue corporate policy with businessmen. He was without equal in explaining—even ennobling—technical matters to the layman. But his competence and eloquence masked a hardness of character. He loved practical jokes, which by their nature must be at someone else’s expense. He was opinionated and in many ways unyielding. His nickname provides a key. “The Boss” was a term of affection, and his staff admired him tremendously. But anyone who hesitated to carry out one of his orders might be fired on the spot. He could be petulant, threatening to resign if not given his way, and he tended to nurse old grudges.
ALTHOUGH HE WAS BORN ON A farm near Loudonville, Ohio, in 1876, Kettering was hardly cut out for a rural existence. “He sure experimented digging potatoes,” an older brother recalled. “He was always coming back out of the potato patch, looking for some other kind of fork, shovel, spade—anything there was a chance he might get ‘em out of the ground easier. Till he had half the tools on the farm out there. And the potatoes not dug.” He was inquisitive from an early age; as a boy he pestered his mother with questions like “Why can I see through a pane of glass?” and “What is magnetism?” Nearsighted and ungainly, he was happiest hanging out in the local gristmill, where he picked up the basics of mechanics by direct observation. Knowledge so acquired was far superior, he came to think, to the kind of theory found in books. “You can know a lot and not really understand anything,” he would say. But he excelled in schoolwork, particularly physics and mathematics, and his intuitive, quick grasp of any argument made him the star of his high school debating team.
Unable to afford college, he taught school for a while, then at the age of twenty-two enrolled in Ohio State’s engineering college, supporting himself by working in the university’s power plant. A year later an old eye ailment forced him to withdraw. Joining his brother’s telephone-line gang, he quickly rose to foreman and proceeded to introduce a number of improvements, such as selective ringing—each customer getting an individual signal. His eyes improved, and he re-entered Ohio State, majoring in electrical engineering. (The university waived the drafting requirement to preserve Kettering’s sight.) He did so well that upon his graduation, in 1904, at the age of twenty-seven, he was offered a job in the inventions department of the National Cash Register Company, in Dayton, Ohio. He began work that July.
“The Cash” was dominated by its hard-driving president, John H. Patterson, a born salesman (and “eccentric martinet,” in the words of one historian) who cared little for product innovation. This did not deter Kettering, who in short order came up with a remarkable series of inventions. The first—an electromagnetic device that made a register’s keys easier to punch—was perhaps the most important, but for an unlikely reason. It worked, but the company said it was too bulky and expensive to produce. Thereafter Kettering understood that an invention was of no use unless it would sell. (Edison had learned the same lesson with his first patent, an electrical vote tabulator for legislatures that worked well but found no buyers.) From that point on, Kettering’s eye never left the marketplace. “I didn’t hang around much with other inventors or the executive fellows,” he recalled of his days at the Cash. “I lived with the sales gang. They had some real notion of what people wanted.”
WHAT MANY DEPARTMENT stores wanted was a device to speedily check a customer’s credit. Kettering produced a switching mechanism that enabled salesclerks to obtain the needed information in writing almost instantly. A clerk would phone the store’s credit office, which checked the customer’s credit and, using a solenoid device, stamped its approval by remote control on the sales slip. Kettering’s invention allowed the credit manager to provide the necessary written authorization without leaving his office. The O.K. Credit System was soon adopted by Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia, and sales boomed. Patterson made Kettering the head of the inventions department.
To supplant the hand crank that powered most cash registers, Kettering decided to electrify the process with a small motor. This presented a new type of problem. Most small motors of the day were built to deliver a steady, moderate stream of power. An electric cash register, by contrast, would need an intense burst for a short period to process the transaction and open the register drawer. So Kettering devised an ingenious clutch system. The electric register was an immediate success. While he was at it, Kettering came up with a method of displaying the sales amount in small electric lights, the forerunner of today’s stadium scoreboards. His next product was another breakthrough: a device for wiring all of a store’s cash registers to a central accounting office, so that sales could be totaled by type and by department as they were made. It presaged today’s computerized inventory control systems and revolutionized retail accounting.
Kettering’s mind teemed with ideas like these. He was immensely popular with his eighteen-member staff. They nicknamed their young supervisor—not yet thirty—Boss Ket, and the name stuck for the rest of his life. Although he was married now (to Olive Williams, whose brother had been on the telephone-line gang), he habitually worked from 6:30 A.M . until late in the evening. Despite paying scant attention to administrative minutiae, a trait that exasperated Patterson, Kettering completely made over the inventions department, organizing it into teams focused on individual products or on more basic concerns like the nature of electrical current—a brand-new approach to industrial research.
He urged his workers to approach every problem with an open mind (he liked to boast of his own “intelligent ignorance”) and to pay no attention to what experts said. “If I want to stop a research program,” he once remarked, “I can always do it by getting a few experts to sit in on the subject, because they know right away that it was a fool thing to try in the first place.” This was actually hyperbole, for Kettering never hesitated throughout his career to call up a friend at Ohio State or MIT and get the latest information on some technical subject.
He also told his staff not to be afraid of failure. It is important, he said, to learn how to fail intelligently. “Failing is one of the greatest arts in the world. … Once you’ve failed, analyze the problem and find out why. … The only time you don’t want to fail is the last time you try.”
One of Kettering’s most successful inventions for the Cash was the simplest: the spring-operated register, whose spring rewound every time the user closed the drawer. The difficulty lay in designing a spring that could withstand repeated slamming. Kettering did it, only to find that some company executives doubted any spring could be durable enough. His response, which has become famous, reflects his ability to win over the most determined opposition. Knowing that one of his doubters had a valuable watch collection, Kettering asked if the man happened to be carrying one of them. When he said yes, Kettering asked, “Does it keep good time?”
“Why, certainly,” the man replied. “I’ve had it for twenty years.”
“Let me see it for a moment,” said Kettering. “I want to find out what makes it go.” There was no further opposition.
IN 1908, WHILE STILL AT NCR, KET -tering became intrigued by a problem presented to him by one of the Cash executives, Edward A. Deeds, who was building an automobile from a kit (not uncommon in those days) in his Dayton back yard. Deeds asked Kettering if he could figure out a way to improve the car’s ignition, the system that ignites the fuel mixture in the cylinders. Kettering didn’t even know how to drive, but he realized the automotive field was burgeoning and decided to help Deeds in his spare time. Two kinds of ignition were being used in autos at this time: a magneto apparatus, which generated current through the use of permanent magnets (favored in European cars), and a cheaper dry cell system (favored in the United States), which used an induction coil to send out a shower of sparks. Kettering set out to find an alternative to the induction coil, which was unreliable and had to be replaced every few hundred miles. He pursued the project with such enthusiasm that he soon attracted several NCR coworkers, who joined him in moonlighting on the project. Working in Deeds’s barn, they came to call themselves the Barn Gang. With their help Kettering, after intense study, settled on using a magnetic relay or holding coil, like the one he had developed for the cash register, to release a single, intense spark instead of the wasteful shower. After many months spent refining the device, the group in 1909 convinced Henry M. Leland, head of the Cadillac Motor Car Company, in Detroit, that it would work in his cars. Leland ordered 8,000 units.
Taken aback by this success, the Barn Gang hastily formed the Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company—Delco. Kettering and his helpers resigned from NCR (Deeds did so some time later) and contracted out the manufacturing of the units to an electrical supply company in Chicago.
Soon another challenge came Kettering’s way. Cars at this time had to be started by hand cranking, a practice both arduous and dangerous. To date no one had perfected a workable selfstarter, though hucksters peddled dozens of them. Early in 1910 a good friend of Henry Leland had gone to the aid of a woman whose car had stalled in traffic on Detroit’s Belle Isle Bridge. The crank kicked back and broke the man’s jaw, and he died later in the hospital. A distraught Leland told Kettering that if he could produce an efficient self-starter, it would go in the next year’s Cadillacs.
Most existing self-starter designs envisioned attaching an electric motor to the engine’s flywheel, but Kettering soon discovered that any such device small enough to fit in a car produced far too little torque. After all, the average man had to crank like a demon for several seconds to start a car the usual way, and many could not do it at all. No conventional electric motor of reasonable size could work at that rate. As he had done with his cash register, Kettering realized that he did not need a motor to operate at such a high level continuously, but only for a short time. Once again the solution was one that could produce a short burst of great power. The motor could then be geared down to serve as a generator, not only keeping the car’s battery charged but helping operate the ignition system and the headlights.
THE KEY TO THE DEVICE WAS A workable voltage regulator to prevent the starter-generator motor from overcharging the battery. The Barn Gang, which now numbered about a dozen men, worked hard. “Quit at five o’clock?” one of them recalled. “Boy, we didn’t know there was any five o’clock. All we knew was light and dark.” At length they adopted a carbon-block rheostat, with a controlling mechanism to adjust the battery’s output and a low-voltage cutout to disconnect the generator at driving speed. Then the whole arrangement had to be shrunk so that it would fit under the Cadillac’s hood. In mid-February 1911 Kettering sent Leland a Cadillac equipped with the device, and in June Leland approved its use in the 1912 model. It was essentially the starter of today.
One surprised witness to the invention’s effectiveness was Thomas J. Watson, who was then sales manager of NCR and would later become head of International Business Machines. One day when Kettering was at the Dayton railroad station, he noticed Watson getting off a train and offered him a lift home. The two went over to Kettering’s car and got in. Watson knew nothing about the starter, which had not yet been revealed to the public, and wondered why his absent-minded friend had neglected to crank the engine. Then to his amazement Kettering pressed a button and the car started with a roar.
The starter was such a success that Leland’s 1912 orders were too big to be contracted out to the small firms that predominated in the electrical industry. Delco moved into larger quarters and went into manufacturing. Before long the new company had 2,000 workers and was selling starters to several other automakers. Kettering had a hard time adjusting to being an entrepreneur. When his workers went out on strike, he sent them an ultimatum offering fair wages and “a kindly interest in your well being and progress” but threatening to fire anyone who did not come back on the company’s terms. The strike was soon settled. Over the next few years he expanded Delco’s line by producing a portable electric generator for lighting farmhouses. In the days before rural electrification, Kettering, the old farm boy, must have been particularly proud of his rugged, dependable generator. He gave the first one to his mother as a Christmas present in 1913 to replace her kerosene lamps, and when he put them on sale in 1916, he sold $2.5 million worth within a year.
KETTERING’S NEWFOUND SUCCESS did not curb his fondness for practical jokes. As an informal technical adviser to Leland, he was asked one day to check out a new V-8 engine that tended to start missing after a few miles. He found an air leak in the intake manifold caused by overheating, a problem easily fixed by adjusting the distributor contacts. As recounted by Stuart Leslie in his excellent biography of Kettering, the Boss took some GM engineers out on the road without telling them of his solution, and each time the car spluttered he got out and methodically tightened the wheel rim nuts. This took long enough to give the engine a chance to cool down, after which it ran fine. Kettering repeated his ruse two or three times before his passengers caught on.
In 1916 Delco and four other independent accessory makers were bought out by United Motors, a new firm organized by William C. Durant, who had previously founded, and then been ousted from, General Motors. Kettering and Deeds—who had by now come over from NCR—sold out to Durant for $2.5 million in cash plus ample shares of stock, and overnight they were both extremely wealthy. They continued to direct Delco, and with the coming of World War I Kettering pushed into new fields. Along with Deeds and Orville Wright he formed the Dayton Wright Airplane Company, which built training planes and developed an aerial torpedo (a small, pilotless plane armed with an explosive charge), which came along too late to be useful in the war. More important, Kettering began looking into the causes of engine knock, a search that would bear significant fruit later on.
An even greater shift in Kettering’s career occurred during 1919. Durant had reacquired control of General Motors but had foundered again because of speculative mistakes, and two new people had moved forward in the operation. One was Alfred P. Sloan, who had headed one of the constituent companies within United Motors, which was now loosely allied with GM. The other was the chairman of the board of the Du Pont Company, Pierre du Pont, who had helped rescue GM from Durant’s excesses by investing heavily in it. Du Pont had demanded that General Motors be put under sounder management, and the resulting realignment merged United Motors—and Delco —firmly into GM, with Sloan as executive vice president of the new automotive giant.
Sloan, an extraordinarily astute manager, began to refine the conglomerate. High on his agenda was the creation of a research effort serving the entire company, and with a record of innovation stretching back fifteen years Kettering was by far the best candidate to direct that effort. The Boss said he would—on three conditions that would have raised hackles in any less secure manager: “I told Mr. Sloan that I would take it [provided] that I would have no responsibility and no authority, and that I would never be held accountable for the money I spent.” He also resisted moving to Detroit; he wanted the new lab in Dayton. Demands so extreme would surely have disqualified anyone else, but Sloan knew his man and agreed to the lot. He never had cause to regret his decision, and Kettering held the post for more than twenty-five years. It put one of the nation’s keenest engineering minds in the forefront of one of its most powerful corporations.
IN NO TIME AT ALL KETTERING DEM -onstrated both his relentless drive and his “intelligent ignorance.” Painting cars in those days was a maddeningly slow hand process that could take as long as thirty-seven days. Kettering found this intolerable, but when he met with paint manufacturers to see if they could devise a faster-drying finish, he was told that at best the time could be cut to a month. “An hour would be more like it,” he told them. The startled paint men filed out and proceeded to do nothing.
One day in New York Kettering saw in a store window a wooden tray with a lacquer he did not recognize. He purchased the tray, located its manufacturer, bought a few cans of the lacquer, and asked Du Pont to analyze it. Out of this inquiry came a new kind of pyroxylin lacquer that would dry in minutes. Still, the paint men were skeptical. Kettering took one of them to lunch, then accompanied him to the parking lot. The man couldn’t find his car. “Isn’t that yours?” asked his host, pointing.
“It looks like mine, but my car isn’t that color.”
“It is now,” Kettering said.
With competent administrators running the business side of the General Motors Research Corporation, as it was called, Kettering was free to do what he did best: think up new projects, cajole the staff, and endlessly experiment and tinker. He spent little time in his office, preferring to wander around the plant and ask questions. Staffers would suddenly be aware of his tall, gaunt frame in the doorway, a smile on his face, asking if he could come in. Then he would sit down at the bench and launch into a series of inquiries that often led them to new ways of thinking.
ONE EARLY KETTERING EXPLO ration for General Motors ended in failure. It was an attempt to produce an air-cooled engine using cylinders girded with sheet copper, gathered in folds like ribbon candy, to carry the heat away. Kettering devoted many months to the idea, foreseeing another automotive revolution, one that would eliminate radiators, water lines, and antifreeze. “If we can ever get the right receptive attitude into the minds of the General Motors people, so that they will really find out what the air-cooled motor means to the future of our industry,” he wrote to a friend, “we will not spend time and money laying out garden variety motors of the ordinary type.” By 1923 he had produced a workable model.
Several hundred of the vehicles were manufactured, but they sold poorly and were riddled with defects. Sloan abruptly canceled the project. Not only had the sales timing been unfortunate—Americans were generally prosperous and preferred a more comfortable water-cooled car—but Kettering had produced the prototype without explaining it to the engineering staffs of the company’s divisions, who in effect sabotaged the effort by skimping on quality control. Kettering was furious at the cancellation and threatened to resign (Sloan gently dissuaded him), but the lessons were clear. Not only was close cooperation between the research lab and the divisions mandatory, but constant attention in any such project had to be paid to such common human traits as pride and jealousy. The Boss did not make the same mistake again.
He soon had a triumph to restore his morale. Ever since the Delco days he had wondered what caused engines to knock, a malfunction that wasted power and could even crack pistons. Unless this knock was eliminated or at least minimized, it was doubtful that engines could be built with increased compression ratios, the key to greater power. Many engineers thought the fault lay in design, but Kettering became convinced early on that fuel was to blame. At Delco he had put a staffer named Thomas Midgley on the project, a surprising assignment since Midgley was a mechanical engineer, not a chemist. That was precisely what Kettering wanted—someone without preconceptions. Any chemist, he told Midgley, would “come in with a pack on his back; we’re going to make a very steep climb here and it may be that that very pack is going to keep us from getting up. Let’s you and I go up and survey the road without any packs on our back and then we’ll get some chemists.”
Midgley devised test apparatus that allowed him to observe the combustion process, including high-speed photographic equipment and a cylinder with a quartz window. When World War I interrupted the effort, he worked on directional controls for Kettering’s torpedo plane and developed a synthetic high-octane aviation fuel. After the war Midgley joined Kettering at General Motors and renewed the search for an antiknock compound.
At Delco Midgley had learned that more volatile fuels were less likely to knock. He knew that some plants put out red leaves in the springtime to absorb sunlight and wondered whether tinting a fuel red might help it vaporize. At General Motors he ran a trial using iodine, a familiar gasoline-soluble dye, and sure enough it turned out to eliminate knock, though not because of its color, because other red dyes didn’t work. However, iodine was too expensive to use as an additive. Midgley and his staff tried tens of thousands of compounds in search of the right combination of effectiveness and economy.
Aniline seemed promising, but it was too expensive and corrosive. It also smelled terrible, as did tellurium and selenium compounds, which even in minute amounts left workers reeking of garlic. Other substances were too volatile. When this random search proved ineffective, Midgley decided to approach the problem analytically. He eventually decided that tetraethyl lead, an organometallic compound that Kettering had seen mentioned in a technical publication, would do the trick. Tests in late 1921 showed that it was fifty times as effective as aniline.
One problem remained: Lead tended to accumulate on spark plugs and exhaust valves. Ethylene dibromide prevented this, and to make it cheap enough, Midgley came up with a way to extract bromine from seawater, where it exists to the extent of one pound in every ten tons. In cooperation with Dow Chemical, Du Pont, and Standard Oil of New Jersey, Midgley’s laboratory procedures were adapted to supply an entire motoring nation, and Ethyl gasoline went on sale in February 1923.
NOT LONG AFTER, AN OUTCRY arose over the possibility that tetraethyl lead could cause lead poisoning. Two workers at Dayton had died, and dozens had gotten sick; and an accident at a New Jersey plant had killed ten men and severely poisoned fifty more. Sales were suspended until the hubbub died down. Industrial practices were made safer, and health agencies assured the public that leaded gasoline posed no danger. Concerns would not surface again until the 1960s, after Kettering’s death, and in the meantime the discovery permitted the development of much more powerful cars, as well as high-performance airplanes. Today’s cars use redesigned engines and synthetic hydrocarbons to eliminate knocking.
Many other improvements came from Kettering’s laboratories or were developed at his instigation: four-wheel brakes, balloon tires, safety glass. The need to coordinate such innovations made the department’s continued location in Dayton unwise, and in 1924 the entire operation moved to Detroit. The new developments were one aspect of a two-part sales philosophy that Sloan had introduced with Kettering’s enthusiastic concurrence. First, said Sloan, General Motors should offer a car for every purse and purpose, so that as a customer moved up the economic scale, he could move on to a more refined—and more expensive—GM car. Second, improvements should be introduced regularly so that each year every GM car would be better than its predecessor. The customer, in short, should be kept permanently dissatisfied. Thus did planned obsolescence come into being.
When someone questioned the concept, Kettering asked him to imagine a car that is bought new and immediately put in a glass case and left for fifteen years. At the end of that time it is still as good as new, he said, but it has become worth much less. “We didn’t touch your car,” he said. “What we did was appreciate your mind. We simply elevated your mental idea of what an automobile should be.” Kettering insisted that the public would not buy a car that was not up-to-date. When Henry Ford said he would never put a self-starter on the Model T, the Boss is said to have replied, “Mr. Ford, that is something you yourself are not going to have anything to say about.” Ford held out until the mid-1920s but eventually gave in.
The research staff’s success enabled Kettering to move in new directions, beyond automobiles. One was refrigeration. Through most of the 1920s mechanical refrigeration was a cumbersome, inefficient process that generally required water-cooling equipment in the basement and a cabinet upstairs. Kettering had the notion that a refrigerator ought to be a box you simply plugged into an electrical outlet. He asked Midgley to look for a safe, effective refrigerant. The result was Freon, which revolutionized the cooling industry and made a household word out of GM’s Frigidaire trademark.
Midgley’s announcement of the gas at the 1930 meeting of the American Chemical Society was pure theater. After lighting a candle on the stage, he took a deep breath of Freon and slowly exhaled it to blow out the flame, demonstrating that the gas was nontoxic and noninflammable (unlike ammonia, sulfur dioxide, and methyl chloride, the major refrigerants of the time). Decades later Freon—like Midgley’s other great invention, tetraethyl lead —would be found hazardous to the environment, but there was no way of knowing that in 1930. Midgley’s Pandoric genius exemplified both the basis for Kettering’s faith in progress and the hidden dangers in that faith.
Kettering’s other new interest was the diesel engine. Existing diesels were mostly four-stroke affairs, and although they offered fuel economy and required no ignition, they were very heavy and very slow. Kettering believed a much lighter engine, perhaps a two-stroke one, would prove attractive to railroads as well as other industries. To help find the answer, in 1928 he commissioned a 105-foot diesel-powered yacht, which he christened Olive K after his wife. She loved entertaining guests aboard, but Kettering spent most of his time in the engine room. When the boat proved inadequate, he had a larger one built: Olive K II , on which guests could listen to phonograph records in their cabins through a centralized hookup devised by their host.
Gradually an engine emerged embodying Kettering’s ideas. Meanwhile the inventor had persuaded General Motors to purchase two Cleveland firms: the Winton Engine Company, which made marine diesels, and the Electro-Motive Company, an installer of locomotive engines. At length he had Winton build a lightweight twostroke diesel, which was exhibited at the Chicago world’s fair in 1933. One visitor to the exhibit, Ralph Budd, president of the Burlington Railroad, was so impressed that he ordered two of the engines. In 1934 the Zephyr , the world’s first streamliner, set a record by racing more than a thousand miles from Denver to Chicago at an average speed of 78 mph, cutting 12 hours off the normal time. The fuel bill for the run was only $14.64. The feat put GM solidly in the diesel-locomotive business, and Kettering’s two-cycle engine later found wide use in submarines and small utility plants.
ALTHOUGH SUCH BREAKTHROUGHS had made Kettering the nation’s best-known engineer by the 1930s, he seemed in ways still to be the Ohio farm boy. The details of everyday living bored him. He paid little attention to what he was wearing. If he and his wife were on the way to the theater and he dropped by the laboratory to check on some project, he would not hesitate to get down on his back and slide under a car to take a close look, heedless of the oil dripping on his suit. Once on a train he found he had forgotten his ticket. When the conductor said an arrangement could be made, he said, “It isn’t that. Without that ticket I don’t know just where I’m supposed to go.” Though extremely well off (by the 1930s his salary was in six figures and he was a multimillionaire), he never seemed to have any cash in his wallet, and others often had to pick up the check. While he and his wife lived well, he had little personal regard for wealth. “I don’t believe,” he once said, “that a man’s assets are in money.”
He was fully aware, however, of what money could accomplish, and from the 1920s on he set aside large sums to fund medical and scientific research projects, generally through the Charles F. Kettering Foundation, which he set up in 1927. He gave Antioch College a science building and refused to let his name be put on it. Though the college’s left-leaning politics bothered him (he once threatened to stop giving unless “you people quit playing around with your pink teas”), he was impressed with its combination of work and study and remained a steadfast contributor. He also became fascinated by fever therapy and personally directed a number of inquiries into the nature of photosynthesis.
But the Great Depression jarred him. He had been sure that the business community would turn things around and was distressed when it did not. To talk up the need for greater industrial activity, he began writing articles for popular magazines and took to radio and the lecture circuit, finding especially enthusiastic response in conservative circles. He was now something of a celebrity—high schools and colleges were organizing Kettering Clubs—and was becoming a technological philosopher. What he had done for General Motors, he told his audiences, would work for the country. Industrial research could put the nation back on its feet.
Ideas continued to flow from him. In 1941 he sent Sloan a prescient memo urging him to be prepared for possible postwar technological advances, among them automatic transmissions (which were rare before the war), air conditioning for cars, low-cost aviation engines, more highly powered diesels, and lighter two-stroke automobile engines. Shortly after the war, at the age of seventy, he displayed a precedentsetting lightweight high-compression engine at a Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) meeting. A few years later Oldsmobile had a V-8 version of it on the market. On June 2, 1947, at that same SAE meeting, he announced his retirement from the company.
Two years before that, Alfred P. Sloan had asked Kettering to join him in donating a major cancer center to New York City’s Memorial Hospital. Sloan was to give $2 million for a building and another $2 million for research. All he wanted from Kettering was his name (for its symbolic resonance) and his advice, but the Boss enthusiastically began contributing on his own. He had already been committed to cancer research since the 1930s through his own foundation, and his sister Emma’s death in 1944 from a neck tumor heightened his concern. The Sloan-Kettering Institute was announced to the press in August 1945. The following year Olive Kettering died of pancreatic cancer. Kettering began contributing to cancer studies at Sloan-Kettering and other institutions in the amount of several hundred thousand dollars a year.
DESPITE HIS FORMAL RETIREMENT , Kettering kept on working, regularly visiting company laboratories and the new GM Technical Center (built at his urging), bounding up and down the stairs—elevators were too slow—to drop in on the young scientists and ask probing questions. “I’m a screwdriver and pliers man,” he would say, as he had all his life. The researchers would listen respectfully, but his suggestions were not as useful as they had once been. As Stuart Leslie observes, “The years had not so much diminished his genius as locked him in an outdated inventive style,” one that was based on low cost and mass production. Research was now more likely to be a high-tech, complex process tied in to academia as well as the government, and that had never been Kettering’s way. He had always been short-tempered, and now his irascibility was becoming pronounced. But he plunged ahead with his study of photosynthesis and in his last years even came up with two new inventive devices, a humidity-sensitive starter switch for air conditioners and a machine for detecting irregular heartbeats below the range of human hearing.
When he died in 1958, Kettering was widely lauded as the last of the pioneering automobile titans. The most perceptive comment, however, came from his old colleague Alfred Sloan. He called him a “master salesman,” acknowledging not only the Boss’s respect for the marketplace but his singular accomplishment of selling the idea of industrial research to everyman.
