Charles Kettering

By Kaveh Hosseini

Before Charles Kettering, starting a car was a dangerous chore. Drivers cranked the engine by hand, and the crank could kick back and break a wrist or a jaw — the wealthy Byron Carter died that way in 1908 after helping a stranded motorist, and his friend Henry Leland, founder of Cadillac, vowed no driver should ever risk it again. He gave the problem to Kettering.

Born August 29, 1876, on a farm near Loudonville, Ohio, Kettering had poor eyesight that nearly kept him out of engineering; he graduated from Ohio State in 1904 and joined the National Cash Register company, where his first invention — an electric motor for cash registers — showed his gift for making electricity do mechanical jobs. In 1909 he founded the Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company: Delco. His solution to the crank was brilliantly simple: a small electric motor that engaged the flywheel, spun the engine to starting speed, then disengaged — drawing on a battery that the engine recharged while running. The 1912 Cadillac was the first car with a self-starter, and within a decade the hand crank was extinct.

Kettering's electrical system — battery, starter, generator, ignition, lights — became the template every car still uses. As head of General Motors research from 1920, his lab delivered the high-compression engine, quick-drying Duco lacquer (which made colored cars possible), and, with Thomas Midgley, tetraethyl lead antiknock fuel and Freon refrigerants — triumphs of chemistry whose environmental costs only became clear decades later. He also developed the first practical automatic transmission, the Hydra-Matic, and funded medical research through the Sloan-Kettering Institute.

He held 186 patents and died November 24, 1958, in Dayton. The hand crank is a museum piece because Kettering understood that the automobile would only conquer the world when anyone — not just the strong and the brave — could start one.

Kettering's first triumph was at the cash register. At National Cash Register in Dayton, his electric motor for cash registers — replacing the hand crank clerks had wrestled — caught the eye of NCR's president, who made the half-blind young engineer head of the inventions department. The Delco story began with his friend Edward Deeds: the Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company, founded in a barn in 1909, first electrified ignition systems before tackling the starter. The 1908 death of Byron Carter — Leland's friend, killed by a crank kickback — gave the work its moral urgency, and the 1912 Cadillac's self-starter made Delco's fortune; United Motors bought the company in 1916, folding it into the future General Motors. At GM Research, Kettering's philosophy was "keep on keeping on": hire good people, give them hard problems, and never punish failure. The lab's output — from Duco lacquer to the Hydra-Matic — proved him right. In 1945 he and Alfred Sloan founded the Sloan-Kettering Institute for cancer research, extending the laboratory idea from machines to medicine.

Impact on civilization

The electric starter democratized the automobile. The hand crank had restricted driving to the young, the strong, and the mechanically confident; the self-starter opened the car to women, the elderly, and everyone else — roughly doubling the potential market overnight and accelerating the car's conquest of daily life. Kettering's integrated electrical system did more: it made the car a rolling power plant, enabling headlights for night driving, electric ignition, and eventually every electronic system in the modern vehicle. Beyond the car, his model of the industrial research laboratory — he ran GM Research for a quarter-century — helped define how twentieth-century corporations turned science into products. The starter motor is a small invention with an enormous shadow: it removed the last physical barrier between ordinary people and the machine age.

The automotive electrical system became the platform for the car's second century: Delco radios, electric wipers, power windows, and eventually the engine computers and sensors of the modern vehicle all ride on the battery-and-generator architecture Kettering standardized. His true product was not the starter but the electrified automobile itself.