Kettering, and “Keeping the Customer Dissatisfied”
Biographer
Stewart W. Leslie has said this about Kettering and his technological style: “He made corporate bureaucracy work for him.
Within the largest private organization of his time he fashioned a managerial
role that proved technological entrepreneurship could flourish, and one man
could still make a difference.”7 Kettering had remarkable personal
qualities that distinguished him as one of the leading industrial scientists of
his and any other era in American history. He was sharply inquisitive, and this
trait led to an intimate knowledge associated with the problem at hand, the result
of close observation and direct experience. Kettering was equally comfortable
in both theory and practice, and he usually focused his attention on a
commercial bottleneck where improvement seemed possible rather than striking
out into completely unexplored areas. Yet he had little use for high-powered
scientific theories and abstruse terminology that usually had little
applicability in an industrial setting. He once said that “Thermodynamics is a
big word for covering up our inability to understand temperature.”8
Born in Loudonville, Ohio,
Kettering attended The Ohio State University, majoring in electrical
engineering.9 Perhaps it was due to the strain of studies, but
whatever the cause he temporarily lost his eyesight, only to regain it after
working as a telephone line repairman. In 1903 he took a job at the National
Cash Register Company (NCR), working in Invention Department No. 4 and was
charged with the development of an electrical motor that would possess enough
torque to operate a mechanical cash register. Dissatisfied with boss John
Patterson, Kettering, along with Edward Deeds (then a vice-president at NCR),
Bill Chryst and others, began work on an integrated automotive electrical
system, a technology that would ultimately greatly improve the automobile as a
form of transportation.
In 1908, on
the eve of Kettering’s involvement in the development of an efficient
automobile ignition system, it was well recognized that ignition or providing
the spark to ignite the fuel was a weak link. As Stewart Leslie has recounted:
A proper ignition for such a variable,
high-speed engine had frustrated inventors for decades. Continental engineers,
led by Robert Bosch, had eventually worked out an acceptable magneto around the
turn of the century. Americans still preferred dry cell battery ignitions,
which were cheaper though less reliable. However, battery ignition had its own
shortcomings. To provide a spark of adequate intensity from a relatively small
bank of batteries, the dry cells were connected to an induction coil in such a
way that the primary circuit was repeatedly interrupted by a master vibrator
that created a shower of sparks, which then depleted the non-rechargeable
batteries after a few hundred miles of driving.10
Kettering
responded to this problem by drawing on his experience gained at NCR. He took a
magnetic relay that he had used for a cash register design, and used it to
serve as a holding coil that would release the ignition contact only at the
proper moment in the cycle and send one intense spark instead of a shower. He
subsequently sold this ignition coil design to Henry Leland at Cadillac, and
this success would not only form the basis of the Dayton Engineering
Laboratories Company (Delco) but also further work leading to an integrated
electrical system. That technology involved a self starter, generator, voltage
regulator and lighting units, which were also first sold to Cadillac before
being marketed to other companies.11 By early 1913, Delco occupied
three floors of a rented factory building in East Dayton, Ohio, employed 1,500
workers, and had sold a total of 35,000 starting, lighting, and ignition
systems. Despite the catastrophic Dayton Flood of 1913, Delco continued to
grow, and thus by the end of that year the firm tripled its annual output, to
more than 45,000 units. Profitable and innovative, it would be purchased by
Durant in 1916.
Kettering’s
successes at GM as head of research would far outweigh his failures. The two
main areas of research at the laboratory were centered on studying the
combustion process in engine cylinders and the nature of materials. In both
cases, definitive answers to a scientific understanding of these important
areas were not forthcoming. Yet, he once said, “You must learn how to fail
intelligently, for failing is one of the greatest arts in the world.” Indeed,
it is instructive to look at his most notable failure, the copper-cooled
engine. The story tells us much about the nature of engineering at GM, and how
it was organized during the period between World Wars I and II.
In 1919,
Kettering had become convinced that there was a great future for an air cooled,
as opposed to a water cooled, engine. Light and maintenance-free in terms of
freezing and adding coolant, the air-cooled engine had been developed in Europe
and America, the most notable successes being the early Franklin engine and the
designs of British automobile engineer Frederick W. Lanchester. Kettering and
his research staff, including mechanical engineer Thomas Midgley, focused on
the use of copper fins to dissipate heat emanating from cylinders. By 1920 a
team of engineers and scientists had developed a technique to fix the copper
fins to the exterior of cylinder walls. Pierre DuPont, at that time in charge
of GM and trained as an engineer, saw the possibilities of this design, and
encouraged Kettering to move forward on the project. What DuPont and other GM
executives recognized was that this light and economical engine could be
inexpensively manufactured in both 4- and 6- cylinder versions, and be used in
the low- priced Oakland and Chevrolet models. Especially with regard to the
Chevrolet, it was thought that the copper cooled engine would provide the edge
for Chevrolet to compete with the Ford Model T.
Despite the
enormous resources that GM dedicated to this project, however, the
copper–cooled-engine failed in the end. Kettering and his group could design
and make small quantities of engines that worked in Dayton, where GM research
laboratories were located. But in Detroit, manufacturing engineers could not or
would not make engines that consumers were satisfied with. These engines often
lacked power; pumped oil, threw fan belts, overheated, or just ran poorly. In
sum, the research engineers and manufacturing engineers were at odds, and until
GM in 1925 formed a technical committee to bring the two groups together,
ventures like the copper cooled engine were doomed to failure.
Success
would come to Kettering and Midgley related to tetra-ethyl lead, however.
Around 1920 there was a fear that the world was running out of oil, and
therefore leading automobile industry executives thought that engines had to be
designed to run more efficiently. One way to do this was to increase the
compression ratio of the engine, or the volume swept in the cylinder by the
piston, but increased compression ratios led to pre-detonation of the fuel-air
mixture, a phenomenon that was called knocking. Kettering initiated a search
for an additive to prevent knocking, and after many trials, discovered an
organo-metallic substance called tetra-ethyl lead, or TEL. There was one hitch
with this project, however. Lead compounds had been known since Roman times, to
be notoriously poisonous, but it was claimed that in the ratio of 1:1300 in
gasoline, the material was harmless. TEL was seen by industry leaders as a
“gift from God;” tests made by laboratories after 1925 demonstrated that TEL
was supposedly safe for mechanics, gas station attendants and consumers.12
Of course, as we know now, it was not. At low levels lead proved to be a
neuro-toxin, but it would remain until the 1960s before improved chemical
instrumentation demonstrated the extent of the public health dangers posed by
this substance. Beginning in the 1970s, TEL was phased out in the U.S., but
only after two generations were exposed to relatively high amounts of lead that
eventually entered the human body.
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