A Brief History Of Gasoline: Charles Kettering, Prophet Of Profit

In our last installment, we saw that far from being the product of a brilliant and thoroughly scientific inquiry, as its makers would later claim, the experiments that resulted in the introduction of the lead additive to gasoline were more than a little haphazard, with many dead-ends along the way. Had things been slightly different, lead could and should have been one of those dead ends. But there were powerful forces at work that made it seem to its inventors and marketers the right idea at the right time. The new product would need a public face, as did the maturing General Motors itself, and the newly wealthy head of its research department, DELCO co-founder Charles Franklin Kettering, got the call.

“I object to people running down the future. I am going to live all the rest of my life there and I would like it to be a nice place, polished, bright, glistening, and glorious.”

—Charles Kettering.1

This is the tenth story in a series of stories on the history of gasoline. So far, Jalopnik’s tech coverage has been focused primarily on the emergence, or reemergence of the electric vehicle. One of the primary arguments levied against electric cars and electric charging infrastructure has been that bringing both into the mainstream would take significant investment from private and public actors, and that this has not generally been politically palatable in the United States. In this multi-part series, award-winning journalist Jamie Kitman will lay out how American corporate and government entities have been cooperating on a vastly more costly, complex and deadly energy project for well over a century: gasoline.

Here are our previous parts:

Part 8: A Brief History Of Gasoline: Searching For The Magic Bullet

Part 7: They Lied About The Science

Part 6: The Original Sin Of General Motors

Part 5: Better Things For Deader Living … Through Chemistry

Part 4: How Standard Oil Got Away With It

Part 3: How Standard Oil Built Its Toxic Monopoly

Part 2: They Trashed Pennsylvania First

Part 1: How Gasoline Got Into Our Lives

Prelude: A Century And A Half Of Lies

Less than a year after World War I drew to a close, GM’s newly empowered Finance Committee moved to cement its grip on Charles Kettering, acquiring his Dayton Metal Products lab in August 1919 along with his Domestic Engineering Company and the Dayton Wright Airplane Co., and simultaneously appointing him vice president of research at a renamed General Motors Research Department.2 By the following December, Kettering would be a member of GM’s board.3

Sloan would recall how Kettering, at his first meeting with the board in 1920, proposed to work in two areas.4 First and most dear to the entrepreneurial engineer’s heart was his plan for designing a practical air-cooled engine for automobiles, a much-scaled-down version of the Liberty airplane engine that so impressed him during World War 1. Dispensing with things like radiators, pumps, hoses and thermostats, air-cooling could save weight, cutting cost and complexity as compared to traditional water-cooled engines.

Meanwhile, with Durant run out of GM that same year, Pierre duPont had seen no choice but to become more engaged in the affairs of General Motors and the elder duPont, gravitating to the magnetic enthusiasm of GM’s top engineer, became a vocal Kettering booster. This led to his support for what had come to be called the copper-cooled engine, on account of the copper cooling fins brazed with molten solder to its iron cylinders’ exterior surface to assist air-cooling. Notably, aside from Kettering and duPont, few were convinced of this innovative powerplant’s practical merit. One problem — and it was a big one — lay in the manufacture. The brazing process was proving difficult to perfect at any price.

Forever confident that salvation for any technical problem lay just around the corner, Kettering was insistent that GM should proceed to launch a radical, new copper-cooled Chevrolet, to go up against the Ford Motor Company’s popular but aging Model T. Pierre, the duPont whose vote mattered most, agreed.

Kettering’s second proposal before the GM board, Sloan recalled, was to carry on his anti-knock research. Sloan wouldn’t admit it, but this, too, failed to spark enthusiasm. Recall Kettering was around this time proposing to inaugurate the sale to motorists of aniline, a gasoline additive that was poisonous, destroyed engines and smelled badly. It didn’t stop knock at higher engine revolutions; it actually promoted it. But, while none of GM or DuPont senior management was persuaded to put it into production, anxious not to disappoint, they humored their new partner.

General Motors and its DuPont masters had no illusions. They just wanted Kettering’s services and properties that badly. Total expenditure in the anti-knock area had been slight to date — $54, 439.99 — and a modest subsidy for further research was hardly onerous, given that aniline and other laughably faulty additives the lab might champion were easy enough to sit on, never formally rejected by GM and DuPont yet still not officially slated for production.5 And Tetra-ethyl lead, the Kettering lab’s latest and seemingly most prominent discovery, also wouldn’t be rushed into production.

Nor was the copper-cooled engine loved much, either. Carefully choosing his words for publication more than 40 years later, Alfred Sloan would recall the company was happy to gamble that the copper-cooled engine might bear fruit.6 Being cheaper, in theory, to produce, it might make cars more profitable to build.7 At least that was Kettering’s contention, and Pierre duPont subscribed to it. Behind the scenes, Sloan and Chevrolet’s chief engineer William Knudsen had never truly committed to the copper-cooled engine, fearing Kettering’s dream would be a production and service nightmare. Without Kettering’s knowledge, they made plans to run a phantom production line to produce a conventional Chevrolet, one that could be substituted in the event the copper-cooled “job” wasn’t ready for service. Which, as we shall see, it wasn’t.

Once again, Sloan and the duPont-installed GM management were prepared to go through the motions of giving Kettering his head, even if it meant occasionally leaving him in the dark. They’d seen something useful in him — not just his polished ability to take others’ ideas and make them his own, but a folksy, larger-than-life personality that was uniquely winning. With a powerful desire and an outsized ability to sell, he was the type of guy they needed for the road ahead.

Straightforward and disarmingly friendly, Kettering looked like a farmer and walked like a farmer, one co-worker offered in retrospect. He talked like one, too. He’d been born on a farm, after all, in Loudonville, Ohio, a small burgh midway between Columbus and Akron. But he was educated and had a quick mind. Working as a school teacher before studying for the ministry at his parent’s behest, he later dropped out to take up electrical engineering at Ohio State. Owing to persistent troubles with his eyes, Kettering took a leave from the university, supporting himself by working on the telegraph lines, before returning, eyesight somewhat improved, and being graduated at the age of 28.8 As a young school teacher with plans to become a minister, he’d come to the value of inspiring talk, little, practical demonstrations and a steady barrage of witticisms from the pulpit, as became his signatures, even before he became an executive. His stint working the lines added a leavening dose of light-hearted profanity to the package. These would be his stocks in trade as a prophet of progress.

PROGRESS’ BEST FRIEND

Having charmed his bosses, Kettering’s esteem among young GM engineers extended the cult of his personality throughout GM’s halls.

Arthur F. Underwood was a research associate, at GM’s Research Labs who joined the organization in the late 1920s, after the Dayton labs had been relocated to Detroit. He recalled knowing Kettering’s booming voice well in advance of their first formal meeting; during telephone calls, the Boss’ heated invective often rose above the din of the lab, carrying into the young researchers’ partitioned cubicles. “[W]e younger fellows said he didn’t need a telephone to talk to New York in those days.”9 Taking great care to dress up for his first meeting with Ket, Underwood was surprised to find a gangly, unpretentious man with spectacles. He “was well-known to all of us younger fellows as a millionaire,” he observed, but Kettering “didn’t look at all like the millionaire I expected.”10

Nonetheless, Ket always maintained elements of the millionaire lifestyle, owning his own airplanes, large estates and an enormous yacht. He drove Cadillacs almost exclusively and never appeared in public un-tailored.11 By 1917, he and some fellow millionaire engineering types were already well enough off to give the Dayton Engineers Club the thrill of its life, when they underwrote an elaborate new $300,000 headquarters downtown, about $6.5 million today.12

But, as Underwood, who would rise to department head at the lab, observed, “He certainly had the common touch.”

Ernest W. Seaholm, Cadillac’s chief engineer for many years, agreed, telling Boyd Kettering was “the most accessible man I knew” as well as “the outstanding personality I had the privilege of associating with.”13

Underscoring Kettering’s value to the once dysfunctional corporation’s internal cohesion and esprit de corps, Seaholm recalled how “The Boss” would be frequently pressed into service in the Twenties and Thirties at Cadillac dealer-distributor meetings. “He was one of the few men who could discuss technical subjects in an entertaining and understandable way…When he got through with a subject he had everybody stirred up and feeling that they knew something about it, whether they did or not.”14

Kettering “somehow, personalized GM” to its many agents and employees, Seaholm concluded.15 “It’s just hard to believe that one man could have been so widely accepted in the whole Corporation. It was a big corporation, with many divisions, a man of lesser calibre than he would have remained a ‘Delco man’ and nothing else. Before he got through, everybody looked to Ket. He was part of everybody and everybody was dwarfed in comparison as he went along the line. They were good men; however, he just stood out.”16

BEFORE THERE WAS MR. GOODWRENCH, THERE WAS BOSS KET

In his 1964 memoir Alfred P. Sloan hints, but never comes out and says so, that Kettering would be tapped to play a role for the corporation unrelated to inventing or scientific research or putting out the mundane technical fires that are part and parcel of a heavy manufacturing business building a costly consumer durable. Beyond hiring engineers and scientists to do the corporation’s bidding, Kettering would be the living and breathing embodiment of GM, its pitchman par excellence, not just to the American public, but also to itself.

Significantly, that was a role none of the other top executives could play. Pierre DuPont was an older and a secretive fellow, the French-inflected product of several generations of inbred wealth. Along with his cousins, he’d multiplied the family fortune exponentially, but that only made his experience more rarefied. He didn’t relish public speaking assignments, and being the controlling shareholder of the company, as well as its president, he was free to avoid them, much preferring to spend his golden years spearheading the design of the majestic gardens, replete with petroleum-powered, hydraulic fountains, he’d established at the family’s great Delaware estate, Longwood.

Sloan couldn’t pull off the job, either. “A man of almost cadaverous appearance, (6 ft., 130 lbs.)“ in Time magazine’s phrase, he was in contemporary photographs an eerily wooden persona. Stiff and formal as the starched collars he favored, hopelessly prim yet saddled with an incongruous Brooklyn accent, Sloan knew where his strengths did and didn’t lie, as did those around him. “There,” DuPont’s John Jakob Raskob said about him early on cited in a 1966 Time profile, “is a man who should be President of the United States,” but “never will, because he is not colorful enough.”

Kettering supplied to General Motors’ engine of progress its missing part: he was the only one colorful enough yet seemingly normal enough to become a star on the era’s newly expanded national stage. His tall, stooped presence, balding dome and simple specs would soon become recognizable to newspaper readers (and writers) around the country as the face of General Motors, a warm, funny, photogenic sort of country fellow with a bunch of smarts who would one day make radio listeners and newsreel watchers smile. “Boss” Kettering’s ready faculty for homilies, bromides and homespun sayings, his boundless enthusiasm for technology, delivered in a distinctive, high-pitched Ohioan drawl, made him an appealing public speaker, a self-described “salesman for progress,” and an increasingly familiar radio guest with the medium’s rise in the 1920s.

In the 1930s, Kettering would become a star attraction of GM’s own sponsored radio program, playing a sort of big business version of the hugely popular homespun commentator Will Rogers. His optimism, plain speaking and G-rated sense of humor (though one had no doubt he swore mightily in private) helped to demystify technology, and he always strove to be entertaining, even if consistent accuracy could not be guaranteed. New technologies were there to surprise and delight the buying public, and were to be embraced, not feared.

Success, Winston Churchill once observed, is moving from failure to failure with enthusiasm. By this measure, Kettering was more than successful, for he was never anything less than wildly enthusiastic. Tomorrow awaited and Kettering thought of himself as an unabashed cheerleader for that day and the awesome power of self-invention. “Remember,” the Boss exhorted GM’s export department in a 1920 speech, taking a more psychological and yet more joyous approach than the dour Sloan would ever have dreamed of, “what you think is what you are.”17

Failure did not scare Kettering much, which was useful because, in truth, his successes were few and overstated and his failures were many and invariably forgiven. For example, the first year’s work of his GM Research Lab had been largely devoted to developing a new product for GM’s Samson division, a tractor operated by reins, like a plow horse, with its driver meant to walk behind it. It was a fairly ridiculous idea, even then (why not have the farmer ride on the tractor?) and this GM property would be quietly closed when, despite the application of Kettering’s genius, its business failed to stop sinking.18

Still, the effect of Kettering’s perpetual public relations campaign — on both his and General Motors’ reputations — was striking, as was the great stability the company would know in his years with it.

Writing in 1930, Theo MacManus, a well-known automobile advertising copywriter who’d go on to found an agency that survives through to the present day, sought to recall the great men of the early days of the nascent automobile industry.19 In his book Men, Money and Motors, he warmed to Kettering as many did. “A high-pitched voice, a staggering knowledge of things and events, and a remarkable ability to explain processes in simple, graceful, graphic language. Kettering, today, is recognized as one of the foremost scientists in the world.”20

Another famous ad man who championed Kettering’s role as the corporation’s outward-face was the influential advertising man Bruce Barton. Inventor of the fictitious baking homemaker, Betty Crocker, and a lifelong friend and regular correspondent with Sloan, Barton’s name lived on with the well-known agency, BBDO, whose clients would include General Motors and the soon-to-be-formed Ethyl Gasoline Corporation. A darling of 1920s industrialists, Barton became more popularly known for his best-selling 1925 book, “The Man Nobody Knows,” which touted Jesus as the world’s first advertising genius. Advertising in 1920s America took off as if a rocket had been strapped to its back and Barton was one of the huckstering arts’ most vocal advocates, as well as a strong proponent of homely figures like Kettering, who could not only stir consumers to buy specific products, but make them trust a corporation generally. So-called institutional advertising, he’d maintain, also built trust within the company’s workforce.21 Surveying the executive roster at GM, he’d fairly conclude Kettering was the only man for the job.

THE FINE PRINT

Though he was widely understood to be a genius, it bears mentioning that the actual hard work of scholarship was not a key Kettering activity. Can-do talking and a steel-trap mind were virtues. When considering Kettering, his employee, biographer and unabashed hero worshipper Boyd would reveal the Boss’s enthusiasm was his greatest skill, noting that “except for a few technical papers, in which he has usually had the help of someone else, Kettering’s talks are not prepared in advance…

“Many of his talks have been taken down as he gave them. Although his audience had understood him perfectly, the record in cold type of what he had said often gave a most disappointing expression of it. Some of the sentences were not completed and many were in such bad form that much editing was needed before printing.”22

Fortunately for his cause, and he was always championing a cause related to his work, Kettering was a forceful personality. Even Midgley, a great talker and self-interested prognosticator in his own right, (one whom Kettering often said he regarded as a brother,) fell silent when the Boss came around. Ethyl General Manager Richard Scales recalled Kettering dominating all conversations. “It was mostly Ket that did the talking.”23

And T.A. Boyd was there, quietly soaking it all in, taking it all down.

After his fearless leader’s death, during the early 1960s, Boyd would interview many former Kettering associates and their wives as part of an oral history project at the Kettering Institute. Around the same time, he recorded his own reminiscences detailing the circumstances of the release of his first Kettering biography, Professional Amateur, in 1957 and the archival record he’d been keeping, almost fanatically, since the 1920s of Ket’s life, speeches, publications and utterances. Boyd would further conduct more than 200 tape-recorded interviews on his favorite subject.

In his own, recorded reminiscences, Boyd catalogs how widely Professional Amateur was distributed. “Besides the book itself, “ he recalls, a 5,000-word condensation was published with photographs in Look Magazine for April 2, 1957. About 275,000 reprints of these were distributed by GM’s Information Rack Service, run by the corporation’s public relations office. The book was also serialized in 24 parts, by the Dayton Daily News (those were the days,) while the Detroit News settled for a mere, 30,000-word extract. Sales Management, a business magazine reprinted passages, Boyd noted, Readers Digest quoted it frequently and a five-page except was included in the book Toward Better Reading Skill.24 Later, GM paid for the publisher to send copies to “a considerable number” of public libraries, while GM’s Educational Relations Section dispatched hundreds to university presidents. In 1959, after Kettering’s death, the Charles F. Kettering Foundation arranged to send the biography to 1,500 college libraries and five thousand high schools.25 This author came across a copy while in high school. So are reputations made and reinforced.

Professional Amateur was well received in its time. Boyd quotes appreciatively from a glowing review proffered by the repeat Pulitzer Prize winner, historian Allen Nevins, who gushed for the New York Herald Tribune in May 1957 “The author has filled his book with quotations illustrating the quaintly expressive wisdom, the originality, the insatiable curiosity, and the unfailing zest of the subject. It is a rare personality as well as a fertile inventive talent that is represented here. ‘You might as well try to hold a fist full of quicksilver,’ said a Detroit journalist of the task of depicting him. And that is probably true. But Mr. Boyd has notably succeeded.”26 27

Boyd’s biography of Kettering was authorized by its subject, who had the opportunity to read it long before its publication and offered no criticism. In fact, Boyd complained he got little feedback at all from Kettering.

When Boyd encountered initial resistance in securing a publisher for this first Kettering volume, he declined to take the advice of some that a professional writer be brought in to lend the project additional luster, on the grounds that a revised work might displease Kettering. Approval had been some time in coming, and arrived only after Boyd had, at Ket’s suggestion, trimmed his book’s length by half.28 He didn’t want to Kettering to go south on the enterprise.

Boyd recalled that his boss didn’t want Sloan interviewed for a book about him, so he wasn’t.29 On the other hand, Kettering’s fully authorized record of his own writings and speeches — more than 2000 in all, which laid out in detail a heroic personal narrative and the interpretation of facts and events most favorable to Kettering — was there, undiluted, for Boyd’s easy reference.

Thwarted in his attempts to find a publisher and undeterred by the likely limits on interest in additional Kettering volumes, so convinced was Boyd of the merit of Kettering studies that he wrote More Tales of Boss Ket: An Informal and Unpublished Sequel to the Book, ‘Professional Amateur, the Biography of Charles Franklin Kettering.’, and edited a collection of Kettering’s speeches, as well as several magazine articles.30 Close to his subject as he was, it remains an important record.

KETTERING’S BELIEF SYSTEM

Part of what made Kettering such a seismic figure of early 20th century industry was his lifelong advocacy of the era’s emerging credo that the first job of manufacturing research was to come up with the next new thing, to assist consumers to become dissatisfied with the goods they owned. “If everyone were satisfied,” he reasoned, “no one would buy the new thing because no one would want it.”31 That they should forever pine for new things was the core tenet of this businessman’s faith, much in tune with the times and the subject of many of his talks, lectures and writings. Industrial America’s production capacity caught up with demand for the first time in the 20th century and it had become necessary to increase that demand, by creating then stoking hitherto unknown desires and identifying new needs that only industry – with the help of Madison Avenue — could solve. The use of advertising was up sharply, as thousands of new products hit the market, many for maladies and ailments — such as halitosis and acidosis — people hadn’t even known they’d had. The very template for a society based on and dedicated to ever-increasing demand was being cut in this era, and Kettering — the man who would soon speak out for a new and improved kind of “good gas” — was a key spokesman for the movement.

Often cited as “the greatest salesman of science this country ever produced,” Kettering was judged “a master salesman,” by his friend and associate, Alfred P. Sloan.32 Optimism about technology and the future was his ticket into the American psyche, through its print media and its airwaves. To Kettering, this dictated wry, public disdain (and overt private hostility) towards those who might stand in the way. Late in life, he’d sum up the worldview he’d wound up with:

“I have been called one of the world’s greatest optimists … You can hardly walk around without falling over an opportunity.”33

“… But what I can’t understand is why so many people—and some scientists, too— allow themselves to be scared near to death by a lot of bugaboos. To hear these people talk, the world is coming to an end tomorrow—or for sure, the day after. Instead of enjoying the rich blessings of our modern industrial civilization, they spend their time worrying about jobs, security, the future of world peace, or whatever else may happen to wrinkle their brows.”34

“All in all, people of this sort have a vague and brooding uneasiness about the future. Take them seriously and you’d decide there’s nothing else to do except to hide our heads in the sand until an atom bomb comes along and puts us out of misery. ”35

Away from the microphone, however, Kettering was known also to be gruff, peevish and autocratic, and he had a tendency to talk too much. Eventually, Sloan would recall, they endeavored to keep Kettering, a board member, out of board meetings, lest he go on and on. In 1953 testimony, for instance, Sloan said Kettering failed to become a member of GM’s powerful Policy Committee because there “was concern on the part of members of the committee that they would be so carried away by all his fascinating talk about the wonders of tomorrow that they would not have time to attend to the necessary business of today.”36

In later years, Sloan would argue against giving Kettering an expanded role in the corporation. “Doing so would have been to water down one of the most valuable assets the corporation has. … He is so tremendously engrossed in his research endeavors and he is making such outstanding contributions through them that it would be a mistake to divert his attention to something else.” This remark came long after Kettering had completed his best work.

But GM didn’t need Kettering to do more. With his sardonic undertone and frank, down-home locution, Kettering’s public role as one-part courageous inventor, one-part comfortable curmudgeon was as vital a requirement as ever. To the latter part, he brought a cultivated readiness to pander to the worst streak of American know-nothingism

“I’m a pliers and screwdriver man, not a theory man,” Kettering liked to explain.37

If so, he was among the last of the tinkering breed, for few laboratory giants in the age of permanent chemical research that blossomed in the 1920s would share such an anti-scientific sentiment. On the other hand, few were as well known as Kettering and even fewer would be as wealthy. Today, it is a well-established marketing gambit – remember again Pepperidge Farm’s long-lived ersatz old-timer or Bartle & Jaymes, the mythical coots who famously fronted for sugary wine “coolers.” But Kettering was there first. If the job required him to oversimplify or to represent himself as a man of the past, he was prepared to do it.

“It doesn’t matter how many books you read or what you study. It’s the information you have at your fingers’ ends that counts; the practical working knowledge of a subject you have acquired and can use.”38

Or, “As Steinmetz, the electrical wizard, once remarked, ‘wise men will gather around the table and prove conclusively that a thing cannot be done; at the same time an untaught genius, too ignorant to know the thing can’t be done, will go ahead and do it.’” Sounds good, but for engineers playing with dangerous chemicals whose danger they didn’t fully appreciate, it was a worrisome attitude. In a similar vein, Kettering once said “If I want to stop a research program 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.”39 His only lightly veiled hostility to scholarship sounded amusing, too, and surely it contained an element of truth, but as a modus operandi for scientific research? Scary.

PROPHET OF PROGRESS

At the same time as he talked the language of the pre-scientific past, with his zeal for all things modern, Kettering became one of the first American businessmen to fly to meetings, often piloting his own airplane, while others took the train or drove. As a guiding principle, Kettering never strayed far from self-interest; thus, true to form, his role as an early outspoken advocate of the now universal (and environmentally debatable) practice of business-flying was entirely complimentary to his posts as a director of the Dayton-Wright Airplane concern, and later a board member at Curtiss-Wright.40 He wasn’t just for business flying, however. A revealing glimpse of his thinking came in an address to a 1920 assembly of GM Export Company employees: “We are not making any aeroplane now, but we are experimenting with them. Five years from now it is going to become a very important part of the business. You folks who live out of the city can fly back and forth to your work.”41

While legions of commuting private plane owners never quite materialized, Kettering’s advocacy reminds us that he was capable of overlooking environmental concerns, no matter how obvious. Brought to his attention on occasion, they’d provoke as often as not his discomfort and ire. Like many contemporaries, he gauged the worth of a new product solely by its sale-ability. This whole business of selling is what excited him most, he’d admitted when he recalled preferring the company of salesmen at NCR. As a young engineer, he’d even taken a nighttime sales course at the Cash. Once the thing was sold, however, he was less interested in what happened next. Follow through was not his strong suit as an engineer.

He loved making money, and science was there to help. “… A bank account in the black is the popular applause of a scientific accomplishment,” was one preferred nostrum and reflected a bent of mind — getting rich was a central part of the accomplishment or it was no accomplishment, at all — that a joke he liked to tell also illustrated. The story begins when Kettering tells the room he likes to fly and one day had a really good idea in the cockpit.

“While up there I got to indulging in day dreams and I organized a perfectly wonderful company that that was going to make me rich beyond the dreams of avarice. The plan was to carry water up there where it would freeze to ice, then drop it back to earth. That ice company was to have a monopoly on the ice business; but along came Prohibition and spoiled it all.”

A KETTERING LESS KNOWN

In spite of it all, GM’s designated technical visionary harbored weightier thoughts than selling, ideas we would call green today. Perhaps it’s fair to say such environmentally aware thoughts co-existed with thoughts of green dollars.

Kettering would, unexpectedly enough, be an advocate of harnessing the power of the sun, building labs and underwriting from his own personal fortune studies in solar energy, chlorophyll and photosynthesis at Antioch University. Known as a hotbed of radicalism, it was an unlikely recipient of largesse for a determined Republican like Kettering, who was, along with many liberal educators, an advocate of cooperative education. 42 43

As early as 1916, Kettering could be found relating his dreams of a solar-powered future, telling an assembly of the Society of Automotive Engineers aboard a Great Lakes steamer, the ill-fated S.S. Noronic,44 that petroleum was to man as the meat of a bean was to a bean plant — “just enough to get that plant out of the ground—to get it up into the sunshine, where it can begin to look after itself.

“I believe, too, that our supplies of petroleum and the like have been put into the earth largely to help the human family get its nose out of the ground, to get it up into the sunshine, where it can take care of itself… There is only one source of energy in the world and that is the sun … [O]ur fuel problem is simply the bank account which the sun has stored up for us to use until we understand how to couple up direct.” Eerily in step with the environmentalists who’d follow him by seventy-five years and more, he also went on later in the same remarks to exclaim, “Hydrogen is really the best fuel known to the world.”45 Clearly, Kettering was no stranger to superlatives, going on to say “The internal combustion engine is the greatest contribution to the mechanical, economical and electrical arts … a wonderful piece of apparatus …”46 But he seemed to recognize earlier than most the longer-term problem engineers faced trying to wean engines from fossil fuels. It’s a problem they continue to confront.

To be clear Kettering was animated by notions of sustainability and the engineer’s love for efficiency as guiding principle, not any dream of sparing the world automobile pollution and its ravages, only beginning to be understood at the time but surely recognized. For Kettering was an early advocate of wasteful annual model changes and the related and environmentally destructive practice of planned obsolescence.47 But he believed the world’s oil wells would one day run dry. To forestall this, he advocated at various times in his career smaller cars, alternative fuels and more economical engines.48 He was a strong proponent of GM’s effort to develop diesel engines (which use less petroleum than ordinary internal combustion engines by compressing the fuel more intensely, though we now know more about their devastating health hazard.) With his son, Eugene, who joined GM early in his career, he is credited with hastening the widespread adoption of diesel for railroad locomotives, helping to kill steam locomotives as well as electric trains, in the process. 48

Many have fairly questioned the environmental value of the diesel when compared to the electric trains it displaced.49 The diesel’s economic benefits versus electric trains were greatly overstated, by both Ketterings and other GM beneficiaries, much as they’d overstate the case for diesel buses over electric trolleys and, in truth, the value of most of their discoveries.49

But that was only one of his successful techniques.

A few years after Ketttering’s death, Earl Bartholomew, Ethyl’s technical head of staff shared a few key lessons he’d learned from the Boss. “…I have learned two things. One…has to simplify anything of a technical nature which he hopes to sell, sometimes even to people who have a fairly substantial technical background. The other is that one has to overemphasize what he hopes to sell in order to get the attention of the people he wants to sell.”50

When he wasn’t selling outside the corporation, Kettering was the corporation’s interdepartmental cheerleader in chief. Listen to him ginning the members of GM’s export staff up in a speech in 1920: ““I know of no business in the world that is so fascinating as is the business in which we are engaged, or so constructive. We have still got to make great strides and great changes in the construction of aeroplanes. We are putting up in Dayton a wonderfully big research laboratory for handling the production problems of the corporation. We are going to get that sunshine to work for us. A great change is going to take place in the next four or five years in the design of motors, because of this fuel condition, but we are investigating and prospecting and we believe we have found the solution.”51

In the end, Kettering’s corporate masters were uninterested in the proto-green areas of his curiosity and enthusiasm. In fact, these issues — conservation of oil and the fear of its disappearance — have been big, relevant topics of discussion since the turn of the last century. But, as Kettering would quickly come to understand there was no easy money in curing those ills. And, as we shall see, circumstances would abruptly cause him to change his tune and focus in favor of discoveries that would be as remunerative as they would be unfriendly to the environment.

His more benign proposals as GM’s head of research — and there were a few, such as his idea of building smaller cars after WWII — never fared well with the duPont-Sloan axis, which he soon enough concluded, preferred ideas that made the corporation lots of money in the nearest term possible. Throughout his professional life, Kettering would be torn by the inherent tension in his profession during the 20th century — a war that pit reliability, efficiency and engineering elegance versus disposability and fast, easy money. In the end, history records, Kettering chose the money.

Endnotes

Boyd, T.A., Professional Amateur: The Biography of Charles Franklin Kettering, New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1957, pp. 4-5. Leslie, Stuart W., Boss Kettering: Wizard of General Motors, New York: Columbia University Press, 1983, p. 116.NOTE: Kettering would continue to own other firms, though often as not their business overlapped with his corporate masters. For instance, when the Flxible Company [the “e” was dropped to assist in copyrighting the name} set up in Ohio as a manufacturer of motorcycle sidecars and later professional vehicles (ambulances, hearses, limousines) and buses, Kettering bought in and was installed on the board. For many years following, Flxible relied on Buick chassis, made by GM, for its vehicles. Kettering, who is thought to have carried the company — which set up in his hometown, Loudonville — through some lean times during the Depression, would divest his interest in Flxible, after 31 years as a director, in response – shortly before his death — to the Justice Department’s 1956 antitrust suit. Mroz, Albert, “Flxible and Buick,” SAH Journal, Society of American Historians, Issue 235, July-August 2008, p. 7. Sloan, Alfred P., My Life with General Motors, (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1963) Leslie, Stuart, W., “Thomas Midgley and the Politics of Industrial Research,” The Business History Review, Vol. 54, No. 4, Business History and the History of Technology (Winter, 1980), pp. 480-503, 485.NOTE: Sloan spent years vetting his memoirs so as to not open the firm up to future criticism or antitrust litigation and so remains remarkably oblique on numerous subjects, among them tetra-ethyl lead. GM’s New York lawyers had succeeded in suppressing their release for more than a dozen years. According to his ghostwriter, who would sue GM and Fortune magazine for their release, the lawyers had “good business reasons, namely public relations, the avoidance of possible legislation leading to the dissolution of General Motors, and antitrust.” McDonald, John, A Ghost’s Memoir: The Making of Alfred P. Sloan’s My Years With General Motors, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002, p. 97.Alfred P. Sloan, My Life with General Motors, (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1963) p. 73. T.A. Boyd, Professional Amateur: The Biography of Charles Franklin Kettering, New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1957, p. viii. Underwood, Arthur F., The Kettering Archives Oral History Project, recorded interview, by T.A. Boyd, August 27, 1964. Transcript, The Kettering Collection at the Richard P. Scharchburg Archives at Kettering University, Flint, MI., p. 1. Seaholm, Ernest W., The Kettering Archives Oral History Project, recorded interview, by T.A. Boyd, July 5, 1962. Transcript, The Kettering Collection at the Richard P. Scharchburg Archives at Kettering University, Flint, MI., p. 5. Seaholm, Ernest W., The Kettering Archives Oral History Project, recorded interview, by T.A. Boyd, July 5, 1962. Transcript, The Kettering Collection at the Richard P. Scharchburg Archives at Kettering University, Flint, MI., p. 1. T.A. Boyd, Professional Amateur: The Biography of Charles Franklin Kettering, New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1957, p. 86. Seaholm, Ernest W., The Kettering Archives Oral History Project, recorded interview, by T.A. Boyd, July 5, 1962. Transcript, The Kettering Collection at the Richard P. Scharchburg Archives at Kettering University, Flint, MI., p. 5. Seaholm, Ernest W., The Kettering Archives Oral History Project, recorded interview, by T.A. Boyd, July 5, 1962. Transcript, The Kettering Collection at the Richard P. Scharchburg Archives at Kettering University, Flint, MI., p. 2.Ibid. Seaholm, Ernest W., The Kettering Archives Oral History Project, recorded interview, by T.A. Boyd, July 5, 1962. Transcript, The Kettering Collection at the Richard P. Scharchburg Archives at Kettering University, Flint, MI., p. 4. Kettering, C.F., speech, “Importance of the Gas Engine,” GM Export Company training school. 4/20/20. Kettering Archive, 4/10 Leslie, Stuart W., Boss Kettering: Wizard of General Motors, New York: Columbia University Press, 1983, p. 116.NOTE: Though MacManus died in 1940, the Theodore MacManus Advertising Agency lives on as the MacManus Group, the new company name for DMB&B and their recently acquired partner NW Ayer. MacManus, Theodore F. and Beasley, Norman, Men, Money, and Motors, New York: Harper & Bros., 1930, p. 125Marchand, Roland, The Inward Thrust of Institutional Advertising General Electric and General Motors in the 1920s, Source: W.J. Hausman (ed.) Business and Economic History: Papers Presented at the Thirty-fifth Annual Meeting of the Business History Conference, March 31-April 2, 1989, Boston, Mass. Williamsburg, VA College of William and Mary, Dept. of Economics Business History Conference, 1989, pp. 188-96. Boyd, T.A., Professional Amateur: The Biography of Charles Franklin Kettering, New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1957, p. 216-217. Scales, Richard K., The Kettering Archives Oral History Project, recorded interview, by T.A. Boyd, January 24, 1961. Transcript, The Kettering Collection at the Richard P. Scharchburg Archives at Kettering University, Flint, MI., pp. 7-8. Boyd, T.A., The Kettering Archives Oral History Project, T.A, Boyd, miscellaneous recollections, impressions and particulars, March 5, 1963. Transcript, The Kettering Collection at the Richard P. Scharchburg Archives at Kettering University, Flint, MI. p. 19. Boyd, T.A., The Kettering Archives Oral History Project, T.A, Boyd, miscellaneous recollections, impressions and particulars, March 5, 1963. Transcript, The Kettering Collection at the Richard P. Scharchburg Archives at Kettering University, Flint, MI. p. 20. Boyd, T.A., The Kettering Archives Oral History Project, T.A, Boyd, miscellaneous recollections, impressions and particulars, March 5, 1963. Transcript, The Kettering Collection at the Richard P. Scharchburg Archives at Kettering University, Flint, MI. p. 19.NOTE: A follow-up volume to Professional Amateur, “Prophet of Progress — Selections from the Speeches of Charles F. Kettering “ was distributed to more than 6000 libraries and colleges, free of charge. Boyd, T.A., The Kettering Archives Oral History Project, T.A, Boyd, miscellaneous recollections, impressions and particulars, March 5, 1963. Transcript, The Kettering Collection at the Richard P. Scharchburg Archives at Kettering University, Flint, MI. p.21. Boyd, T.A., The Kettering Archives Oral History Project, T.A, Boyd, Miscellaneous recollections, impressions and particulars, March 5, 1963. Transcript, The Kettering Collection at the Richard P. Scharchburg Archives at Kettering University, Flint, MI. p. 18.The Kettering Archives Oral History Project: T.A. Boyd.” March 5, 1963. Boyd, T.A., “Prophet of Progress: Selections from the Speeches of Charles F. Kettering,” New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1961, pp. 252. Kettering, C.F. ,“Keep the Consumer Dissatisfied,” Nation’s Business, January 1929, p. 79. Leslie, Stuart W., Boss Kettering: Wizard of General Motors, New York: Columbia University Press, 1983, p. 340. Kettering, C. “Formula for the Future” (as told to Christopher C. Vogel). No date.Ibid.Ibid.
T.A. Boyd, Professional Amateur: The Biography of Charles Franklin Kettering, New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1957, p. 141. Leslie, Stuart W., Boss Kettering: Wizard of General Motors, New York: Columbia University Press, 1983, p. 338.Kettering, C.F., speech, “Importance of the Gas Engine,” GM Export Company training school. 4/20/20. Kettering Archive, 4/10AGAINST EXCESSIVE SKEPTICISM, COLLECTED QUOTES NOTE: Kettering wasn’t the only auto man at GM to profit from air travel. In 1920s, Sloan assembled North American Aviation Corporation, including cores of what would become Eastern and Transworld Airlines, but would sell out (at a profit) in 1940s. Pelfrey, William, Billy, Alfred, and General Motors: The Story of Two Unique Men, A Legendary Company, and a Remarkable Time in American History, New York: AMAMCOM, 2006, p. 257-258.Kettering, C.F., speech, “Importance of the Gas Engine,” GM Export Company training school. 4/20/20. Kettering Archive, 4/10 Mott, Charles Stewart, The Kettering Archives Oral History Project, recorded interview, by T.A. Boyd, October 19, 1961. Transcript, The Kettering Collection at the Richard P. Scharchburg Archives at Kettering University, Flint, MI., p. 2. NOTE: Demonstrating his cranky side, in 1946 Kettering would write Antioch’s president Algo Henderson, whose liberal academy was soon to come under scrutiny by the House UnAmerican Affairs Committee, colorfully charging him with “harboring an undercurrent of communism in your organization which has a shaded green light from the executive office.” But he would continue to fund what we would today call “green” research at Antioch for almost 25 years. Shortly before his death, the rabid anti-communist Kettering told Boyd on a flight in Kettering’s personal plane, “The Blue Tail,” to the funeral of Ethyl’s Dr. Graham Edgar, that Antioch’s era of “degenerated liberalism” had passed. He gave the Olive T. Kettering Library, in his wife’s memory, to the college Boyd, T.A., The Kettering Archives Oral History Project, T.A, Boyd, Some further recollections of Charles F. Kettering, July 4, 1966. Transcript, The Kettering Collection at the Richard P. Scharchburg Archives at Kettering University, Flint, MI. p. 3.NOTE: The Noronic, launched in 1913, was destroyed in a horrible fire that broke out in a locked linen closet while docked in Toronto, killing more than 115 passengers. The firehoses didn’t work; arson was suspected. Kettering, C.F. “Science and the Future of the Automobile,” presented to the Society of Automobile Engineers, on board the S.S. Noronic, June 18, 1916, p. 18-20.Kettering, C.F., speech, “Importance of the Gas Engine,” GM Export Company training school. 4/20/20. Kettering Archive, 4/10 Seaholm, Ernest W., The Kettering Archives Oral History Project, recorded interview, by T.A. Boyd, July 5, 1962. Transcript, The Kettering Collection at the Richard P. Scharchburg Archives at Kettering University, Flint, MI., p. 2. NOTE: A plan to introduce such a car at the end of WWII was backed by Kettering and GM president Charles E. Wilson, but shot down by Sloan, who felt the corporation would be able to sell anything it could build with post-war demand and that smaller cars meant smaller profits. Kuhn, Arthur J. GM Passes Ford, 1918-1938: Designing the General Motors Performance Control System, (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986) p. 326-327. However, Charles Stewart Mott would remember a plan he and Kettering had for a market car that was consistently opposed by GM President Wilson. Mott, Charles Stewart, The Kettering Archives Oral History Project, recorded interview, by T.A. Boyd, October 19, 1961. Transcript, The Kettering Collection at the Richard P. Scharchburg Archives at Kettering University, Flint, MI., p. 6. NOTE: Diesel locomotives, the first of which was a 600 h.p. unit that powered the “Pioneer Zephyr” for the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad. In an interview about this research, he was asked if the development of this type of engine presented any unusual problems. His classic response was, “Let it suffice to say that I don’t recall having any trouble with the ‘dipstick.’”NOTE: “Invalid comparisons, faulty statistical methods, incomplete and biased data, and various forms of misinterpretations” were the stuff of GM’s diesel-boosting efforts, according to a paper presented to the Institution of Mechanical Engineers of London, on Nov. 30, 1960, entitled “Economic Results of Diesel Electric Motive Power on the Railways of the United States of America.”The paper by Harry Farnsworth Brown, a British engineer, “simply states that the all-embracing economics claimed for diesel motive power on the Class I railways of the United States, as a whole do not appear in the statistical record. The diesel has not ‘revolutionized’ American railway economics. In road service, diesel motive power has added to the financial burden of the railways…[E]conomic performance of diesels [was] on par with steam … [while] capital costs had just about cancelled the operating savings.” It turned out, electric locomotives lasted half again as long as diesels and were cheaper to maintain. Black, Edwin, Internal Combustion: How Corporations and Governments Addicted the World to Oil and Derailed the Alternatives, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2006 p 189-191, citing Northwest Rail Improvement Committee, “The Abandonment of Electric Operation by the Chicago, Milwauke, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad Company,” (typescript, Northwest Rail Improvement Committee, Everett, W, 1975, 4-5.) NOTE: The matter of diesel particulate emissions is, of course, the flip side of the industry’s ready willingness to add deadly compounds to gasoline — namely, its utter unwillingness to extract the worst naturally-occurring ingredients from petroleum, sulfur being a key source of diesel particulate emissions and an easily removed one, yet the subject of industry foot-dragging for more than a century.Bartholomew, Earl, The Kettering Archives Oral History Project, recorded interview by T.A. Boyd, Jan. 20, 1961. Schaarchburg Archive at Kettering Institute, Flint, MI., p. 12.
NOTE: As Kettering is speaking before the discovery of tetra-ethyl lead, one’s natural assumption is that he refers here to aniline, selenium or one of the other intensely unsatisfactory additives that he’d proposed productionizing, but the phrasing, getting “that sunshine to work for us” suggests he was thinking of ethanol, the only gasoline additive known to Kettering at the time that could be accused of using sunshine in its manufacture.