Charles F. Kettering is no longer a household name. Kettering (1876 - 1958) was one of five children in an Ohio farm family, the kind of farm and family where everyone worked, the kids walked to a one-room country school, and each got one new pair of leather shoes a year. Charles was naturally healthy, although bad eyes prevented him from finishing college until he was 28 years old.
Though he’s unknown now, it’s fair to claim that Kettering had as much influence on our modern lives and habits as any other individual of the twentieth century. For instance, he perfected the battery ignition system and the electric starter for automobiles, released on the 1912 Cadillacs. Then came electric lighting for cars and trucks. Any fan of General Motors cars and trucks knows the name Delco – founded by Charles F. Kettering.
Kettering conceived, built, and sold thousands of electrical generating systems for remote farms and homes. He developed CFCs (‘Freon’) as a practical refrigerant, then refrigerators (Frigidaire) and air conditioning for homes. He improved automobile power and mileage by adding tetraethyl lead to gasoline – ‘Ethyl’ gasoline. He brought Diesel engine manufacturing to America, greatly improved those engines, and helped develop what we call buses for public transportation. Then there was the Diesel railroad locomotive, another Kettering project.
The man worked in science and industry, chemistry and engineering and manufacturing, automobiles and airplanes, education, banking, and medicine, and made significant progress in every one of those fields. He was a great philanthropist; what he couldn’t do himself, he helped to finance with his own money. The famous Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York is just one of his many legacies.
Charles Kettering was obviously no dummy, nobody’s fool, no kind of a failure. Oh, we no longer use ‘leaded’ gasoline, and ‘Freon’ is not a popular word now, but Kettering stated repeatedly that all of his work was just one step in an ongoing process of discovery and improvement. Nearly everything he invented or developed a century ago has been improved or superseded now, but he took the first steps in all those cases.
I say all that to say this: After Kettering retired in 1947, he made some statements that remain significant. He imagined the Utopian Transportation Company, Limited, to provide free transportation for anyone who thinks the U.S.A. is a ‘lousy’ country and who wants to go somewhere better. He said the company would give anyone a free ticket to anywhere, but it was a Limited company – limited to one-way tickets. That’s a very modern idea, but it seems complainers would still rather stay here and gripe.
Then Kettering said, “We have a Constitution and we believe in constitutional government. We also believe in constitutional rights, but I don’t think anybody has any constitutional rights who is trying to use them to destroy the Constitution itself. I do not believe that anyone has the right to free speech who is trying, by the use of that free speech, to destroy free speech.
“I see many, many problems in front of our country. But, after we add up where we stand with the rest of the world, I think our problem of the future is to perfect what we have and not discard it in favor of some untried or theoretical systems that have to date nothing to show for their claims ... .”
No one yet has said it better than Kettering did in 1947.
Larry Cloud