Man with the Wrench

It is man's destiny to ponder on the riddle of existence and, as a byproduct of his wonderment, to create a new life on this earth.

So, in later life, said Charles Franklin Kettering, who grew up in wonderment on an Ohio farm. "Why," he asked, peering nearsightedly out of his mother's kitchen window, "can I see through a pane of glass?" "What," he asked, "is magnetism? I would like to know how a magnet reaches out and pulls a piece of metal to it." Charlie Kettering was not satisfied with merely asking the questions: all his life he probed for the answers with his pliers, his screw driver, his wrench--and his insatiably curious mind.

Charlie Kettering became an inventor, perhaps the most successful of his day. He changed a nation's way of life, partly because, like the nation in which he lived and of which he partook, he respected both the theoretical ("Why is grass green?" he asked--and one of his bosses, former General Motors President Charles Wilson, came to use the question as an example of woolly-headed, time-wasting pure science) and the practical ("Remember," said Kettering, "that you and I get no place in the world except as we serve the fellow who pays for our dinner").

Self-Starter. In 1910 a woman driving across Detroit's Belle Isle bridge had engine trouble. Byron Carter, maker of an auto called the Cartercar, happened by, stopped to help, and was cranking furiously away when the motor kicked. The backlashing crank broke his jaw; he later died of complications from the injury. Kettering, an engineering graduate from Ohio State University ('04), by then set up in his own Dayton Engineering Laboratories Co. (DELCO), heard of the accident, decided that he could do something to prevent others like it.

With a group of eager young inventors--the kind that seemed to flock about him all his life--he set to work in a barn hayloft, trying, testing, failing, then trying, testing and failing again. It was part of his system: "You cannot start to do a new thing and hit it right the first time." But within eight months, by disregarding all the rules of the day about electric motors and storage batteries, he had developed the self-starter. Cadillac bought it, and within a year car sales were doubled.

"Boss Ket." For Kettering, that invention eventually led to a place as head of the General Motors Research Corp., a vice president's title, a seat on the G.M. board and a fortune estimated at $33 million. For the next 48 years he kept probing, testing--often failing. But his successes included quick-drying paint, chrome metal, ethyl gasoline, a two-cycle diesel engine for locomotives--and more than 100 others.

Revered at G.M. as "Boss Ket," he lived up to the legend that grew about him, loved to drive a Chevrolet because it was "the best buy" of all the G.M. cars he could have had for the asking. He always left friends chuckling with his aphorisms: "I object to people running down the future," he liked to say. "I'm going to live all the rest of my life there." After his official retirement in 1947, much of his interest turned to the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research (his wife died of cancer in 1946) and to Ohio's Antioch College, which he had helped endow. Yet he remained a familiar and active figure around G.M. Charlie Kettering's wife had once told him that on his tombstone she would have engraved the words: "I don't know." In his attempts to find out, he worked a revolution by the time he died last week at 82.

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