WHAT HAPPENED TO KETTERING afterward doesn’t really have much to do with the battery or the electrical system (from the first self starter on the 1912 Cadillac until the introduction of the alternator to replace the generator in the 1960s automobile ignition and self starting systems were simply improvements of Kettering’s basic idea) but it bears telling.
Kettering immediately went to work on solving what he thought was to be a simple problem. He wanted to do away with the water cooled engine block which required water pumps that broke down hoses that leaked radiators that clogged and all sorts of holes in the engine block which itself was rusted by the water.
There was a successful air cooled engine the Franklin (which Dr. Ferdinand Porsche who designed the air cooled Volkswagen engine frankly admitted was his inspiration) but Franklin was not going to permit GM to make an engine using their principles without payment of a stiff royalty.
Kettering wasn’t concerned with the Franklin engine’s patent; he was convinced that he could build a better engine using a cast iron cylinder and surrounding it with copper vanes 01* fins which would dissipate the heat.
The basic problem again was a law of physics. Cast iron and copper expand at different rates when heated. Kettering tried one method after another and as he worked he enlisted the enormous support of Pierre S. DuPont himself.
DuPont saw to it that Kettering got whatever funds he thought he needed to make whatever experiments he wanted to make.
The costs were obviously enormous. The cost for example of making a mold in which to cast an engine block doesn’t contribute much to the cost of an individual engine if you are going to make fifty thousand of them or five million of them. But Kettering wasn’t making that many blocks.
Sometimes it became apparent after casting a dozen or even two engine blocks that he was on the wrong track that this particular engine shape wasn’t going to work and that meant the mold was now useless.
There was no one in the organization above Kettering to challenge his expenses except Alfred P. Sloan himself. Sloan was then chairman of the board of General Motors and as powerful as he was as capable an executive he still owed his job to Pierre S. DuPont and he knew full well DuPont’s feelings about Kettering in general and the copper sheathed air cooled engine itself. Kettering kept ordering parts and supplies and if General Motors didn’t have the parts or couldn’t make them a Purchasing Order was issued to whoever had what was needed or could make it and the cost was of less interest than how soon it could be delivered.
By 1921 Kettering was able to report he was making progress. By 1922 he announced he thought he had the problem solved and when the 1923 Automobile Show opened there it was the first copper jacketed air cooled automobile engine which was going to push Chevrolet far ahead of its competition.
It wasn’t a prototype car a handmade version later to be adapted for manufacture on the assembly line. It was a product of an assembly line a small one to be sure but large enough to have turned out 729 cars each intended for distribution to a dealer to show the latest product of General Motors Engineering Excellence.
There was only one problem: The engine was no good. If it didn’t overheat it froze mechanically and if it didn’t overheat or stop suddenly it fell literally apart.
Sloan bit the bullet. Risking not only Kettering’s well known ire but that of Pierre S. DuPont himself he ordered the recall and scrapping of the 729 copper jacket engine cars. That represented a million dollar loss in itself but that million losses was only the loss that showed the actual cost of making the 729 cars whose engines wouldn’t run. It didn’t take into consideration at all what vast sums had been spent in development in experimenting in wages for Kettering and his staff nor any of the overhead costs over the years.
Then Sloan braced himself for the appearance of Charles Franklin Kettering. He didn’t have long to wait. Kettering appeared at his offices and totally un-awed by their majesty lit into Sloan. Here was his resignation. The deal he had made with General Motors had been that he was to be allowed to pursue whatever path of investigation he wanted to pursue with all expenses paid and no questions asked. If GM wanted to break the deal there were others in the automobile business waiting to take on Kettering on Kettering’s terms.
For once in his life Kettering was intellectually outwitted. Sloan said that General Motors intended to honor its bargain in letter and spirit. He said that the obvious problem before them was not the copper jacketed engine but General Motor’s inability to administer a program that would handle the idea from its inception to cars on the showroom floor. The missing element in other words was Kettering himself. If he would tell Sloan where he wanted to start a whole new division of General Motors when he wanted to start it and how much money it would cost Sloan would set the wheels in motion.
Whatever Kettering wanted it was not to be responsible for a bevy of corporate bureaucrat’s salesmen advertising men supervisors of assembly lines and the like. He told Sloan at the time he would let him know but it’s safe to assume that both men knew that when Kettering left Sloan’s office it was the last time either of them would ever discuss a copper jacketed engine or even an air cooled engine.
It wasn’t until 1959 that General Motors finally came out with a successful air cooled engine in the Corvair 1959 69. Kettering turned his inventive genius to other things.
That phrase isn’t quite accurate because it suggests that Kettering faced one problem at a time and that wasn’t the case. He had his fingers into a dozen problems at once and his mind was considering ten times that many problems.
He had for example been thinking about “knock” in automobile engines since 1916. To solve that problem Kettering had to first invent ultrahigh speed photography.
That came after he made himself something of an expert about the chemical and physical properties of gasoline.
First he learned what gasoline was one of the “fractions” of natural petroleum. In fact some gasoline occurs naturally coming out of the ground perfectly suited for use in an automobile. In other words man coined the term gasoline to describe that kind of petroleum which had certain characteristics which permitted it to burn very rapidly when ignited.
That was based on its molecular structure. When the “right” structure occurred there was gasoline. The next thing man did was learn to make gasoline by taking out of petroleum the “heavier fractions” and leaving what he wanted. (Actually men had started to “refine” petroleum to get kerosene not gasoline and for a while the federal government actually paid inspectors to work at refineries to make sure no unscrupulous refiner was passing gasoline off as kerosene to unsuspecting customers. Before the automobile market began to demand vast quantities of gasoline millions of gallons of it were burned to get rid of it.)
That fraction of petroleum called gasoline was a combination of various sized molecules something the scientists chemists and Kettering knew about but didn’t pay much attention to until “knocking” became a problem in automobile engines. Kettering had a more than usual interest in the problem when it became apparent that his coil charged spark system caused more knock than the dynamo system it replaced.
The obvious thing to do Kettering realized was to examine just what happened inside the cylinder when the gas air mixture was ignited by the spark plug. The first problem would be looking inside the cylinder. Cylinders are made of steel and steel is not transparent. Other materials which were transparent (glass for example) would shatter under the tremendous pressures generated by the exploding gas air mixture. Kettering experimented with various materials and after a good deal of effort and many failures finally devised a window into the cylinder. He took a thick piece of quartz polished it so that it was transparent and then fixed it into the cylinder wall in such a manner that it didn’t get blown out when the cylinder fired.
It was a major breakthrough in technology but it told Kettering and his number one associate Tom Midgely very little they didn’t already know: When ignited by an electrical spark a mixture of air and gasoline will burn very rapidly. (Another of Kettering’s eccentricities was that he refused to have subordinates or assistants. Anyone who worked with him from the boy who swept the floor to a top level scientist like Tom Midgely was referred to as an “associate.”)
Since the human eye wasn’t fast enough to see much of the explosion Kettering decided he needed photographs to stop the action. Even the fastest shutters which opened and closed in Kooo of a second weren’t fast enough. All they showed was an explosion. Kettering next wrapped a length of film around a tomato can and fixed the can in a machine which through a crank would spin it rapidly. Then he put the high speed shutter between the film and the quartz window in the cylinder wall. The shutter still opened for Mooo of a second but since the film moved that meant the light from the open shutter didn’t “rest” on the same piece of film for that long period but for a much shorter one perhaps as short as %oooo of a second.
When the film was developed (not, the first film it should be emphasized nor the fiftieth but eventually after perhaps two hundred failed attempts) it showed not one explosion but at least two.
It didn’t take Kettering long to figure that out. What was happening was that the spark from the spark plug was not igniting all the gas air mixture at once. It ignited the smaller molecules (lighter fractions) causing one explosion and then a tiny fraction of a second later the heavier fractions (larger molecules) were ignited by the first explosion.
But how to solve the problem was something else. Kettering started with a basic rule of physics well known to any high school freshman: Dark colored substances absorb heat better than light colored substances. He reasoned that if he could color the gasoline somehow the larger molecules would absorb enough heat to permit simultaneous ignition; in other words do away with the double explosion which was causing the knock.
One of the first dyes he tried was iodine. A couple of drops added to a gallon of gasoline stopped the knock immediately. There was another result however one that ruled iodine out as a long term solution: The iodine dissolved the rings the pistons and the cylinder walls.
But now that he had been able with one “additive” to stop knock Kettering realized that solving the problem once and for all would be simply a matter of finding an additive which had no or few side effects, after some experimentation he came up with one additive aniline which worked beautifully to suppress knock and didn’t harm the engine interior at all. The small problem here was that the exhaust smelled like an old goat. If the 30000000 plus motor vehicles then on the highways suddenly switched to an aniline added fuel the United States of America would begin to smell like the world’s largest goat yard.
What finally worked was tetraethyl lead about three grains per gallon. (There are 7000 grains in a pound.) It stopped the knocking its effect on the engine was minimal ( it dirtied the spark plugs a little ) and it didn’t smell badly as part of the exhaust. Before tetraethyl lead the highest compression possible in an auto engine was about 4.5:1, afterward it immediately jumped to 6:1 and it eventually rose to 11:1 and even higher.
The side effects of tetraethyl lead in pollution of the atmosphere weren’t even considered in those days although they have become known and controversial in our time. As this chapter was being written the head of the Federal Environment Protection Agency went on television to announce that he wasn’t sure how much ecological damage tetraethyl lead does. He was right in the middle between those who see it as a killer pure and simple and those who see it as no more harmful than salt.
It is now possible to make high octane rated gasoline without the addition of tetraethyl lead so the question may become academic in the future. What is significant is that for more than forty years efficient automobile engines owed their very existence to the genius of Charles Franklin Kettering.
It would require a book much larger than this one to detail all of Kettering’s contributions to the automobile and to science in general so we’ll leave him after giving him at-least part of the credit for the bright colors we now expect our automobiles to be painted with.
In the early days there was a saying that Henry Ford would sell you a Ford in any color you wanted provided you liked black. Many people really believed that Henry Ford thought that Fords should be no other color but that wasn’t the case. It was a question of economics based on the available painting technology.
It was possible to paint a car with black enamel (or dull gray enamel or a sort of pea soup green enamel) and then run the car through a drying oven for about two hours.
Heated by either gas fires or radiant heat lamps to 400 degrees Fahrenheit the oven would dry a car completely in two hours.
To get any other color it was necessary to use a varnish and to apply at least five coats of varnish letting the paint dry between coats. The owner of a canary yellow Packard Touring Sedan had paid for his color scheme. It wasn’t only a question of five times as much labor to get the paint on but of the cost involved in building and maintaining enormous dust free buildings in which to store cars while they were drying between coats of paint. Luxury cars like the Packard often had ten coats of paint which meant they had to be stored for at least two week soften longer in buildings large enough to house two or more weeks’ production of cars.
The problem was that enamel available only in black gray and pea soup green was the only paint which would flow through a paint sprayer in a consistency thick enough to cover the body in one coat. So far as Kettering was concerned this was an impossible situation but one for which a solution certainly could be found. He was totally unimpressed when informed that Henry Ford who agreed it was an impossible situation had spent millions of dollars in a vain attempt to find a solution.
Kettering made his own experiments trying to develop brightly colored enamels which could be applied to car bodies with as much ease as black. After about a Vear he reached a double conclusion. He couldn’t do it but that didn’t mean it couldn’t be done.
He had the ear of Pierre S. DuPont who openly regarded Kettering as a pure genius. If Kettering said that there was a solution and that to find the solution all that was required was the labor of a hundred or so chemists that was it. DuPont issued orders for DuPont chemists to have at the problem and to keep at it until they had found a solution. Kettering turned over to them what data he had developed in his own experiments and announced that he would appreciate being kept advised of how the DuPont chemists were coming along.
Later the DuPont chemists admitted they weren’t at all happy with the situation. They had been working on the problem themselves before Kettering put his two cents in and if anything they knew more reasons why it couldn’t be done than he did. As far as they were concerned it was a waste of time and money. What it boiled down to was that they had been ordered to achieve the impossible and they were going to be watched frequently by a man who not only believed the impossible to be possible but who had the ear of the big boss who was going to believe that their failure was because they weren’t trying.
But the boss of course whether or not lie’s right is always the boss and the DuPont laboratories went to work.
After a year or so they did make one breakthrough. Using a lacquer made of liquefied cotton they came up with a substance which could flow through a paint spray nozzle in a thick enough consistency to cover metal with one coat. There was only one problem with the liquefied cotton lacquer; it was transparent.
There was a mixed reaction to their discovery. Pierre S. DuPont was pleased with it because there was a large market for a transparent lacquer. Brass beds were common then and if a new and freshly polished brass bed were sprayed with the new transparent lacquer it would stay shiny for an indefinite period. DuPont it was obvious was about to sell vast quantities of their patented liquefied cotton transparent lacquer. That made Pierre S. DuPont reasonably happy. On the other hand after talking to his pal genius Kettering he wanted to know how come they couldn’t make the transparent lacquer opaque with pigments.
Maybe they weren’t trying hard enough. If Kettering said it could be done it obviously could be done. All they had to do was get to work.
DuPont’s chemists told him there were two problems.
The first was that while the liquefied cotton lacquer did indeed cover metal in one coat that coat was too thin for automotive use. It worked fine on a brass bed which sat in a bedroom out of the sun and rain but it wouldn’t work on a car which was exposed to the elements. The second problem was that when they tried to mix paint pigments with the liquefied cotton lacquer they beaded up and came out the paint spray nozzle like tiny BBs.
Pierre S. DuPont Frowned his famous frown and told them to keep working on it.
The chemists assigned to developing an automotive lacquer worked in the DuPont laboratories at Parlin New Jersey where other DuPont chemists were working on an improvement for motion picture film. Movies were by then an established facet of the American culture and they had a basic problem. The film then in use had the nasty habit of blowing up often by spontaneous combustion. If it didn’t blow up it degenerated with age so that when exhibitors opened a can of film they frequently found a pile of goo.
The film chemists weren’t having much more luck with developing a new film than the paint chemists were having developing a new paint. The one thing they had in common was the fraternity of the miserable; they were all friends. The film chemists were experimenting with a cellulose film. One day in 1920 just after the film people had mixed a batch of cellulose in a 55 gallon drum the electrical power to the laboratories went out. The power failure caused all sorts of problems with other experiments and processes in progress and the 55 gallon drum sat forgotten outside the labs for three days and nights until the lights went back on.
What happened then has not come to us in detail but we do know that the film chemists showed the paint chemists the forgotten barrel of cellulose. It probably went like this: “Hey Charley you want to see 55 gallons of cellulose jelly?”
“What happened?”
“Oh when the lights went out we had just set a drum of fresh cellulose outside. It’s been outside for three days chilled at night heated in the sun. Another 55 gallons and who knows how much money down the drain.”
One of the paint chemists went to look at the mess out of pure personal curiosity. The film chemist was wrong about the cellulose mixture turning into a jelly. The barrel now held 55 gallons of light brown syrup. It was useless for the film chemist’s purposes and he was perfectly willing to give it to the paint chemist.
“What are you going to do with it?” the film chemist probably asked.
“Well we’ve had everything else anybody’s been able to think of through that paint nozzle” the paint chemist probably said. “We might as well try this.” And of course it worked.
The hit of the 1924 Automobile Show was the 1924 Oldsmobile painted a light blue color with a one coat paint ( called “Duco” ) developed by the hard working never say die chemical geniuses of E. I. DuPont de Nemours & Company Better Things for Better Living Through Chemistry.
Charles Franklin Kettering and Pierre S. DuPont were as proud as if they themselves had left the drum of cellulose outside and forgotten about it.