Charles F. Kettering was born at a time and a place that gave him many opportunities to invent and create. In fact, many famous industrialists would emerge right alongside him there in his home state of Ohio. At 19 years of age a public school teacher like his sister, Charles Kettering was known for his fascination with magnetism and electricity, and he loved the interest shown in these things by his students. He would eventually go on to create the famous Delco automotive electrical brand. But first, after graduating Ohio State University in 1904, the young electrical engineer went to work for a company in Dayton, Ohio called National Cash Register (NCR), where he procured for the company twenty-three patents and in 1906 developed the world’s first motorized cash register, which the company would subsequently produce for forty years. The experience of designing the cash register's small but powerful electric motor prepared him to later create the first commercially viable, mass-produced automobile electric starting motor. After starting his own company together with fellow electrical engineer and former NCR President Edward Deeds, their first successful product was a replacement for the then-common magneto ignition, in 1908. That invention we now call the Kettering ignition, and at that time the team incorporated as Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company (Delco). Soon after, the head of Cadillac commissioned Delco to produce the aforementioned electric starter, which other engineers at the time said couldn’t be done, and many thousands of Kettering’s 24-volt starters went into new Cadillacs in 1912.

Kettering sold Delco to General Motors for $2.5 million and would later become the president of a company that made buses, and more importantly was for twenty-seven years vice-president of General Motors Research. In that role he developed Freon, and probably most famously, tetra-ethyl lead, which from 1921 until its ban in the 1960s was how gasoline refiners made gas compatible with higher compression engines. Kettering also developed the world’s first aerial missle, he invented the baby incubator, was a pioneer in experimenting with solar-derived electrical power, and promoted the use of immersion heat and magnetism in medicine. He also worked on car safety glass and together with Dupont, created a faster-drying paint for automobiles. Kettering and his son Eugene later did a lot of development work in diesel locomotives.

Nearly a dozen schools are either named after Kettering or have structures bearing his name, and together with GM chairman Alfred Sloan, Charles established the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research. Charles and his son were extremely active in philanthropic endeavors, and the record shows that this continues to be a hallmark of the Kettering family up to the present. Substance abuse programs, cancer diagnosis, war veterans health—the legacy of this family has been its giving to society in significant ways. Charles Kettering never sold his General Motors stock and when he died in 1958 its worth was estimated at more than $165 million, at the time the most held by any GM stockholder. Kettering and his descendants have donated and endowed to medical and educational institutes millions and millions of dollars.

We vintage Honda enthusiasts owe a lot to Charles Kettering for the creation of integrated and reliable automotive electrical systems, and most of all for the electric starter and Kettering ignition. Kettering liked cars and wanted to improve their manufacture and function. He was not afraid to think outside the box, and when he heard of the death of a friend from an accident involving a car’s hand-crank starter, and thanks to his experience designing the cash register motor, he decided that an electric motor to be used to start an engine did not have to be rated for continuous use, but rather for short bursts of operation. Thus it could be made physically smaller than many at the time thought possible, and this together with his electrical knowledge and insistence on quality, led him to produce the first practical automobile electric starter. After seeing a demonstration, the founder of Cadillac believed in him and ordered a couple of train cars full. This was just one of Charles’ many successes. Similarly, at a time when motor vehicles had unreliable and and not very durable magneto ignition, Kettering’s simple and stone-reliable battery/coil/points ignition system, scribbled out on a scrap of paper (and still viewable in that form today in the Kettering archives) promised the auto driver of that day much less maintenance and worry. Kettering even proposed to have it fitted to the airplanes of the day, but was not successful in that. This ignition system is known today as the Kettering Ignition, and its name and more than a hundred years of extremely reliable use even to the present is a fitting tribute to the man.