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Professional Amateur the Biography of Charles Franklin Kettering
242 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 1972
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
October 9, 2015
My great-grandfather worked with the great Charles Kettering at National Cash Register in Dayton from 1904-09, when Kettering resigned to work at his own company.
Kettering began at NCR as a twenty-seven-year old, working there as an experiment engineer with the Inventions Department, where my great-grandfather worked into the thirties.
NCR hired Kettering to develop an electric drive to replace the hand crank on cash registers, which required two turns for each sale. Kettering and his group developed an electric motor that gave the momentary burst of power needed to open the drawer. Moving from a crank to a motor made the cash more secure.
Later, after developing the cash register motor, Kettering saw a man in 1905 who unsuccessfully tried to crank the engine of his car. Kettering realized that the new-fangled car, just like the cash register, needed an ignition that would give a short and vigorous burst of power. From there, he and his engineers invented the self-starter, which first appeared on the 1912 Cadillac.
A dozen men worked on this project. Known as "the barn gang," they worked on an upper floor of a barn. My great-grandfather was part of the gang. From a loose group working after hours, Kettering and others formed the Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company, now known as Delco.
Many stories in here about Kettering's many inventions. But, because of the family connection, the one about the self-starter intrigued me the most.
Interesting story. The book was written by one of Kettering's longtime friends. So, it reads as a less critical story than would one written by a biographer. Three and a half stars.
Kettering, the largest suburb of Dayton, took its name from this inventor, who lived there from 1914 to 1958. Also, Charles Kettering and Alfred Sloan donated money in the forties to create the Sloan Kettering Institute, what we know today as the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
…
Goodreads does not list it, but T A Boyd edited twenty of Kettering's speeches into a 1961 volume, Prophet of Progress, published by Dutton. This book was presented to libraries by the Charles F Kettering Foundation. So, apparently this was a corporate or commissioned book.
Prophet of Progress includes nineteen mostly impromptu speeches and composites as well as magazine interviews. "Kettering made liberal use of exaggeration and oversimplification," wrote Boyd in his introduction. And that means looking elsewhere for a more objective overview of Kettering and the period that my great-grandfather worked with him.
Kettering began at NCR as a twenty-seven-year old, working there as an experiment engineer with the Inventions Department, where my great-grandfather worked into the thirties.
NCR hired Kettering to develop an electric drive to replace the hand crank on cash registers, which required two turns for each sale. Kettering and his group developed an electric motor that gave the momentary burst of power needed to open the drawer. Moving from a crank to a motor made the cash more secure.
Later, after developing the cash register motor, Kettering saw a man in 1905 who unsuccessfully tried to crank the engine of his car. Kettering realized that the new-fangled car, just like the cash register, needed an ignition that would give a short and vigorous burst of power. From there, he and his engineers invented the self-starter, which first appeared on the 1912 Cadillac.
A dozen men worked on this project. Known as "the barn gang," they worked on an upper floor of a barn. My great-grandfather was part of the gang. From a loose group working after hours, Kettering and others formed the Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company, now known as Delco.
Many stories in here about Kettering's many inventions. But, because of the family connection, the one about the self-starter intrigued me the most.
Interesting story. The book was written by one of Kettering's longtime friends. So, it reads as a less critical story than would one written by a biographer. Three and a half stars.
Kettering, the largest suburb of Dayton, took its name from this inventor, who lived there from 1914 to 1958. Also, Charles Kettering and Alfred Sloan donated money in the forties to create the Sloan Kettering Institute, what we know today as the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
…
Goodreads does not list it, but T A Boyd edited twenty of Kettering's speeches into a 1961 volume, Prophet of Progress, published by Dutton. This book was presented to libraries by the Charles F Kettering Foundation. So, apparently this was a corporate or commissioned book.
Prophet of Progress includes nineteen mostly impromptu speeches and composites as well as magazine interviews. "Kettering made liberal use of exaggeration and oversimplification," wrote Boyd in his introduction. And that means looking elsewhere for a more objective overview of Kettering and the period that my great-grandfather worked with him.
January 13, 2013
Great book
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews