Charles kettering inventions
- •
Charles Kettering
Charles Franklin Kettering invented dozens of important devices, but he is best known as the founder of Delco, the company who brought automobiles into the Age of Electricity.
Kettering was born on a farm outside Loudenville, Ohio in 1876. With the first money he ever earned, $14 for cutting wheat on a nearby farm, he bought a telephone, which he soon dismantled, analyzed, and rebuilt. After graduating from high school, he taught in a one-room schoolhouse near his home. He entered college twice, in 1896 and 1898, but both times, he had to return to teaching because constant studying was ruining his eyesight. Then, Kettering worked on a telephone line crew, which gave him both the practical training on which he would rely as an inventor and the determination to earn a college degree. Kettering stayed after beginning college for the third time at Ohio State University and earned his BS in Electrical Engineering in 1904.
Kettering’s first post-collegiate position was with National Cash Register (NCR) in Dayton, Ohio
- •
Charles F. Kettering, inventor of electric self‑starter, is born
Charles Franklin Kettering, the American engineer and longtime director of research for General Motors Corp. (GM), is born on August 29, 1876, in Loudonville, Ohio. Of the 140 patents Kettering obtained over the course of his lifetime, perhaps the most notable was his electric self-starter for the automobile, patented in 1915.
Early in his career, Kettering worked at the National Cash Register Company in Dayton, Ohio, where he helped develop the first cash register to be equipped with an electric motor that opened the register drawer. With Edward A. Deeds, he formed Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company (DELCO), a business dedicated to designing equipment for automobiles. Kettering’s key-operated electric self-starting ignition system, introduced on Cadillac vehicles in 1912 and patented three years later, made automobiles far easier and safer to operate than they had been previously, when the ignition process had been powered by iron hand cranks. By the 1920s, electric self-starters would come standard on nea
- •
Charles F. Kettering
Copyright ©mobthaw.pages.dev 2025