grab a beer or two.........

Technical Giants Once Walked our Land”

Dear Funk Flyers,

I may have told part of this story before, a long long time ago. But then again, I may have thought I told it. Anyway, it needs to be told again, simply because I am the only one that can tell it, because I was the only one there when Charles F. (Boss) Kettering, of General Motors told it to me. I carry it around with me in a memory that is fading fast, and I want to write it down, in case I forget, but more important so others can learn from the precious story(s) he told me
.
It was the first time I flew the lateral pipeline that stretched from Seymour, IN. to Chicago, IL. I would guess that part was a round trip distance of about 300 mi. It was a products line, probably a 36” diameter that allowed petroleum to be pumped from the big - 48 inch to the GATX terminal on Lake Michigan.

No one told me that to stay on the pipeline I had to fly along the edge of a missile site, at an altitude of 150 feet, where anti-aircraft weapons tracked my progress as I flew north.

No one told me that I had to fly around three sides of the very busy Midway Airport in Chicago, to reach the GATX terminal, which was 20 mi. farther east along Chicago's Sanitation Canal. Reaching GATX, I was thinking how did I get into so much trouble so fast. My job called for me to dead-head South again to pick up the little big 48 inch and patrol the pipeline on to Waynesburg, PA., where I would spend a short night and fly back down a 48” gas pipeline to below Jackson, Mississippi, then West across the
Mississippi River, into Louisiana where I could break off and head for home, which was Monroe, LA., where I kept my Funk.

Leaving the Chicago area, I realized that I fueled last in Harrisburg, IL, and was probably running on fumes. Got to pick up some fuel, but with no maps of this area, and headed for Ohio, I'd need to get lucky and find a nice airport that would take one of the credit cards I was carrying in exchange for full fuel. There up ahead there's a nice grass strip with a windsock, even a full size replica of a Dutch windmill at the gas pump. I pulled up to 800' and flew a polite and perfect left-hand pattern. Pipeline pilots got a bad rap for flying into airports at 150' chopping throttle and putting it on the wheels, turning off short to the pump. I was using my very best manners, flying right and acting like a real pilot. I pulled up to the pump, cut the engine, got out and began looking around for someone to help me fuel.

Someone from behind a short hedge, asked me; “What do you want? Are you a guest?” I told the fellow without a shirt ”No .... I'm a pipeline patrol pilot and I sure could use some gas. Can you sell me some gas?” “Are you a guest? Who sent you?” “If you are not a guest, I can't sell you anything” said the bare chested man. And abruptly he turned around and walked off to the next little hedge.

This guy was buck naked! I found out later that this was a private club, actually a nudist colony for pilots and their guests. I didn't know there were such things. Where have I been all this time?

I need to be a guest. Well, nothing to do but to take off again in the metalized Stinson with an unknown amount of fuel, on board.

About 12 minutes later, I came upon a very nice little airport, paved strip, nicely cared for, on a busy North/South highway, same as the runway. I was in luck I thought; until I lined up downwind for 18, and to my surprise, there was a car on the runway. It was traveling at a speed, much higher than my airplane. The shiny black 4-door sedan was going faster than the Stinson. It would run the length of the 5,000' runway, then turn around quickly and run fast back the other way. I've got to have fuel I was thinking. I went around the pattern, got down to my usual 150' altitude, flying beside the car,
And when the car turned at my end of the runway, I did a quick 180 into the runway and put it down on the wheels and turned off smartly at the first exit off the runway. Here it comes again whizzing by me headed full blast towards runway's end, only to turn around and continue the program.

I taxied cautiously towards the gas pump, a young man, fully dressed this time, came out to greet me, and asked if I needed gas? Trying to be polite, I asked “Yes, fill it up .... Who's the kid out on the runway?”

“Oh, that's no kid, it's Boss!”

“That's your boss?” I asked. “No that's Boss Kettering” he said with a smile. I was flabbergasted. “That's my boss but his real name is Boss Kettering. “You mean Charles F. Kettering ... Chief Engineering for General Motors, inventor of the self -starter, quick -dry enamel, Freon, the 671-series GM diesel, NMR, CAT scan, Sloane Kettering Institute, inventor of the first cruise missile?” I imagined that some kid was testing his grandmother’s new car, running on the runway, to see how fast it would go. “Oh, that's no kid”, he said. That's Boss, the very one” he said as he topped off the last of my three tanks in the Stinson.

I asked if Boss did this car testing often. Gasman told me he did it all the time, owned the airport, tested his airplanes also, and he would come in to the restaurant soon. I asked if he would introduce me to Mr. Kettering. He said he would and while he was helping Mr. Kettering with the door, I was behind them making signals to remind
Gas man to go ahead and introduce me... please, using hand signals!

And introduce me he did. We sat together on old fashioned spin-stools at the restaurant
counter. He ordered a giant hamburger and I did the same. I told him that I was a Mechanical Engineering student taking a sabbatical (actually thrown out, low grades as a senior) and would like to get his opinion on what best to major in when I returned to the University.

Better yet, I'll show you” he said, and we climbed into the black Chevrolet, cruised down the runway at over 160 mph and ran off the end, down into a shallow draw, parked at a neat little laboratory that I found out later was specially built at end of runway from only wood and aluminum, no iron or steel. About a dozen stretched Cadillac automobiles,
all shiny black, were parked in a fenced-in area beside the lab.

Mr. Kettering, I asked, “Why are these cars all Cadillac?” I asked. “Oh, the
damn fools “he said, “They say they have to be that brand, same size and mass, so they can easily zero out the magnetic interference for the Zero-Magnetic Laboratory.”

And he went on to show me what was going on inside, measuring “Zeeman effect”, electron spin-flip, the forerunner to the laser, all kinds of magnetic imaging, cat-scans, the beginning of modern sensing methods for science and medicine before Doctors got them.

As we talked back at the restaurant, we squirmed around on the swivel bar-stools in the
hamburger shop, so Kettering had the waitress order some Psychiatric couches, Boss thinking they would be more comfortable.

I asked about the development of GM's diesels, and he told me the story of how the GM-671 series diesel came about.

He took a light-weight diesel engine from a German Zeppelin, took it apart and perfected each element down to hundreds of parts, each engineering student designing their own piston, letting the engine choose the piston the engine liked the best in
testing. He used engineering students to compete in making the very best piston for best engine performance. Kettering called his technique of development; “Running Errands for Science.”

Mr. Kettering told me the story about how Quick-Dry enamel was developed. High volume production of automobiles was GM's major interest. They could produce no more cars than they could paint properly, and it took two days for paint to dry on a Chevrolet and 5-days on a Buick, Oldsmobile, Cadillac, to dry well enough to be shipped. One day he and his wife were strolling the streets of New York when he noticed the shopkeeper of a novelty shop painting individual figurines. He watched the artist paint a small gnome (elf) figure, blows on it to dry and sat it in the display
window as a finished product.

Mr. Kettering asked the shop keeper if he could see the one just painted and placed in
the window. The shop keeper told him he had many others, but Boss insisted on seeing that particular gnome. Once he had it in his hand, he touched it in disbelief, finding it was already dry to the touch. He asked the shopkeeper if he would mix him up several gallons of his special homemade enamel, only to find out that the shopkeeper mixed only a thimble full at a time. Boss commissioned the shop keeper to mix just as much as he could, pre-paid him for his efforts and told him to call him when finished
and he'd be back to pick it up. In those days, GM was thinking about building giant
ware houses, just to dry freshly painted cars. Anything that would speed the drying of car paint was important. GM figured they were going to need a paint drying facility the size of the state of Rhode Island, the way production was advancing. Something had to be done. GM had many failures trying to find a useful quick-dry paint for car manufacturing.

“Selling a new product to GM management was not an easy task, to get them to accept it” he told me. When he finally re-developed the shopkeeper's quick-dry enamel, no one wanted to try it out because of the many failures, paint wrinkling, flaking, peeling, fading, etc., that had gone on before.

Kettering took along with him some paint colors when he asked the Oldsmobile Division Manager to lunch with him one day. Before going into the restaurant, Kettering asked the manager which of the colors on the chart he liked best, and then drew a circle around the manager's choice. He left the circled color chart on the Oldsmobile's seat and went into the restaurant to eat.

Back from lunch, the manager could not find his car, thinking it must have been stolen, because it was not where he parked it. He was prepared to call the cops. Kettering asked the Division Manager if the freshly painted car in the same spot at the curb was his. And the manager discovered that it was his, now painted and ready to go in the new color, all while they were having lunch. Surprised and pleased, the manager agreed to try out the new quick-dry enamel in production and “The rest was history” Kettering told me.

To develop Freon, Kettering purchased a vacant house near the GM plant, hired a carpenter to seal up the doors, windows and had a paperhanger come in, paper all the walls, ceiling, and even the floor of the largest room with white wallpaper. Then he had a painter come in and stripe 3-dimensional coordinates on all walls, ceiling and floors, creating the world's largest PVT, Pressure, Volume, Temperature chart.

Chairs were brought into the room so groups of engineers, scientists and chemists from a number of different companies could sit in the middle of the room and listen to Boss Kettering tell them about the physical properties of a special gas that he needed to allow it to operate as a refrigerant, to air condition an automobile, make it comfortable both summer and winter. On one wall, he listed a temperature scale of the ambient. On another wall, he listed the pressure and volume expansion needed, and on another wall and ceiling, he defined the temperatures from expansion that he needed to make a car comfortable in summer and in winter.

Then he drew a small circle on each wall where he wanted the new refrigerant to operate. He did this so everyone in the room knew exactly what was required to air condition an automobile. And after several years of hard work by people from Carrier, DuPont, Trane, GM, and the refrigerator division of GM called Frigidaire, they came up with a solution that almost worked. Within a few more years of persistence, Engineering college students finally got it right. Today, we depend on his work for the climate control systems in our cars.

And then Kettering told me about what they did to improve auto mobile brakes, switching from drum brakes to disk brakes, like the ones developed and used on airplanes during WWII.

He told me how they developed the self-starter for an automobile and this was huge! “Now even women could now drive cars with self-starters” he said. He told me he got the idea when converting NCR's calculator and comptometer (while a partner in Delco-Remy) to an electric motor now used to start a car. Everyone said the electric motor could not start a car; it would get too hot and burn out.

He agreed with them but reminded everyone that if; “The engine started quickly and every time, the heat safely dissipated” he told me. I was enthralled to hear Mr. Kettering go through the solutions to each of his accomplishments, talking to me for two and a half days. He must have told me over a hundred stories.

The pipeline company was searching for me. The patrol company just knew I was dead. I did not want to miss the opportunity to talk face -to-face with one of the greatest Engineers of our time. “Damn the torpedoes!” I asked him to please have a group of students from the University of Ohio, Dayton interview him and record all of the stories that he told me. He said he would and we actually corresponded for a while until he passed away. He did send me some tapes of addresses that he gave to several Engineering Societies, to a group of medical professionals, but none of these were nearly as good as the stories that he told me at his airport, just South of Dayton.

And so it happens that I carry with me in my mind the last stories that Kettering ever told about his remarkable work... and I share it with you. In his opinion, he told me, “Chevrolet was the best automobile on earth, the very best value for Americans to drive.” At this time (1957), he was pushing development of the aluminum V-6 automotive engine, and his way of proving it was to install this experimental, light weight engine in an airplane, a Piper Apache with a 150-hp Lycoming remaining on the other wing.

He was good friends with Dr. Servel and the two of them worked together tirelessly to equip the Apache with a freon deicing system that used exhaust heat to boil the Freon that de-iced the wing and tail leading edges. Can you imagine; an 80-year old gentleman flying around in icing conditions with one experimental prototype car engine, destine for a passenger car, the other engine FAA approved, but the twin-engine airplane flying around with special hollow extruded leading-edge skin by his friends at Reynolds Aluminum, with exhaust heated hot Freon coursing through them?

I learned that the Apache was donated to him by none other than William (Bill) Piper, of Cub fame. Piper, Beech, Kettering, the Funk Brothers, Sloane of GM, Dr. Servel, and Reynolds were all the best of friends Boss told me. Oh by the way, Kettering told me I should become a Physicist like all the guys at the Zero-Magnetics Lab. He told me that Physicist had a lot more fun than Engineers. I found him to be right! He said it was the dawning of the new age of the Semiconductor Electronics Industry and that this would takeoff soon and I could grow with it just as he had with the auto industry.... and he was right, it did! I did! “And the Rest is history” as he used to say.

I have some ideas that I want to share with you next time, about what I'd like to do with a whole bunch of Funk airplanes in the way of a really good airshow, create a safety center where one could come down (haul down your Funk project) and do repair work on their Funks, swap ideas, make modifications and bring the wife and kids to let them have a fun at a flying summer camp, horses, boating, camping, sea-planes, maybe take some flying lessons ..... I'll tell you all about it next time.
This month, I've been a little too windy with my conversations with my best friend Charles F. (Boss) Kettering. Wasn't he a
...

[Message clipped] View entire message

That is just fantastic!

That was an excellent yarn! I'd like to read the rest of it...

Alan