Charles Kettering
Charles Kettering
Charles Franklin Kettering sometimes known as Charles Fredrick Kettering was an American inventor, engineer, businessman, and the holder of 186 patents. He was a founder of Delco, and was head of research at General Motors from 1920 to 1947. Among his most widely used automotive developments were the electrical starting motor and leaded gasoline. In association with the DuPont Chemical Company, he
"You are always too late with a development if you are so slow that people demand it before you yourself recognize it. The research department should have foreseen what was necessary and had it ready to a point where people never knew they wanted it until it was made available to them."
"You know, you read about the future. You cant help that. I dont look upon the future. I am not a politician. I am not worried about the future at all. I dont like to run it down. I dont like to think of it being too dark because I expect to spend all the rest of my life there and I dont want to have a nasty end to it."
"The key to economic prosperity is the organized creation of dissatisfaction."
"We find that in research a certain amount of intelligent ignorance is essential to progress; for, if you know too much, you wont try the thing."
"The whole fun of living is trying to make something better."
"Logic is a way of going wrong systematically."
"The Wright brothers flew right through the smoke screen of impossibility."
"A problem thoroughly understood is always fairly simple. Found your opinions on facts, not prejudices. We know too many things that are not true."
"Why is the human skull as dense as it is? Nowadays we can send a message around the world in one-seventh of a second, but it takes years to drive an idea through a quarter-inch of human skull."
