Boss Kettering: Wizard of General Motors

Charles F. Kettering, inventor and organizer of industrial research, had one of the most significant and rewarding careers of any American engineer. As Stuart W. Leslie notes, Kettering bridged the single most important development in twentieth-century technology, the transition from independent invention to scientifically oriented and corporately harnessed research and development. More important than his inventions, many though they were, was his ability to sell research to an often skeptical business world.