Charles Kettering
Charles Kettering
Charles Franklin Ketteringwas 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 was also responsible for the invention of Freon refrigerant for refrigeration and air conditioning systems. At DuPont he also was responsible for the development of...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEntrepreneur
Date of Birth29 August 1876
CityLoudonville, OH
CountryUnited States of America
The simplest way to assure sales is to keep changing the product the market for new things is indefinitely elastic. One of the fundamental purposes of advertising, styling, and research is to foster a healthy dissatisfaction.
Research is an organized method for keeping you reasonably dissatisfied with what you have.
A research problem is not solved by apparatus; it is solved in a man's head.
Bankers regard research as most dangerous a thing that makes banking hazardous due to the rapid changes it brings about in industry.
I often say that research is a way of finding out what you are going to do when you can't keep on doing what you are doing now.
If I want to stop a research program I can always do it by getting a few experts to sit in on the subject, because they know right away that it was a fool thing to try in the first place.
Research means that you don't know, but are willing to find out.
An inventor is simply a person who doesn't take his education too seriously. You see, from the time a person is six years old until he graduates form college he has to take three or four examinations a year. If he flunks once, he is out. But an inventor is almost always failing. He tries and fails maybe a thousand times. It he succeeds once then he's in. These two things are diametrically opposite. We often say that the biggest job we have is to teach a newly hired employee how to fail intelligently. We have to train him to experiment over and over and to keep on trying and failing until he learns what will work.
We should all be concerned about the future because we will have to live the rest of our lives there.
The only difference between intelligence and education is this: intelligence will make you a good living
If a fellow wants to be a nobody in the business world, let him neglect sending the mail man to somebody on his behalf.
I bought him an attractive bird cage made in Switzerland,
It is the follow through that makes the great difference between ultimate successand failure, because it is so easy to stop.
It is not a disgrace to fail. Failing is one of the greatest arts in the world.