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Short Stories of Science and Invention

A Collection of Radio Talks by
Charles F. Kettering

INDEX

Weekly, from September 1942 to July 1945, Charles F. Kettering gave five-minute intermission talks about Science and Invention during the radio broadcasts of the General Motors Symphony of the Air.

Kettering invented the first automobile self-starter, and for 31 years directed a research laboratory for General Motors.

These radio talks are a fascinating legacy from the mind of a prolific inventor. The obvious anachronisms now add a historical perspective of the war-time period in which they were written.

These web pages now preserve some of the most popular stories for a new generation to read The text and art come from a General Motors booklet of selected talks. (Reprint, March 1959)

24.  A Man Who Groped in the Dark
A Radio Talk by
Charles F. Kettering

Composer    As we listen to fine music, you probably wonder, just the same as many others, what kind of person the composer was and how he arrived at the combination of notes and intervals that resulted in this particular composition. We are sure that back of it there are long hours of cut and try, discouragement and hard work. We hear only the successes.

    I wish we could see the great amount of patient work that is required and the great amount of discarded material which is necessary to produce one of these successes.

Columbus    Composition, development and invention are not new things. The procedure used is as old as mankind itself. However, there is a certain amount of dramatic appeal to discovery inasmuch as it always includes the element of surprise. It is often the result of starting out to do one thing and ending up with something different. Columbus, of course, is the classical example of this. He started out to find a new route to India, and discovered America.

    Many years ago, I read a story which had a great effect on me and whenever I think of men groping blindly to find things, it always comes to my mind. The story is about a man by the name of Bernard Palissey who lived in the southwest of France about four hundred years ago. He was jack-of-all-trades - surveyor, painter, a worker in glass and, in addition, he was a nature lover.


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- 100 -
Sophie Germain
Gertrude Elion
Ernest Rutherford
James Chadwick
Marcel Proust
William Harvey
Johann Goethe
John Keynes
Carl Gauss
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- 90 -
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Lise Meitner
Charles Babbage
Ibn Khaldun
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Frederick Banting
Andre Ampere
Winston Churchill
- 80 -
John Locke
Bronislaw Malinowski
Bible
Thomas Huxley
Alessandro Volta
Erwin Schrodinger
Wilhelm Roentgen
Louis Pasteur
Bertrand Russell
Jean Lamarck
- 70 -
Samuel Morse
John Wheeler
Nicolaus Copernicus
Robert Fulton
Pierre Laplace
Humphry Davy
Thomas Edison
Lord Kelvin
Theodore Roosevelt
Carolus Linnaeus
- 60 -
Francis Galton
Linus Pauling
Immanuel Kant
Martin Fischer
Robert Boyle
Karl Popper
Paul Dirac
Avicenna
James Watson
William Shakespeare
- 50 -
Stephen Hawking
Niels Bohr
Nikola Tesla
Rachel Carson
Max Planck
Henry Adams
Richard Dawkins
Werner Heisenberg
Alfred Wegener
John Dalton
- 40 -
Pierre Fermat
Edward Wilson
Johannes Kepler
Gustave Eiffel
Giordano Bruno
JJ Thomson
Thomas Kuhn
Leonardo DaVinci
Archimedes
David Hume
- 30 -
Andreas Vesalius
Rudolf Virchow
Richard Feynman
James Hutton
Alexander Fleming
Emile Durkheim
Benjamin Franklin
Robert Oppenheimer
Robert Hooke
Charles Kettering
- 20 -
Carl Sagan
James Maxwell
Marie Curie
Rene Descartes
Francis Crick
Hippocrates
Michael Faraday
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Francis Bacon
Galileo Galilei
- 10 -
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John Watson
Rosalind Franklin
Michio Kaku
Isaac Asimov
Charles Darwin
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