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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)

54.  Mosquitos and Steam Shovels
A Radio Talk by
Charles F. Kettering


Mosquito     One of our most valuable engineering possessions today is the Panama Canal. This Canal saves the ships going through it as many as 9,500 miles or about a month's travelling time. The building of the Panama Canal was the first full scale test of sanitary engineering which had been started by Dr. Donald Ross in his fight against malaria and Dr. Walter Reed and Dr. Finlay in their fight against yellowjack or yellow fever.

Hospital     To show you the importance of this full scale attempt to control disease, in 1880 the French organized a company under Ferdinand de Lesseps, to build a canal from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. De Lesseps was the man who had built the Suez Canal and was well fitted to do this job. The French company spent hundreds of millions of dollars but they gave up in 1899, not because their machinery was inadequate for the job or their plans were wrong. The thing that stopped them was malaria and yellow fever. So effective was this stoppage that in 1900 all they had left to show for their great effort was a partly finished canal overgrown with jungle, rusted, vine-covered machinery and Monkey Hill Cemetery, which contained, as one writer says: "acres and acres of little white crosses."

     Now, most people thought of this canal as being a great construction engineering project and when, in 1904, the United States bought the French concessions for about twenty million dollars, we felt that this was just another job for American ingenuity. A big job, everybody conceded, but nothing unusual for us.



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- 100 -
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Ernest Rutherford
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William Harvey
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Carl Gauss
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- 90 -
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Lise Meitner
Charles Babbage
Ibn Khaldun
Euclid
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Robert Bunsen
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 -
Aristotle
John Watson
Rosalind Franklin
Michio Kaku
Isaac Asimov
Charles Darwin
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