Knowing is not understanding. There is a great difference between knowing and understanding: you can know a lot about something and not really understand it.
Charles F. Kettering
I came to know about Charles Franklin Kettering from a late night radio show that found me sitting in a scientific laboratory at Harvard University's School of Public Health. At the time I was the weekend supervisor of the Monkey Nursery there and worked from noon to midnight every Saturday and Sunday. I had dropped out of college in my junior year and had spent a few years working as an actor and a carpenter before I found this job which I took initially because it interested me and would allow me copious free time during the week. It soon inspired me to return to school and pursue a degree in Anthropology.
I was in charge of the infant monkey nursery, surrounded by rooms full of baby monkeys. There were certain times during my twelve-hour shift when I would have some free time to study, listen to the radio or read. On Sunday night there was a radio show produced at Wayne State University in Detroit and re-broadcast by one of the Boston area college stations that I always checked in with to see what was on. There were only a dozen or so programs in the series and they would repeat them over and over to fill the time slot. Nine of the programs were pretty standard educational fare and I don't remember them at all. The other three changed my life in a fundamental way.
These were actually antique recordings of an address that Kettering had given at some commemoration or dedication ceremony toward the end of his career. He was then one of the few surviving members of a group of entrepreneurs and inventors that changed life for all of humanity in the latter part of the industrial revolution. Here was a man who was responsible for the electric cash register, the diesel locomotive engine, the electric starter for the automobile, safety glass and probably the most profoundly influential of them all, the discovery of Freon gas for refrigeration and air-conditioning. This great technologist spoke mostly not of moving industry and wielding power but of making people's mind grow by paying attention to their hearts.
He told the story of his first professional job as a recent college graduate. He was schoolmaster in a turn-of-the-century one room school house. One of his youngest pupils was a first grader who had already had a difficult experience in school. Although she was obviously bright and could already read at a high level for her age, she could only do it with the book held upside down. Her previous teacher had insisted that she learn to read the "right way" and refused to let her read upside down. Luckily she kept reading and only learned to hate the teacher.
When Kettering came on the scene he sized the situation up in much the same way he approached all of the other problems that he solved in mechanics. chemistry and electronics. First he understood the whole problem. It turned out that the little girl had spent many hours with her grandmother who was unable to hold the little girl on her lap and read to her in a more standard way so she would read to her by placing a book on a stool in between two chairs that faced each other and would read to her as the girl looked on upside down. Kettering knew from this that the girl was smart and motivated and could adapt to any condition. He hit on a plan that worked perfectly with no emotional damage or condemnation of the child. He merely borrowed a music stand from someone in the community and placed her book upside down in front of her. Since when a book is mounted upside down this way, it is 180 degrees out of the usual reading position. Kettering then turned the music stand's music holder 5 degrees clockwise every Monday during the school year. As the year progressed, the girl found herself reading at 175 degrees out of the usual then 170 then 165 etc... By the end of the year she was reading just the way everyone else was and Kettering had done it without making her feel as though she was different, strange or wrong. He honored her as an individual at the same time he was correcting her because he followed his own admonition to understand the the problem deeply enough that the solution became obvious. This was an example, he said, of "letting the problem be the boss".
The trouble that most people get into when they run into a problem they have never experienced before, he explained was they immediately try to fit it into what they know. The more educated and expert the person the greater is that tendency. Kettering advanced the idea that true solutions to problems come not from trying to fit every question to the answers you already know but from meeting the problem on its own ground and letting it teach you what you need to know to understand it and solve it. Once, Kettering said, you let the problem be the boss and do not try to bend it to fit your small view of the world, you begin to grow in power and ability.
I was captivated listening to Kettering talk because he had clarity of expression that perfectly reflected the genius of his insight. He made you feel as though his understanding was your understanding. Somehow I felt that this very practical man was so clear and so pragmatic that he paradoxically was talking in a perfectly spiritual and transcendent way about these quintessentially down to earth matters. He offered a glimpse into the core of our relationship with the real world and because of this he was seeing too into very fiber of the order of the universe.
I looked forward to these programs and must have heard each one of them a half dozen times. I read as much as I could find about Kettering in the library too. I took him and his philosophies to heart and he became one of my life's heroes.
He was also an anti-authoritarian of the purest kind. Another story he told was about another speech he had given before an august assembly of academics. They had gathered to honor Kettering, Edison and a few other of the great inventors of that time. Kettering told how he had gotten up and explained to the academics that the kind of education they prized and awarded advanced degrees to was the antithesis of the kind of training that wqs needed to produce more innovators like the ones gathered there for honors. He related how his group of engineers had been struggling to find the right gas to serve as a refrigerant for a cooling system that GM had commissioned him to develop. They worked by their own methods for some time time with little success. Then Kettering took things into his own hands and told them to pack their things for a working retreat. Once there, he had them draw a graph of all the molecular formulae they had tried so far on the wall. The graph included the composition and the refrigerant properties of each gas. As they filled in the graph, it became apparent that there was one spot where all the properties of the other molecules seemed to converge to point toward the most efficient refrigerant. Kettering pointed this spot out and was immediately told by one of his sliderule wielding engineers that they had suspected that there was a molecule that would fit there for some time but that they had not tried to produce it because according to their calculations, the characteristics of the molecule would be unstable and unusable. Kettering insisted that they try it anyway and Freon gas was discovered. Freon served for many decades as the best refrigerant known. It made possible food preservation and shipping as we know it as well as air-conditioning and many medical and scientific research techniques that have saved and enriched un counted lives.
Kettering would often call meetings at which slide rules were strictly forbidden. He insisted on re-training all engineers with advanced degrees who came to work for him. He did this because he was the all-time professor of considering every possibility. He considered advanced degrees to be the warning signs of mental deficiency. After all, time after time, PhDs and engineers with advanced degrees had looked at his projects "logically" and told him that the things he proposed were "impossible". To Kettering, "Logic is a system whereby one may go wrong with confidence."
Kettering spent his life astride the no man's land between belief and knowledge. There is a prejudice today that knowledge and belief are mutually exclusive. He knew that they were much more powerful in combination and that the truth of things can most nearly be approached by using them together.
By far the most lasting and powerful thing I learned from those old lectures of Kettering's was his ability to acknowledge mystery and unpredictability while still having faith in an orderly and lawful universe. He, as did Newton and Einstein, knew that there was more to this Universe than any human can understand. His approach to problems was to learn what they had to teach him until they became solutions. As Kettering put it in his plain and firm way, "It is not what we know that is important, it is what we do not know."”
Jerome (Jerry) Gould is a writer and speaker who has a growing reputation for helping others to find and appreciate what is sacred in their lives and the world around them. He lives in Newton, Ma. with his wife and the two of his six children who are still at home. His blog http://alittlepileofseeds.blogspot.com/ is a popular source of inspiration and spiritual insight. His other web site http://home.comcast.net/~littlepileofseeds/ promotes his book which tells the story of how he recovered from a terrible childhood trauma to develop a powerful tool that others have used to recover from their own traumas.
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