LOUDONVILLE — The first shot in the “arms race” for more horsepower that led to the hot rods of the 1950s, and eventually established the muscle car as the image of American automobiles, was fired by Loudonville native Charles Kettering.
Kettering had been working on high compression engines since the end of World War I, believing that raising an engine’s compression ratio allowed the engine to extract more energy from the fuel it burns, improving both power and fuel economy.
He was right.
Most engines even in the early 1950s had a compression of no more than 7:1, whereas Kettering’s early design was 12.5:1. The issue was that conventional gasoline didn’t have enough octane to work in his high compression designs, so in the 1920s he developed tetraethyl lead as an octane-boosting gasoline additive.
With this additive, his new designs increased power and mileage by nearly 30%.
Tetraethyl wasn’t available on the market, leaving aviation fuel as the only commercial gasoline with enough octane for his designs that was commercially available. So Kettering, as VP of General Motors, had GM push the oil companies to start offering gasoline with his tetraethyl — which they called “premium.”
World War II slowed the evolution of the engine, but as soon as it ended the race was on for more power, with Oldsmobile and Cadillac leading the way.
In 1949 Oldsmobile introduced the Kettering Power 303 V8 engine, named in honor of the man that made it all possible — but Kettering, despite having recently retired, was never one to promote his own name and had GM block it from hitting the production lines until Oldsmobile renamed it the Rocket — another homage to the aviation fuel Kettering first had to use.
Cadillac used a similar design based on Kettering’s engines as well, and soon muscle cars set the standard for American automobiles.
More information on the Cleo Redd Fisher Museum can be found at this link.
