Formula For Discovery; C. F. Kettering

So I said, "Well, lees just try an experiment. Lees suppose that the lubricating oil testing machine is a dangerous weapon. It belongs to your worst enemy, and he Mr. Kettering, famed inventor, was for many years Chief of Re search at General Motors. [316 ] can kill you and your family with it. But you can pick the lubricant for it. What would you recommend· if you were picking the poorest thing in the world to lubricate it with? What would you specify?" We all thought about it, and finally picked a material called monochlormethyl ether, which is practically the same as is used to put you to sleep when you are going to have a surgical operation. It is so thin it has no vis cosity at all. You can pour it on your hand and blow on it and it is all gone. You couldn't pour it in a warm machine as a liquid. It would evaporate at once. So we took the cap off the ether can, soldered a tube on it, ran the tube over to the bearing machine, and sealed it into the oil hole. Then we put a warm towel around the can and the vapors went through the tube to the bearing.

Since there was no liquid in the bearing, it must run absolutely dry. We had made bets on how long it would last-how much pressure it would take. One man had nerve enough to guess 150 pounds. That was the highest. We started to load up the machine very gently and carefully, and to make a long story short, we ran out of weights at 30,000 pounds. Everybody was amazed; they said, ~~It can't be." But we tried it over and over again, and we got some more weights. I think it stuck up around 36,000 pounds-five or six times the load of the best oil. We brought the oil engineers in and showed it to them. They said, "The only thing that makes us sore is that we didn't do it. This is our business, not yours." "But," I said, ~Cyou couldn't have done it. You have [317 ] graded oils for so long on their viscosity that you would have fired anybody who proposed using something like this that didn't have any viscosity feel to it."

Well, that was the beginning of the so-called extreme pressure lubrication which came just about the time we were developing the hypoid gears, and you couldn't have run hypoid gears if it hadn't been for these lubricants. There are many things that you couldn't do today if it weren't for these lubricants. Now what did we do? All that had been done in lubricating oils before that was to test the affinity of one molecule of oil for another. This is called viscosity. When you put pressure on them, you found that you pushed them apart and you had no lubrication. But the oils with no viscosity at all formed a chemical bond more like the nap on plush, and this took much more pressure to break through than did the viscosity film. It completely changed the concept of what you could do with lubricating oils. [318 ] THE GRADUATED GADINKUS TAX IT WAS New Year's Day and Alonzo Brown had a head ache. Not because he had imbibed too much, for he was a teetotaler. His head ached because he was making out his federal income tax return. The further he figured, the more he fumed.