"License to Manufacture: Constructing the GM Mythology, 1919"

In early 1916 Charles Kettering of Delco was hired by the U.S. Bureau of Mines to conduct research on fuels. When WWI came, Kettering's co-owner in Delco, E.A. Deeds, was drafted to manage the government's $640 million for aviation, and the government provided Kettering funding to expand his fuels research. With onsite support from government chemists, Kettering's team invented both types of modern gasoline -- one raising the antiknock quality with synthetic blending components, the other raising antiknock quality using a non-fuel additive. After the war, the Bureau asked Kettering to become a consulting engineer, but he resisted. On April 22, 1919 the Bureau sent a representative to meet with Kettering's attorney, who provided an account of the wartime research that wrote the Bureau almost entirely out of the history, but the Bureau signed it anyway. Thus, Kettering got both the patents and the bragging rights. Just four months later, in August 1919, Kettering's companies were bought by General Motors, which would use Kettering's inventions not only as products but as a theme in creating a new corporate identity. When Kettering's team discovered tetraethyl lead for gasoline in 1921, based on the government-funded findings, GM proclaimed the wonders of private enterprise, without referencing the Bureau's contribution, establishing an enduring myth associating corporate prerogative with material advancement. The myth, though false, stuck. Sixty years later, in a cabinet meeting to decide whether to take the lead out of gasoline, President Reagan recalled that myth, lamenting that he was the only one old enough to remember how the introduction of lead additive had been celebrated as a great advance. Reagan was outvoted by his cabinet that day, but his remark reveals how a single set of events set up an enduring idea about corporate prerogative and the environment still with us today.