By William “Skip” Deegans
In the 1920s, C. D. McClung was the Lewisburg distributor for Delco-Light plants. The plant consisted of an air-cooled engine that ran on gasoline or kerosene, generator, switchboard and a set of batteries to use at rural homes and farms that were not serviced by electric utilities. The noisy plant could run during the day to charge the batteries that would provide enough DC current to light a home and power a few appliances in the evening without hearing the plant running. (Cost of the plant in today’s dollars is about $5,000).
The Delco-Light plant was developed by Charles Kettering who operated the Dayton Engineering Laboratories Co. (Delco). He gave the first unit he built to his mother as a Christmas gift in 1913. The plant was not Kettering’s first invention. An engineering graduate of Ohio State University, he had already motorized the cash register and developed an electric ignition for automobiles. The latter development was revolutionary as it meant women no longer had to depend on men to hand crank automobiles to start them.
Delco was sold in 1918 to General Motors. By 1929 sales of the Delco-Light plant topped 325,000 units. They provided more electricity to rural farms and homes than all of the U. S. electric utilities combined. In the 1930’s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the Rural Electric Administration (REA) as part of the New Deal. Installation of 100,000 miles of power lines under the REA resulted in the end of Delco-Light plants.
Kettering had become a vice-president and head of research at General Motors. He had over 140 patents and is credited with developing anti-knock gasoline, refrigeration, baby incubators, and lightweight two-stroke Diesel engines. He once said, “Research is an organized method of finding out what you are going to do when you can’t keep on doing what you are doing now.”
Perhaps Kettering’s most significant legacy is the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center that he co-founded with Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., chairman of General Motors.
Advertisement courtesy of the West Virginia Daily News.
Sources: The West Virginia News, Dayton Daily News, The Journal Herald, DoctorDelco.com
