In 1908, a young inventor named Byron Carter pulled over to help a stranded driver start their car. This goodwill gesture ultimately ended Carter’s life, but also inspired a new automotive era.
This was back when most vehicles on the road had to be hand cranked to start. To do this safely required following a careful, step-by-step procedure. A removable handle connected through a hole in the grille to the front of the crankshaft. After priming the engine, adjusting the throttle and timing the ignition, a turn of the crank was enough to mobilize the pistons and get the engine running on its own power.
If you didn’t follow this process exactly, the engine could backfire, violently jerking the crank. That’s why you always had to make sure to only turn the crank with your left arm, and avoid wrapping your thumb around it, so if the crank handle spun backward it would pull you in a more natural motion, and not break your arm.
Still, broken wrists were common enough that surgeons coined a term for a particular type of injury most often seen in professional drivers: the chauffeur fracture.
“In the fracture from the ‘back kick’ of the starting handle, there is no impaction or splintering,” described one orthopedist in 1904. “The hand is violently dislocated backward, and the ligaments at the wrist simply tear off the articular surface close to the lower end of the bone, commonly just above the base of the styloid process.”
Bryon Carter would’ve known all this like the back of his … hand. He was a motor vehicle pioneer who had founded the Jackson Automobile Company and the Cartercar company in Michigan, which used a unique friction drive design in its vehicles, and was eventually acquired by General Motors.
But, for whatever reason, he was unprepared that winter in Detroit when he stopped to help a woman with a stalled Cadillac. The engine backfired and the crank broke his jaw. He died not long after, with different sources saying it was due to either pneumonia or gangrene.
Carter’s friend, Henry Leland, the founder of Cadillac, was heartbroken. “The Cadillac car will kill no more men if we can help it,” he said.
Around the same time, not far away, another inventor named Charles Kettering had been working on something that could eliminate the hand crank altogether. Kettering had already invented a motorized replacement for the hand crank on cash registers, and was tinkering with other solutions for automotive engines. Leland was impressed, and the next year he started ordering parts from Kettering and his business partner, who started a new production company to handle the work, named the Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company, or Delco.
At this point, an electric starter motor had already been conceptualized and patented, but it wasn’t yet practical for mass production on an automobile. Leland tasked Kettering with improving on it, and he soon patented his own design. The new motor appeared on the 1912 Cadillac Model 30, a four-cylinder, 40 horsepower innovation that also featured some of the first electric headlights. It was marketed as “The Car That Has No Crank,” and it instantly doubled Cadillac’s sales. A Cadillac brochure from the time called it “the greatest achievement for the advancement of the motor car since the inception of the industry.”