The first push-button starter for the automobile was invented when and by whom?

Starting an internal-combustion (IC) engine has been done with gunpowder cylinders, wind-up springs, secondary IC engines, and clunky electrical starters, but the earliest IC automobiles typically were started using the hand-crank, which required strength, persistence, and often medical care.

If something went wrong with the process—and this typically involved a mistake by the driver, such as incorrectly setting the “spark lever” or gripping the crank improperly — the crank could “kick-back” and break a bone somewhere on the upper extremity being used to turn the crank.

Occasionally, the injury suffered was more severe. In one such incident, an early Cadillac stalled near Detroit one day in 1908. A passerby volunteered to crank the car and the driver forgot to use the spark lever to “retard” the spark. The kick-back broke the jaw of the Good Samaritan, who suffered complications and died of pneumonia.

Remorseful that his company’s car had caused a death, Henry Leland had his Cadillac engineers build an electric starter, which worked but was impractical. Leland turned to Kettering, who had replaced the cash register’s crank with an electronic opener while at National Cash Register. Now leading Delco (Dayton Engineering Laboratory Company), Kettering and his team invented the push-button starter.