"Bendix invented the electric starter"

A commonplace of the Bendix legend · Tested against the patent record in the Inventors file

The claim. Vincent Bendix is popularly credited with the electric starter itself — the device that ended hand-cranking — and the credit attaches the more easily because the corporation he founded made South Bend its seat in 1924 and this city its home.

The record. The Inventors file tested the claim against the patents. The electric self-starter is Charles Kettering's, of Delco, in Dayton. What Bendix invented is the self-engaging drive that bears his name — the mechanism that throws the starter's pinion into the flywheel and withdraws it — and the drive's own patent, U.S. 1,125,935, filed 2 May 1914, gives its inventor's residence on its face as Chicago. South Bend's part in the story is the corporation: Bendix founded his company in Chicago, brought its seat here in 1924, and built the South Bend works whose brake line had its own documented inventor in Adiel Y. Dodge, whose duo-servo specification, U.S. 1,978,699, says what it is in its own text.

What the record leaves. The claim is not supported. The starter belongs to Kettering and Dayton; the drive belongs to Bendix, and its patent is a Chicago patent of 1914, a decade before the corporation came to South Bend. What this city can document is the company, not the invention's geography — and the Inventors file prints the story at exactly that division.

Sources

1. The Inventors & Inventions file in this record — the starter credited to Kettering and Delco; the Bendix drive's patent U.S. 1,125,935, filed 2 May 1914, "of Chicago" on its face; Adiel Y. Dodge and U.S. 1,978,699; the corporation's seat in South Bend from 1924.