Ralph R. Teetor

Ralph R. Teetor

Feature Article from Hemmings Classic Car

July, 2009 - Jim Donnelly

Just before Christmas in 1902, a reporter in a Manhattan newsroom tapped out the story of a young kid in the farm country near the Indiana-Ohio border who was doing some very atypical and impressive stuff. In the agitated prose of early 20th-century news writing, the correspondent noted that the youngster, at age 12, had already built his own functioning automobile and was driving it. The tale typified the sort of Ripley-esque features that were a staple of big-city newspapers at the time, even more prized if they involved people from the enormous countryside that most urban readers had never visited. The journalist filed his story and got it published.

Reading it today, you can't escape the feeling that the reporter never realized that his subject, a young Ralph R. Teetor, was blind.

Not many people outside the confines of engineering or business history today know that, or much of anything else, about Teetor. That's really unfortunate: Teetor was a hugely influential patron of education in the automotive world, his contributions recognized even now by those in the know. He was also an early, and very important, industry supplier and aftermarket manufacturer who understood intelligent marketing.

Teetor's life story would be notable for any sighted person. But for a person with his limitation--and we can virtually guarantee that he never once referred to it that way, or, as far as we can tell, in any way--his achievements and legacy are vast.

Teetor was born in Hagerstown, Wayne County, Indiana, into a family that had immigrated from Germany in 1729 and spent nearly 100 years in western Pennsylvania before moving to Indiana. The family was busily building bicycles when Ralph was born. A few years later, a distant relative who worked for the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad asked the Teetor brothers if they could build a small inspection car, pedal-powered like a bicycle. The highly successful company formed to build production models of that inspection car, soon adapted to use gasoline power, was the Railway Inspection Car Company.

That was in 1895. That same year, young Ralph was working with a knife when it slipped and penetrated his eye. Within a year, Teetor was totally and permanently blind--and it didn't stop him. Before young adulthood, he had developed a highly refined sense of touch, an enormously valuable characteristic for any mechanic or technician, even one with his full faculty of vision. His daughter and biographer, Marjorie Teetor Meyer of Indianapolis, recalls today that, "His sense of touch was legendary around the factory. One day, he picked up some new castings and felt them. Pleased, he remarked that they didn't vary by more than .002 inch. The men measured them. He was exactly right."

His father and uncles tutored him in the exacting practices of machining metals. Meanwhile, after building railcars, they reorganized their business as Teetor-Hartley, an early automotive supplier during the industry's boom years in Indiana. It produced gasoline engines, with Auburn among its early customers. Through Teetor-Hartley customers who raced the engines, including such industry notables as American, Packard, Marmon and Duesenberg, Teetor learned the art of crankshaft balancing.

After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in mechanical engineering, Teetor worked across the Delaware River in Camden, New Jersey, on a shipyard contract for the U.S. Navy. His breakthrough task there was creating a process for dynamically balancing steam turbines that operated under shattering heat and pressure, a method that became standard practice in maritime propulsion. Returning to Indiana, Teetor conceptualized and built a fluid-operated gearshift, to which Bendix bought the rights. The Teetor family then realigned its company to produce piston rings, renaming it Perfect Circle and installing Ralph as its lead engineer.

Under his leadership, first in the design department and then as the company's president beginning in 1946, Perfect Circle was the unchallenged leader of its industry segment. Not always the case among family-controlled industries, Perfect Circle adopted a Calvinistic code of ethics and accountability, and maintained a hard-won reputation for quality. It was also among the earliest industry suppliers to market its products through motorsports, with huge success. For decades, a Perfect Circle decal was a standard decoration on the flanks of cars in the Indianapolis 500, and race wins inspired advertisements that appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, among other outlets. Solid engineering, as inspired by Teetor, also made Perfect Circle a prime defense contractor during World War II.

Teetor was incredibly adept with his hands and loved to craft things with them, perhaps even more so after climbing to the presidency of the Society of Automotive Engineers. Legend has it that the unsteady driving of his patent attorney jarred Teetor, but according to his daughter, he was already trying to invent an automotive speed control during the war, when the United States had a national speed limit of 35 MPH. Teetor achieved immortality, of a sort, by inventing the prototype of a modern, driver-set cruise control. Perfect Circle called it Speedostat, but the various automakers that bought it and offered it as an option used their own trade names for it. Regardless, the sightless Hoosier inventor had transformed the long-distance highway cruise.

When he died in 1982, Teetor's legacy as a supporter of education was already firmly in place. After retiring from active business, he was a major benefactor of Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana. He is enshrined in the Automotive Hall of Fame, and one of SAE International's most prestigious engineering awards is today named in Teetor's honor.

This article originally appeared in the July, 2009 issue of Hemmings Classic Car.

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