Where were you in '49? If you were keeping up with a Hudson Hornet, you had a fast car. Charles Kettering was an engineer at GM remembered primarily for his development of the points-type ignition system.
Kettering saved one of his best inventions for last, as his career at General Motors approached retirement, and that invention would be intimately involved with the respected name Oldsmobile. As a nuts-and-bolts thinker, Kettering reasoned that if an engine were able to use a compression ratio higher than normal more power would be the natural result. But, as Kettering and his colleagues discovered, higher compression engines would literally rattle themselves to death on the low-octane gasoline then available. Engine knock caused by the gasoline exploding rather than burning in the combustion chamber was the cause. Another inventor might then have thrown up his hands and said, "Impossible!"
In typical fashion, Kettering worked backward to find a solution. Instead of trying to adapt his high-compression engine to the available fuel, he set about not only perfecting the high-compression engine, but also perfecting a higher-octane fuel that would make it practical. The results of his labors were two-fold: the high compression V-8 engine that would soon come to be known as the Olds "Rocket" engine and high-octane leaded gasoline.
Introduced for the 1949 model year, soon after Kettering's retirement from GM, the Olds "Rocket" V-8 was a revelation. The big news, of course, was its heady 7.25:1 compression ratio, but the engine featured other state-of-the-art features from its well-balanced 90-degree design to its "monobloc" single cast iron block to its overhead valves to its lightweight pistons. In essence, the Rocket V-8 set the standard for every American V-8 engine that would follow it for at least three decades. Fact is the very modern engine that graces today's Chevrolet Corvette owes a huge debt to the Rocket and Charles Kettering.
With a displacement of 303 cubic inches and topped by a two-barrel carburetor, the first Rocket V-8 churned out 135 horsepower at 3600 rpm and 263 pound-feet of torque at a lazy 1800 rpm. While this might not seem too potent by today's standards, in 1949 Ford flat-head V-8s were considered to be among the hottest things on the market, and they produced just 130 horsepower. No mid-range car in the world, save the Hudson Hornet, came close to the Rocket Olds performance potential.
In the immediate post-war years Oldsmobile had two models, the near-luxury 98 and the mid-range 76. At first the Rocket (or "Kettering" V-8) seemed destined for just the top-of-the-line 98, but then good sense prevailed and the modern V-8 was also offered in the much-lighter 76 chassis in a new 1949 model dubbed the 88. A legend was born. Though fitted with an automatic transmission (the Olds manual couldn't handle the engine's torque), the Oldsmobile 88 was the hit of NASCAR's 1950 season, winning eight of the 10 races. Given its lightning-like success, one could clearly make the case that the Olds 88 with its 135-horsepower V-8 was the first "musclecar," the first in a line that would include the Pontiac GTO, Dodge Charger and Olds 442 among scores of others. In fact, all the successful Oldsmobile vehicles that would follow it for the next 30 years would bear the distinct seal of Charles Kettering's last great invention, the legendary Rocket V-8.
