Fate must have decreed that Deeds and Kettering should meet. In 1904 Deeds was Superintendent at the NCR. Electrically minded since his boyhood on the farm, he had an unwavering confidence in the application of electricity to industry. At that time the cash register was operated by turning a crank. Deeds conceived the idea of putting a motor on the machines to supersede the crank. He designed and built the first motor to be employed for this use. This is an important link in the Deeds-Kettering story, because it brought the two men together. Deeds was absorbed in many responsibilities at the NCR and could not devote the necessary time to the perfection of the motor. He wanted a bright young electrical engineer to whom the electrification project could be entrusted. He asked Alfred D. Cole, his old professor of physics at Denison University, to suggest a likely candidate. Cole, who had joined the faculty of Ohio State University, suggested Kettering, his star student, who was about to graduate. Deeds wrote to Kettering, offering him a position at $50 a week and the offer was accepted, not, however, without some qualms on Kettering’s part. When Kettering took over his job in the Inventions Division at the NCR it was to mean more than a brilliant contribution to the development of the National cash register. It marked the beginning of a kinship with Deeds that was to make inventive history. The reason for this kinship did not rest solely on the fact that they were both electrically minded. Also important was the fact that they embodied certain opposites of talent and temperament which so often make for success. In 1904, when Deeds and Kettering met, the gasoline-propelled vehicle, despite jests, jokes and jeers, was becoming a practical reality. Great inventors like Thomas A. Edison and Charles P. Steinmetz, however, insisted that it was doomed to failure, contending that electricity was the one and only effective motive force for the horseless carriage. Deeds believed otherwise. He saw the internal combustion engine as the driving power of the future. He had been so impressed with the gasoline automobile that for a time he had an ambition to go into its production. Unable to do this, he decided to “put something”, as he expressed it, on motor cars. This ambition pointed the way to what became the electric ignition, lighting, and starting system.