Science: I See

Last week the Society of Automotive Engineers, meeting in Detroit, installed as its new president able, burly Ralph Rowe Teetor, vice president and research director of Perfect Circle Co. (piston rings). This topflight engineer saw none of the charts which accompanied technical discussions. He is totally blind.

When inquisitive Ralph Teetor was 6, he tried to open a locked bookcase drawer with a penknife. The knife slipped. The blade jabbed into the corner of his right eye. Loss of sight in both eyes followed.

The comfortable but not wealthy Teetors, to whom Ralph was born 45 years ago in small Hagerstown, Ind., soon saw that the boy’s blindness was not going to hamper him anymore than he could possibly help. Every day he ran to & from grade school where he got splendid marks. At the University of Pennsylvania he got his B. S. without difficulty. Because he was sensitive about his affliction and hated to accept help, he learned to do almost everything for himself.

When War broke, he asked for and got an appointment as consultant at a shipyard in Camden, N. J. For months he was given nothing to do. The other engineers were trying vainly to balance the turbine rotors for torpedo boat destroyers. Called in as a last resort. Teetor drew on his supersensitive ”feel” for vibration, found a way to balance the rotors in three hours each.

After the War, Teetor went back to Hagerstown to rejoin the company founded by his uncle in 1900, in which young Ralph had balanced crankshafts after college. He married a small, trim schoolteacher named Nellie Van Antwerp. They now have a 5-year-old daughter.

The Teetor enterprise has changed its name several times and switched from railroad equipment to automobile engines to piston rings. It became the Perfect Circle Co. in 1918, is now the biggest U. S. maker of piston rings (capitalization $1,625,000), turning out 300,000 “perfect circles” a day. It has more Teetors than Sun Oil has Pews. Hagerstown has less than 2,000 inhabitants, but a third of them work for Perfect Circle and the town has no unemployment. Perfect Circle mail grew so heavy that little Hagers-town got an $80,000 post office.

Ralph Teetor frequently walks through the plant, never bumping a machine or a workman or missing a door. So thoroughly aware is he of what goes on around him that he frequently says. “I see that that machine has been replaced.” or. “I see that this lathe needs attention.” Most of the automotive engineers who shook hands with him in Detroit last week had an uncanny feeling that their new president really could see them.