He was also an anti-authoritarian of the purest kind. Another story he told was about another speech he had given before an august assembly of academics. They had gathered to honor Kettering, Edison and a few other of the great inventors of that time. Kettering told how he had gotten up and explained to the academics that the kind of education they prized and awarded advanced degrees to was the antithesis of the kind of training that wqs needed to produce more innovators like the ones gathered there for honors. He related how his group of engineers had been struggling to find the right gas to serve as a refrigerant for a cooling system that GM had commissioned him to develop. They worked by their own methods for some time time with little success. Then Kettering took things into his own hands and told them to pack their things for a working retreat. Once there, he had them draw a graph of all the molecular formulae they had tried so far on the wall. The graph included the composition and the refrigerant properties of each gas. As they filled in the graph, it became apparent that there was one spot where all the properties of the other molecules seemed to converge to point toward the most efficient refrigerant. Kettering pointed this spot out and was immediately told by one of his sliderule wielding engineers that they had suspected that there was a molecule that would fit there for some time but that they had not tried to produce it because according to their calculations, the characteristics of the molecule would be unstable and unusable. Kettering insisted that they try it anyway and Freon gas was discovered. Freon served for many decades as the best refrigerant known. It made possible food preservation and shipping as we know it as well as air-conditioning and many medical and scientific research techniques that have saved and enriched un counted lives.

Kettering would often call meetings at which slide rules were strictly forbidden. He insisted on re-training all engineers with advanced degrees who came to work for him. He did this because he was the all-time professor of considering every possibility. He considered advanced degrees to be the warning signs of mental deficiency. After all, time after time, PhDs and engineers with advanced degrees had looked at his projects "logically" and told him that the things he proposed were "impossible". To Kettering, "Logic is a system whereby one may go wrong with confidence."

Kettering spent his life astride the no man's land between belief and knowledge. There is a prejudice today that knowledge and belief are mutually exclusive. He knew that they were much more powerful in combination and that the truth of things can most nearly be approached by using them together.

By far the most lasting and powerful thing I learned from those old lectures of Kettering's was his ability to acknowledge mystery and unpredictability while still having faith in an orderly and lawful universe. He, as did Newton and Einstein, knew that there was more to this Universe than any human can understand. His approach to problems was to learn what they had to teach him until they became solutions. As Kettering put it in his plain and firm way, "It is not what we know that is important, it is what we do not know."”