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Organization

General Motors

American car maker; owner of Opel from the 1920s.

7 links, 2 backed by primary records. 63 more in open data

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Also known as
GM
Wikidata
Q81965
Over time
  1. developed Tetraethyl lead 1921–1923
General Motors holds

Connections 7

founded

  • Ethyl Corporation 1924 through its chemical company, with Standard Oil of New Jersey Primary record 234

owns a stake in

  • Opel 100% Scholarship & press 1

    Described by the Washington Post as a wholly GM-owned subsidiary during the war.

acquired

  • Opel Scholarship & press 5

    In the 1920s, according to the publisher of Henry Ashby Turner’s history.

funded

  • Kettering Laboratory 1930 Scholarship & press 2

    As The Nation reports it, with Du Pont and Ethyl; the lecture below thanks the unnamed “industrial organizations that have financed these investigations.”

developed

involved in

Timeline 3 dates
  1. 1921–1923 General Motors developed Tetraethyl lead
  2. 1924 General Motors founded Ethyl Corporation
  3. 1930 General Motors funded Kettering Laboratory
Proof 5 sources
  1. U.S. Dealings With Nazi Germany -- Did Ford, GM Boost Nazi War Effort?, The Washington Post, by Michael Dobbs, as reprinted by The Seattle Times, 30 Nov 1998. Scholarship & press
    The enemy was also driving trucks manufactured by Ford and Opel - a 100 percent GM-owned subsidiary - and flying Opel-built warplanes.
    GM spokesman John Mueller said that General Motors lost day-to-day control over its German plants in September 1939 and "did not assist the Nazis in any way during World War II."
  2. The Secret History of Lead (Jamie Lincoln Kitman, The Nation, March 2000), The Nation, 20 Mar 2000. Scholarship & press
    the oil company (one of twenty-seven companies formed by the 1911 breakup of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Trust) and the automobile company formed a joint venture, which they called the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation.
    founded with an initial $130,000 gift from GM, Du Pont and Ethyl at the University of Cincinnati, where the lead industry paid Kehoe’s salary for half a century
    On December 9, 1921, a young engineer named Thomas Midgley Jr. , working in the laboratory of the General Motors Research Corporation in Dayton, Ohio, reported to his boss, Charles Kettering , that he’d discovered that tetraethyl lead
  3. Proceedings of a Conference to Determine Whether or Not There Is a Public Health Question in the Manufacture, Distribution, or Use of Tetraethyl Lead Gasoline (Public Health Bulletin No. 158), U.S. Public Health Service, Treasury Department, 1925. Primary record
    which includes the General Motors Corporation and the Standard Oil Co. (N. J.)
    Lead tetraethyl was developed by the General Motors and Du Pont corporations as an addition to motor fuels.
  4. Statement to the Committee of Enquiry on Lead Ethyl Petrol, by Graham Edgar, Director of Research, Ethyl Gasoline Corporation (addendum of March 1928), Ethyl Gasoline Corporation (copy via ToxicDocs), 1928. Self-published
    Ethyl Gasoline Corporation (formerly the General Motors Chemical Co
  5. General Motors and the Nazis: The Struggle for Control of Opel, Europe's Biggest Carmaker, by Henry Ashby Turner (publisher's description), Yale University Press, 2005. Scholarship & press
    GM purchased Opel, Europe’s largest automaker, in the 1920s and continued to hold it through the Second World War.
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