American inventor Arthur Atwater Kent (1873-1949) had a fascination with electrical and mechanical gadgets. At the age of thirty, he set himself up as a battery maker in a run-down factory where, it was said, the cracks in the floor were so big that he never needed a dustpan.
With his first earnings, Kent bought a one-cylinder automobile, and tinkering with it led him to develop his own ignition system. The ignition system is an essential part of any engine. An ignition coil turns the 12 volts in the car battery into the thousands of volts needed for the spark plugs to produce a spark to ignite the fuel in the tank. It works like a high voltage transformer, consisting of a primary and secondary winding wrapped around a metal core. The primary coil has a lower number of turns than the secondary coil and when the circuit is broken the magnetic field of the primary coil disappears. This causes the secondary coil to be overwhelmed by a large changing magnetic field that induces a current with enough power to create a spark to ignite the fuel. Before the high voltage from the coil goes to the spark plugs it needs to be distributed to the right cylinder. This is done by a rotating mechanism that touches one contact per cylinder, distributing the electricity. It was this mechanism that Kent came up with in 1907, and it is an essential part of the car ignition system.
Although Kent's ignition system was ingenious, he actually made his fortune in radio manufacturing. Visitors to his factory could watch through a special window to see gold bars dissolved in acid to make the plating for the Atwater Kent trademark.
