At Allis-Chalmers prior to Deutz buying the place ether was the cold start method. Book said to remove the air cleaner cover to inject straight but on our proto fleet we always injected straight into the air intake, a 2 person job, one cranking and the other person spraying after the engine was cranking. Then came Deutz engines and harder cold starting but also more delicate. The engine came with a thermostatically controlled ether system that automatically sprayed when the temperature was below a certain temp. Fine until your ether can ran out and you didn't have a spare. A few years after I moved to Cat we started switching to Perkins for our little engines (less than 7 liters). I asked our Perkins rep about ether since we were putting a decal on the air cleaner stating no ether. He said it was just because people overdo it. The first Perkins we used (before buying the company) had a starting aid that consisted of a heating coil at the opening of the intake manifold along with a diesel line, solenoid valve, and diesel line. When cranking the cold engine the coil would get very hot, the solenoid would open a valve spraying diesel into the manifold starting a fire that warmed the incoming air. It was a small fire so it didn't burn all of the oxygen and defeat the purpose. You can imagine spraying ether into that - explosion before the ether got close to the combustion chamber. With Tier 3 that changed to glow plugs and cold starts down to -15F but below that we say use an additional starting aid and don't mention ether like it doesn't exist knowing if the engine has to start in really cold weather, ether gets used and unless overused, it will not hurt long term engine life any more than having to endure really cold starts in the first place. Block heaters, oil heaters, heated garages, anything you can do to help.