by Tom Phillips
The reason is that the substance they finally settled on was lead (specifically, a liquid compound called tetraethyl lead, or TEL). And lead is a deadly poison. It causes, among other things, high blood pressure, kidney problems, fetal abnormalities and brain damage. It particularly affects children.
Midgley’s story is often told as an example of “unintended consequences,” which... No, not really. Granted, “poisoning entire generations of people all across the globe” wasn’t actually his goal. But equally, nobody involved in the production and popularization of leaded gasoline gets to play the “oh no, what a horrible and unforeseen surprise” card.
Lead’s toxic nature wasn’t a new discovery—it’s been known for literally thousands of years. Before the first gas pump had even started supplying the new antiknock fuel in early 1923, medical experts were warning that this was a terrible, terrible idea. William Clark of the US Public Health Service wrote in a letter that using tetraethyl lead presented a “serious menace to public health” and predicted—entirely accurately—that “on busy thoroughfares it is highly probable that the lead oxide dust will remain in the lower stratum.”
In an even more upsettingly accurate prediction in 1924, a leading toxicologist foresaw that “the development of lead poisoning will come on so insidiously that leaded gasoline will be in nearly universal use...before the public and the government awaken to the situation.”
And the thing is, it’s not like lead was the only available solution. In the years since their iodine breakthrough, Midgley’s team had come up with loads of effective antiknock agents. One of which was impressive in its simplicity: ethanol. A viable fuel in its own right, your basic drinkin’ alcohol isn’t just good for sterilizing physical wounds and temporarily cleansing emotional wounds, it also works well as an antiknock additive—with the added benefit that it’s incredibly easy and cheap to produce on a mass scale.
In fact, for years, Midgley’s team had been backing ethanol as the perfect solution to the engine-knocking problem. So why did they drop that in favor of a substance that everybody knew was toxic as hell? You will be shocked to learn that the reason was money.
The trouble was that ethanol was simply too easy and cheap to produce. And, crucially, it wasn’t patentable. Charles Kettering’s company, Delco, had been bought up by the giant General Motors in 1918, and there was pressure on his research team to show that they could generate actual cash, rather than just a bunch of pie-in-the-sky tinkering. Ethanol—a substance so easy to make that people could do it at home, with no hope of it being turned into a proprietary product—was useless for that purpose. And so they went with lead.
In case you think poor Thomas Midgley was simply a harmless inventor whose work was misused by some nasty plutocrats: nah. In fact, he was the one who suggested and strongly advocated using lead. He even did the math, calculating that they could charge an extra three cents on the gallon on TEL fuel, and predicting they could capture 20 percent of the gasoline market with an aggressive ad campaign. On that, like a lot of things, he was wrong by virtue of wildly underestimating his work’s impact: in just over a decade, tetraethyl lead gasoline—under the brand name Ethyl, cunningly not mentioning the “lead” bit—had actually captured 80 percent of the US market.
All the way, General Motors and Midgley insisted it was safe, despite plenty of what you might call “warning signs.” Huge flashing neon warning signs. Like the fact that in February 1923, when Ethyl first went on sale, Midgley himself had to take the whole month off work due to ill health caused by the lead fumes. Or like the fact that workers at the factories that made the fuel kept on dying a lot. Five workers died from lead poisoning at the Bayway plant in New Jersey, and 35 were hospitalized, many of them driven insane by the neurological effects of lead—“the patient becomes violently maniacal, shouting, leaping from the bed, smashing furniture and acting as if in delirium tremens,” one report recorded. Six workers died at the New Jersey Deepwater plant, where hallucinations caused by the lead were so common that workers renamed it the “House of Butterflies.” The deaths made it to the front page of the New York Times. Faced with a public relations crisis, sale of Ethyl was suspended, and the US Surgeon General hastily set up a committee to determine its safety.
And then, in a remarkable bit of corporate judo that would come to serve as the template for a whole range of fucking-stuff-up industries over the rest of the twentieth century, the companies behind the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation—General Motors, Standard Oil and chemical behemoth DuPont—managed to turn that PR crisis into a PR win.
It was a classic example of responsible people answering entirely the wrong question. The focus of public concern on the deaths at the manufacturing stage was so strong that, in the end, that was the only issue the Surgeon General’s committee actually delivered a verdict on. Persuaded by the firms’ assurances that extra safety measures would be taken in their factories—TEL, Midgley said in his testimony, was “not so much a dangerous poison as it is a treacherous one”—the committee decided not to ban its manufacture. The much bigger question of its effect on the exhaust-fume-breathing public was never actually decided: that was, in the time-honored tradition, a matter for future research. But the committee’s decision was spun to the public and the politicians as giving leaded gasoline an entirely clean bill of health.
In case you’re wondering about that “future research,” for the next four decades, almost all of it was either funded by the companies who made leaded gasoline, or carried out by their own staff. In shock news, this research was inconclusive! Which was all the producers of TEL needed to make the case that the question was still undecided, and it would be very, very bad and wrong to stop selling this lovely fuel that had enabled so many dreams to come true.
Because once leaded gasoline had been given the supposed all clear, the sky was the limit. Not only did it stop car engines knocking, it enabled the development of a whole new generation of more powerful engines, which turned cars from practical but ungainly old bangers into fast, smooth, sleek objects of desire. An aggressive advertising campaign played on fears of having a slow, crappy car if you didn’t use leaded fuel; rival products from competitors, including those that used ethanol—the very substance Midgley’s team had advocated for years—were derided as substandard. When health fears were raised in other countries about the introduction of leaded fuel there, the fact that the Americans had said it was A-OK was used to tamp down those fears; the Surgeon General, Hugh Cumming, even communicated with his counterparts overseas to tell them how extremely safe it was.
Backed by some woefully bad science, a rapacious desire to make money and the fact that powerful cars are cool and let you travel farther, leaded fuel quickly became the standard around the world. Thanks to advances in the oil extraction game, the supposed fuel shortages that had prompted the work on antiknock agents in the first place never materialized, so instead all the benefits from lead went toward making ever more powerful engines. The age of the automobile was here, and across the globe, more and more people started breathing in lead fumes.
The thing about lead is that it doesn’t break down. While some toxins will become less dangerous with time, lead builds up—in the air, in the soil and in the bodies of plants and animals and humans. In 1983, a report by the UK Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution concluded that “it is doubtful whether any part of the earth’s surface or any form of life remains uncontaminated by anthropogenic lead.” Children’s bodies are especially at risk, as they absorb five times the amount of lead into their systems as adults. In the US alone, it’s estimated that 70 million children had toxic levels of lead in their blood in the decades between the 1920s and 1970s.
The effects of lead are severe. The World Health Organization estimates that hundreds of thousands of people die annually worldwide from lead-poisoning illnesses, such as heart disease. Beyond the physical health effects, lead also damages children’s neurol
ogical development—it causes a drop in IQ levels among affected populations, and is estimated to be the cause of over 12 percent of developmental intellectual disabilities around the world.
It also causes behavioral problems, such as antisocial behavior, which gives rise to one of the more nightmarish possible consequences of Thomas Midgley Jr.’s work. It’s important to point out that this is, to date, just an unproven hypothesis, but a number of researchers have pointed out that the enormous spike in crime levels that occurred across much of the world in the postwar period tracks pretty neatly the growth in lead pollution.
The crime levels that gave rise to many of our casual cultural assumptions—the feral teens and the inner-city hellscapes and all that nineties talk of “superpredators”—are in fact a historical anomaly, a global blip that is hard to explain and now seems (hopefully) in the past. But in country after country, regardless of their social conditions or political direction, crime started to spike a couple of decades after leaded gasoline was introduced there—in other words, when the first children to be exposed to it in significant amounts reached their teens and early twenties. And the correlation applies in the opposite direction, too: the past few decades have seen a consistent fall in violent crime around much of the world, again regardless of what social policies each country might be implementing. But the drop in crime does seem to occur around two decades after each particular area banned lead in gasoline—happening sooner in the places that banned lead earlier, and more rapidly in the places that stopped its use abruptly rather than gradually phasing it out.
To reiterate, correlation is definitely not causation, and this is still no more than informed speculation. Given the ethical issues you’d hit if you tried to inject a load of children with lead and then wait around to see how many crimes they committed twenty years later, it may never be proven one way or the other. But in addition to possibly millions dead, and the fact that we’ve polluted every corner of the planet, and the knowledge that multiple generations of children had poison in their blood that affected their intelligence (those are the generations, by the way, who have BEEN IN CHARGE OF THE WORLD FOR THE LAST FORTY YEARS), the possibility that we might have caused a global crime wave that lasted for decades and entirely reshaped our view of society, simply because Thomas Midgley wanted to make three cents on the gallon, is...well, it’s a very long and very dark joke.
Midgley himself did not hang around after inventing leaded gasoline. Ever the tinkerer, he quickly moved on to other areas of investigation—and he still had his second catastrophic mistake to make.
Unlike the years-long search for a better fuel, this one came quickly. In fact, according to corporate legend, it took Midgley all of three days after being set the problem before he found a solution. And unlike lead, this one genuinely is a case of unintended consequences: there were no dire warnings ignored or risks covered up. It was simply a product of assuming, in the absence of any evidence, that everything would be fine.
This time, the problem Midgley confronted was cooling things down. This was 1928, not long after the beginning of the era of mechanical refrigeration (before that, the ice-harvesting industry was big business, with vast quantities of ice being carved up and shipped from the cold parts of the world so that people in the warmer parts could keep stuff cool). The trouble was, all the substances currently being used for refrigeration were (a) expensive, and (b) extremely dangerous. They had a tendency to catch fire, or poison people in large numbers if they leaked—the year after Midgley began his work on refrigeration, a leak of methyl chloride from a Cleveland hospital’s refrigeration unit killed over 100 people.
Unsurprisingly, this was causing something of a drag on widespread adoption of refrigeration technology.
The goal was simple: to find a cheap, nonflammable, nontoxic substance that would do the same job as the current refrigerants. General Motors had recently bought a refrigeration company, which they renamed Frigidaire, and they knew that if they could crack the problem, they’d make a mint.
Midgley’s approach was less haphazard this time around (he’d now had over a decade’s experience in chemistry, after all). Studying the chemical properties of known refrigerants, he quickly identified fluorine as a likely candidate, ideally in a compound with carbon to neutralize its toxic effects. And he pretty much nailed it out of the gate, as one of the initial substances his team created to test was dichlorodifluoromethane. These days, it’s better known by the brand name they gave it: Freon.
Midgley demonstrated its safety to great acclaim at a meeting of the American Chemical Society, theatrically inhaling a lungful of it and using it to blow out a candle. Nontoxic, nonflammable and an excellent refrigerant. Perfect. Indeed, he hadn’t just discovered a new compound, he’d discovered a whole new class of them, all of which had similar properties. They became known as chlorofluorocarbons—or, to use the common abbreviation, CFCs.
Unfortunately, in the early 1930s, nobody even really knew what the “ozone layer” was, or just how important that thin band of oxygen molecules in the stratosphere was in shielding the surface of the earth from the sun’s harmful ultraviolet rays. They certainly didn’t know that CFCs, entirely harmless at sea level, would become far more dangerous when they got into the upper atmosphere, where that same ultraviolet radiation would cause them to break down into their constituent elements—and that one of those elements, chlorine, would destroy the ozone, robbing the planet of its protective shield.
In fairness, they also didn’t anticipate that the use of CFCs would end up being far wider than refrigeration. Very quickly people worked out that these new, exciting and extremely safe chemicals had lots of other uses—most notably as a propellant in aerosol sprays. In a darkly amusing bit of historical irony, during and after World War II, CFCs were widely used to spray insecticides, including that other classic example of large-scale chemistry screw-ups, the birth-defect-causing nightmare that was DDT.
After the war, aerosols really took off, in everything from spray paint to deodorants. And they took off in another, more literal way: the vast amounts we started releasing made their way upward into the stratosphere, where they set about dismantling the ozone layer.
The good news here is that this time humanity realized the problem before it could cause death on a massive scale. Woo-hoo! Score one for humans! In the 1970s (just as the first moves to phase out leaded gasoline were beginning), the growing hole in the ozone layer was also discovered, along with the link to CFCs. With that came the warning: if ozone depletion carried on at the current rate, humans would be exposed to more and more damaging UV radiation, and within a matter of decades cancer cases and blindness would soar.
And so from the 1970s to the 1990s, the world set about unwinding Thomas Midgley’s legacy, as both of his major inventions were either banned or phased out in most countries around the world. We’re still stuck with huge amounts of environmental lead—it doesn’t simply break down or vanish, and cleaning it up is a nightmare. But in good news, at least in most places children aren’t breathing it in as much anymore, and the amount of lead in the blood of many kids is now below toxic levels. Hurrah. The ozone layer, meanwhile, is slowly repairing itself now that CFCs have been widely banned: if all goes well, it should be back to pre-Midgley levels by, ooh, 2050-ish. Go, team.
Midgley’s reputation, meanwhile, is set: he was a “one-man environmental disaster,” as New Scientist described him; a man who in the words of historian J. R. McNeill (in his book Something New Under the Sun) “had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in earth’s history.”
But it’s also true to say that he shaped the modern world, often in unexpected ways. Antiknock fuel led to cars becoming the dominant mode of transport in many parts of the world, and established them not just as tools but as status objects that became a potent symbol of personal identity and individualism. CFCs didn’t just bring your domestic fridge into existenc
e, they powered air-conditioning, too, without which many major world cities simply wouldn’t exist in the same form as they currently do. His two inventions even teamed up: more powerful vehicles with inbuilt AC made regular long-distance driving a realistic, even enjoyable proposition. Large swathes of the American West and much of the Middle East, to take just two examples, would likely be very different places without Thomas Midgley’s creations.
There was a knock-on effect on wider culture, too—for example, in America, movie theaters were among the earliest adopters of air-conditioning, helping to boost the popularity of cinema as a leisure activity during the Great Depression, cementing the cultural impact of the golden age of film and making it perhaps the defining entertainment form of the twentieth century. Basically, what we’re saying is Thomas Midgley invented Los Angeles: a city that runs on cars and AC, and is home to the movie business.
So the next time you sit in a cinema watching a dumb Hollywood film about a cop who doesn’t play by the rules taking on a crime wave, just remember that almost everything about your experience may well come down to the fact that Thomas Midgley Jr. assumed the chemicals he’d invented would be harmless, and would make him three cents on the gallon.
6 SCIENTISTS WHO WERE KILLED BY THEIR OWN SCIENCE
Jesse William Lazear
American medic Jesse William Lazear proved beyond doubt that yellow fever was transmitted by mosquitoes—by letting one of the disease-carrying mosquitoes bite him. He died, proving his theory right.
Franz Reichelt
An Austrian French tailor who in 1912 confidently attempted to test his elaborate new parachute suit by jumping from the Eiffel Tower while wearing it (he was supposed to use a dummy). Plummeted to his death.
Daniel Alcides Carrión García
Peruvian medical student Carrión was determined to investigate Carrion’s disease. Of course, it wasn’t called Carrion’s disease then. It got that name after he injected himself with blood drawn from the warts of a victim, and died.