A lot of people through history managed to invent one thing that salted the earth for a generation, but when it comes to fucking up the planet, Thomas Midgley Jr is the bellwether. The mind reels thinking how different the planet would be now if Mama Midgley had swallowed.
Today’s Moment of Science… the most cancelled chemist.
When you think of leaded gasoline and CFCs, what comes to mind? Greedy captains of industry laughing their way to the bank, callously disregarding the harm they’ve caused? A bygone era when we lived in blissful ignorance of the invisible damage caused by ‘our friend the atom’? Something in between, perhaps?
That’s the dark crevice spanned by Thomas Midgley’s career in the lab, when we were capable of creating new and powerful things but not quite capable of fully understanding them.
Midgley staked out significantly darker territory than that.
As a chemist at GM researching chemical additives for gasoline to reduce engine knock, Midgley conjured up tetraethyl lead (TEL) in the early 1920s. And to be fair, this neurotoxic bullshit made cars run smoothly.
But he knew it was neurotoxic bullshit.
“Can you imagine how much money we’re going to make with this? We’re going to make 200 million dollars, maybe even more,” Midgley reportedly told his boss at GM. This was while he was recovering from lead poisoning incurred during a demonstration of sniffing and touching the leaded product, meant to show off how safe the new fuel was. So.
This isn’t some ‘oh fuck how could we have known’ story, because we knew lead was poisonous (centuries before Midgley decided to huff it). It’s also not a story of TEL being an industry shifting breakthrough. In the research process, they came up with many compounds that reduced engine knock remarkably well.
Chief amongst them was plain old alcohol, the kind that gets you drunk. Unfortunately, there was little profit to be made in a gasoline product punched up with a touch of funny juice.
Conscientious of the potential fear of lead, ‘tetraethyl lead’ got a glow up to the brand name ‘Ethyl.’ Knowing it was neurotoxic, even having been poisoned by it personally, Midgley backed the big lie that leaded gasoline was safe.
Then he scampered off to another division of GM to fuck up the ozone layer.
To be fair, there was a bit of an ‘exploding refrigerator’ issue. When we moved over from ice boxes to these electric behemoths, we didn’t ask too many questions. You could have told people there was propane, ammonia, and sulfur dioxide piping through their fridge and they’d likely have said “but do you know how much an ice box sucks?” Refrigerators used gasses that could explode with deadly consequences every so often. People dealt with it because the next best thing was essentially a cooler.
Nobody else had anything better when Thomas Midgley came up with a new method to synthesize dichlorodifluoromethane, a CFC eventually marketed as Freon. First synthesized in the 1890s but previously without any common applications, by all measures of the time it was safe and incredibly stable.
The shenanigans don’t happen at sea level though.
Once released, Freon mixes into the air around us and finds its place in the gaseous layer cake. That wonderful stability allows it to stay intact, rising to the stratosphere before chlorine is cleaved off. Once there, chlorine systematically rips the ozone layer apart in a devastatingly simple set of chemical reactions.
I really want to pull for Midgley on this one. At least it seemed safer compared to the immediate danger in our homes. Nobody knew at the time that it was causing any damage. Unlike TEL, it was clearly superior to other available alternatives.
Midgley’s chemical monsters reigned across this good earth for about a half a century. Unleaded gasoline became commonly available by the mid-1970s (though it’s not 100% banned if we’re being honest). CFCs began being phased out shortly thereafter in the US, but we dragged our feet for a good long time on both of them.
Thomas Midgley Jr. never lived to see any of this.
Just a decade after the release of Freon, he contracted polio and lost leg function in 1940. He died at the cruel whim of a system of pulleys he invented to hoist him out of bed, strangled, in 1944.
He died a celebrated chemist, knowing only accolades, awards, and in a perversion of ironies, that his well intended work could have deadly consequences.
This has been your daily Moment of Science, reminding you that some toxic bullshit deserves to be cancelled.
Very true that leaded fuel is not extinct. Virtually all small airplanes run on 100low lead. Aircraft engines are far more expensive to update due to the regulatory issues with obtaining a supplemental type certificate for each model aircraft. Plus, the “old” tech works fine and there is no real incentive as long as 100LL is still in (limited) production.