Double Damage

What do you know about how lead came to be put into gasoline?

I knew that it was done on purpose some time in the 1920s to prevent "knocking." And I knew that its promoters were aware that lead is poisonous. 

I didn't know (or had forgotten) all of the details about Thomas Midgley Jr., the General Motors chemical engineer who came up with the idea. One of the many facts I never knew was that GM, along with DuPont and Standard Oil, wanted to make more powerful engines to differentiate from Ford's cheap Model T, but the low-grade fuels used at the time backfired inside the engine.

Midgley's leaded gas was the answer. To sell the idea, he went so far as to pour tetraethyl lead over his hands and breathe it in as a safety demonstration for the press. No one told the press that Midgley — like many of the workers in the fuel-manufacturing plants — later developed lead poisoning.

Another fact about Midgley that I never knew is that he also devised the idea of using Freon as a refrigerant, and thus created the category of CFCs. Yes, those are the ones that created a hole in the ozone layer. 

"In another public demonstration, in 1930, Midgley inhaled the gas and blew out a candle with it, a move designed to show its safety." Quite a showman, was Midgley. 

There's some discussion in the article about how much to blame him as an individual vs. seeing him as a cog in the early/mid-century corporate machine of growth and innovation. But I'm not so sure just any inventor would have been pouring liquid lead over their hands or breathing in Freon for the business press. 

It seems to me Midgley wanted to sell his ideas and make a name for himself, and especially with lead — where they already had facts available — he didn't care too much about what that meant for the safety of millions of people.

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Earlier posts about lead in gas and lead poisoning:

2019: Lead and Crime, Causality

2021: Two Stories, a Connection, the Beginning of a Hypothesis

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