PROBLEM SOLVING - A CAUTIONARY TALE

I was wanting to learn about and write something on how leaded gasoline became a thing. But then I came upon the biography of its inventor. 

Thomas Midgley, Jr. was born in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania in 1889. He grew up in Columbus, Ohio and studied engineering at Cornell, earning a Master’s of Engineering in 1908 and a PhD in mechanical engineering in 1911. Five years later he was working for General Motors, at their Dayton Engineering Laboratories (DELCo) subsidiary in Ohio. 

TETRAETHYL LEAD

At DELCo, Midgley was given the task to figure out why the internal combustion engines of that time developed a knocking sound. In December of 1921 Midgley discovered tetraethyl lead. The substance, when added to gasoline, prevented the dreadful engine knocking; and, critically, his discovery wasn’t just a superior alternative to other fuels, making engines run more efficiently, it was also cheaper to produce. The anti-knocking compound was Midgley’s first of many patents (US Patent No. 1,491,998). And the award he received for his discovery, from the American Chemical Society, just one of many to come.

But, as the company was busy branding, promoting, and selling their new product (labelled “ethyl” to avoid mention of the lead component), Midgley was on extended vacation in Florida — to recover from severe lead poisoning. Though the health impacts of lead were understood for thousands of years at that point, and even folks such as Charles Dickens and Benjamin Franklin having written about the dangers of lead poisoning, there was money to be made! So, GM and Midgley pressed forward.

In 1924, GM established a separate chemical company to supervise production of tetraethyl lead by the DuPont company. Midgley was made vice president. However, following several cases of lead poisoning and a pair of lead-related deaths, their prototype plant in Dayton, Ohio was in trouble and administrators were considering abandoning the project altogether. DuPont’s Deepwater, New Jersey plant saw similar troubles, with eight more deaths. General Motors then decided to partner with Standard Oil, forming the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation, to market and produce tetraethyl lead using a new bromide process. Within months of starting operation, staff at their new and improved plant were plagued with lead poisoning, hallucinations, and cases of insanity. Oh and five more deaths.

The broader public began asking questions. In October of 1924, in his role as VP, Midgley participated in a press conference to allay concerns about the safety of their lead-based product. Pouring the tetraethyl lead over his skin and breathing in its vapors to demonstrate its harmlessness, Midgley announced to the gathering of reporters that he could do the same daily without having any issues. The State of New Jersey was not impressed and ordered these lethal plants closed. Shortly thereafter, Midgley also took another leave of absence due to another lead poisoning diagnosis, at which point he was relieved of his role as vice president of the General Motors Chemical Company. However, production of tetraethyl lead started up once again, the following year, after intervention from the federal government. Someone had convinced them the higher octane engines enabled by lead additives were critical for military applications.

FREON

But Midgley wasn’t finished developing his chemical gifts for humanity. Frigidaire, a division of General Motors, was one of the leading producers of refrigeration systems in the 1920s. All refrigeration at that point made use of explosive, flammable, or highly toxic compounds such as ammonia, chloromethane, methyl formate, propane, or sulphur dioxide. As a result, they were desperate for a safer alternative.

That’s how Midgley arrived at his second significant contribution to civilization: chlorofluorocarbons (better known as CFCs.) Midgley, working with Albert Leon Henne, had the idea to incorporate fluorine into a hydrocarbon, believing the carbon–fluorine bond was effectively inert, stable enough to prevent hydrogen fluoride from being released or resulting in any other unwanted breakdown products. In 1930, they eventually synthesized their first CFC, dichlorodifluoromethane, and named it "Freon". It was both non-toxic and non-flammable. Problem solved. Quickly Freon and many other CFCs replaced the older, more volatile refrigerants. But Midgley and Henne’s CFCs didn’t just make it into refrigerators and air conditioners. Soon CFCs were found to have many useful applications such as propellants in aerosol products and asthma inhalers.

At that time, of course, no one knew CFCs would make their way into the upper atmosphere. They also were unaware that once there CFCs would be broken down by ultraviolet radiation, releasing catastrophic chlorine atoms that would themselves break down the essential ozone molecules protecting our own species and almost every other life form from cancer-inducing radiation...

For his efforts at remaking the world, the Society of Chemical Industry awarded Midgley the Perkin Medal in 1937. That was followed by the American Chemical Society’s highest award, the Priestley Medal, in 1941. He was then gifted two honorary degrees and elected to the National Academy of Sciences. In 1944, Midgley was elected president and chairman of the American Chemical Society and named an American delegate to the International Congress of Applied Chemistry.

ENDINGS

At age 51 Midgley was diagnosed with polio. He was quickly left with significant disabilities including severe paralysis. He died just four years later. The more popular version of events says the brilliant inventor applied his great mind to building a harness and device to lift his weakened body from his bed by way an elaborate system of ropes and pulleys. It’s said that, by accident, on one lift he became entangled in his device and a rope wrapped around his neck, killing him. But you’ll find the coroner who conducted the autopsy on Midgley, as reported in The Dayton Herald, November 10th, 1944, felt differently about the situation. He declared the death intentional: “suicide by suffocation through strangulation.”

PROFITS AND BENEFITS (BUT ALSO MORE DEATH AND DESTRUCTION)

Aside from becoming an essential component of aviation fuel, it is said that by making engines more efficient, tetraethyl lead saved billions of barrels of oil in just the first 25 years of its application, alone. The economic benefits for the automobile and gas industries as well as America and many other countries was likely tremendous. You could also argue that the fuel savings reduced the volume of CO₂ produced over the 20th century and may have helped forestall climate change. And there's no doubt Midgley achieved his aim of making refrigeration safer, at least at an immediate personal level.

That said, it’s also not wrong to suggest that Midgley’s inventions poisoned himself and his colleagues, resulting in their and his own sickening, catastrophic mental decline, and death. He also hastened the deaths of millions of people around the world and invented a method by which we, totally unwittingly, almost extinguishing life on planet Earth — certainly the vast majority of land-based organisms and any living in regions of the sea easily penetrated by ultraviolet radiation.

Not until the 1970s did we fully appreciate the human health and ecological impacts of leaded gasoline. And it wasn’t until then that an unleaded alternative was formulated. And it took much more time than that for countries to ban its use. Japan was the first in 1986, followed by Brazil and Austria in ‘89 and Canada in 1990. It took another 30 years for the rest of the world to catch up and phase out leaded gasoline for most automobiles. But it's still very much with us. Though leaded gasoline has eventually been banned worldwide for road-going cars and trucks, off-road and racing vehicles still use the product today, as does the aviation industry.

Similarly, in 1974, when global CFC production reached a million tons annually, scientists Molina and Rowland published their little paper in Nature, (for which they earned a Nobel Prize in chemistry) theorising that CFCs could be destroying the planet’s ozone layer. And that theory wasn’t first confirmed observationally for another decade. In 1985, the world was shocked by the publication of another paper in Nature, by Shanklin, Farman, and Gardiner, including observations and a possible chemical mechanism explaining how a vast, 20 million square kilometre hole had opened up in the atmospheric layer protecting life from a lethal ultraviolet rays. And, though the Montreal protocol arrived in 1987, freezing production and consumption of CFCs, full phase-out was not arrived at until only recently. More than that, we're still learning about the global impacts from this “safe refrigerant” all the time, with new research suggesting full recovery of our ozone layer is still generations away.

Reflecting on all this then, to my mind the most enduring gift of the life of Thomas Midgley Jr. may be as a cautionary tale for us all. In fact, I don't know how I only just heard about this character. By all accounts, the man was intelligent, skilled, and as highly educated as possible. He also joined a leading company in his field and toiled away, using his skills and knowledge to try and make the world a better place. And for all he knew, that was his legacy. It wasn't until long after his death that the world discovered so many of the cruel flaws in "Better Things for Better Living...Through Chemistry."