quoms:

The Brilliant Inventor Who Made Two of History’s Biggest Mistakes

Midgley was laid to rest as a brilliant American maverick of the first order. Newspapers ran eulogies recounting the heroic inventions he brought into the world, breakthroughs that advanced two of the most important technological revolutions of the age: automobiles and refrigeration. “The world has lost a truly great citizen in Mr. Midgley’s death,” Orville Wright declared. “I have been proud to call him friend.” But the dark story line of Midgley’s demise — the inventor killed by his own invention! — would take an even darker turn in the decades that followed. While The Times praised him as “one of the nation’s outstanding chemists” in its obituary, today Midgley is best known for the terrible consequences of that chemistry, thanks to the stretch of his career from 1922 to 1928, during which he managed to invent leaded gasoline and also develop the first commercial use of the chlorofluorocarbons that would create a hole in the ozone layer. […]

Ethyl and Freon belonged to the same general class of secondary effect: innovations whose unintended consequences stem from some kind of waste byproduct that they emit. But the potential health threats of Ethyl were visible in the 1920s, unlike, say, the long-term effects of atmospheric carbon buildup in the early days of the Industrial Revolution. The dark truth about Ethyl is that everyone involved in its creation had seen incontrovertible evidence that tetraethyl lead was shockingly harmful to humans. Midgley himself experienced firsthand the dangers of lead poisoning, thanks to his work in Dayton developing Ethyl in the lab. In early 1923, Midgley cited health reasons in declining an invitation to a gathering of the American Chemical Society, where he was supposed to receive an honor for his latest discovery. “After about a year’s work in organic lead,” he wrote to the organization, “I find that my lungs have been affected and that it is necessary to drop all work and get a large supply of fresh air.” In a jaunty note to a friend at the time, Midgley wrote: “The cure for said ailment is not only extremely simple but quite delightful. It means to pack up, climb a train and search for a suitable golf course in the state named Florida.”

Midgley did in fact recover from his bout with lead poisoning, but other early participants in the Ethyl business were not so lucky. Days after the first mass-production site for tetraethyl lead opened at DuPont’s Deepwater facility in New Jersey, Midgley and Kettering found themselves responsible for one of the most horrifying chapters in the history of industrial-age atrocities. On the eastern banks of the Delaware River, not far from DuPont’s headquarters in Wilmington, the Deepwater facility already had a long history of industrial accidents, including a series of deadly explosions in its original operational role of manufacturing gunpowder. But as soon as it began producing Ethyl at scale, the factory turned into a madhouse. “Eight workers in the DuPont tetraethyl gas plant at Deep Water, near Penns Grove, N.J., have died in delirium from tetraethyl lead poisoning in 18 months and 300 others have been stricken,” The Times would later write in an investigative report. “One of the early symptoms is a hallucination of winged insects. The victim pauses, perhaps while at work or in a rational conversation, gazes intently at space and snatches at something not there.” Eventually, the victims would descend into violent, self-destructive insanity. One worker threw himself off a ferry in a suicide attempt; another jumped from a hospital window. Many had to be placed in straitjackets or strapped to their beds as they convulsed in abject terror. Before work was halted at the plant, the hallucinations of swarming insects became so widespread that the five-story building where Ethyl was produced was called the “house of butterflies.”

Perhaps the most damning evidence against Midgley and Kettering lies in the fact that both men were well aware that at least one potential alternative to tetraethyl lead existed: ethanol, which had many of the same antiknock properties as lead. But as Jamie Lincoln Kitman notes in “The Secret History of Lead”: “GM couldn’t dictate an infrastructure that could supply ethanol in the volumes that might be required. Equally troubling, any idiot with a still could make it at home, and in those days, many did.” On the face of it, ethyl alcohol would have seemed the far safer option, given what was known about lead as a poison and the unfolding tragedies at Deepwater and other plants. But you couldn’t patent alcohol.

Pretty good article, worth reading all the way through if you don’t already know the story. But here’s the paragraph that knocked my fucking socks off:

The footage at least gave the problem some specificity: How do you make the fuel combust more efficiently? In the early days, Midgley was groping in the dark; his training was as a mechanical engineer, after all, not as a chemist. One of his first lines of inquiry came from a bizarre suggestion from Kettering — that perhaps the color red could somehow improve the fuel’s combustion. Kettering had long been impressed by the way that leaves of the trailing arbutus plant could turn red even when covered by a layer of snow, somehow capturing the energy of the sun’s rays more effectively than other plants. Perhaps adding a red dye to the fuel would solve the problem of knock, Kettering suggested. So Midgley used iodine to dye the fuel red, and it did seem to have some mild antiknock properties. Ultimately he realized that it was the iodine itself, not its color, that was the active agent in subduing the knock. It wasn’t a solution per se, but it suggested something important nonetheless: that the ultimate solution would come from chemistry, not from engineering.

Leaded gasoline was invented, however indirectly, because of Charles Kettering’s mistaken belief that red gasoline would make your engine go faster? One of the greatest environmental and public health catastrophes in world history happened because the guy who invented the electrical engine starter thought fucking WARHAMMER 40K ORK PHYSICS WAS REAL? WHAT THE FUCK