In 1921, a team of G.M. researchers looking for a way to prevent knock discovered that by adding small amounts of tetraethyl lead, or TEL, to the fuel supply they could solve the problem. By that point, the toxicity of lead was already well known. Indeed, one of the G.M. researchers behind TEL, Thomas Midgley, very nearly poisoned himself while working on the additive, and several workers at a plant experimenting with TEL died gruesome deaths as a result of exposure to it. (Midgley went on to invent Freon, which was later discovered to be destroying the ozone layer.)The author apparently argues that even in the 1920's, chemists proposed avoiding the problem by increasing petrol octane, which is the solution that, 50 years later, was finally forced on the car manufacturers after untold public health harm by leaded petrol.
Anyway, I had never heard of Thomas Midgley before, even though it sounds like he almost singlehandedly did the world in; which is quite a feat, really.
Let's see what Wikipedia has to say about him....Ah well, there you go: typically, I am not original in my thoughts:
One historian remarked that Midgley "had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in earth history." [1]He also died in a "stranger than fiction" fashion:
In 1940, he contracted polio at the age of 51, which left him severely disabled. This led him to devise an elaborate system of strings and pulleys to lift him from bed. This system was the eventual cause of his death when he was accidentally entangled in the ropes of this device and died of suffocation at the age of 55.I hope we have all learnt something from this post*.
*(I have no idea what, but it was sort of fun.)
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