Wow, Thomas Midgley, Jr. died from his own Heath Robinson contraption for lifting him out of bed but not before he put lead into petrol and created CFCs. Should have done those the other way around and saved us all a whole lot of grief.
> Midgley's legacy has been scarred by the negative environmental impact of leaded gasoline and Freon. Environmental historian J. R. McNeill opined that Midgley "had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth's history", and Bill Bryson remarked that Midgley possessed "an instinct for the regrettable that was almost uncanny".
Multiple sources seem to agree that the reason he chose to add lead to gasoline rather than ethanol (which was both greener and cheaper) was due to profit: his company could patent leaded gasoline, but not ethanol. That's an interesting lesson that we should learn any day now.
Interesting!
Fritz Haber & Robert Le Rossignol (who are both out of the running for being killed by their own inventions) might have a reasonable competing claim to their shares in "most impact on the atmosphere" for: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process
> Due to its dramatic impact on the human ability to grow food, the Haber process served as the "detonator of the population explosion", enabling the global population to increase from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 7.7 billion by November 2018. [...] Nearly 50% of the nitrogen found in human tissues originated from the Haber-Bosch process.
Being responsible for removing a bottleneck that enabled +100% more biomass of tool-using fossil-fuel-burning* primates arguably may have been a much larger indirect impact on the atmosphere (and many other things, for better or worse), leaving aside the direct impact on the nitrogen cycle.
* also, for various subsets of primates, perhaps add: airplane-flying, meat-eating, truck-driving, aircon-running, tree-planting, fish-catching, land-clearing, television-watching, hackernews-reading, list-enumerating, ...
I think nitrogen run off from soil has had quite an impact on changing water habitats as well, eutrophication and fish getting beat out by algae for limited oxygen resources.
He was completely unapologetic about it - he thought gas a better form of killing.
Both his wife and daughter seem to borne some guilt from his poison gas work. His wife committed suicide a week after Ypres - though some have disputed if it was connected. His daughter's suicide was on learning her research into poison gas cures couldn't be continued.
The grandparent is the one claiming history did it wrong, by using leaded gasoline even though ethanol gasoline would have been the better choice.
Eh. "It could only be this way, because it was" is a textbook definition of begging the question and circular reasoning. It's entirely possible that there were multiple extrinsic reasons that lead to this situation that aren't "leaded fuel was just the better option". Marketing/PR, industry momentum, regulatory capture, cost-of-entry into the fuel industry. In fact it was noted below that the leaded fuel inventor has partnered with GM.
This is exactly what the GP meant by invoking History vs. Econ 101. You're assuming that this simplistic model of price/demand is an inevitable law of nature even though there are countless counter examples throughout history of the wrong decisions made for the wrong reasons.
And profit for what? His immediate use?
I’m not seeing any indication of a family in his bios. Where did all of that wealth go?
According to "The secret history of lead" [1]:
> With a legal monopoly based on patents that would provide a royalty on practically every gallon of gasoline sold for the life of its patent, Ethyl promised to make GM shareholders–among whom the du Ponts, Alfred Sloan and Charles Kettering were the largest–very rich. (...) In April 1923, (...) the General Motors Chemical Company was established to produce TEL, with Charles Kettering as president and Thomas Midgley as vice president.
So it seems most of it went to GM, Du-Pont, and Standard Oil. As for who inherited his personal fortune, he had a wife and two children [2].
Worse still, Midgely worked actively to cover the risks of lead up. He even held a press conference in 1924 where, to assure reporters that TEL was safe, he washed his hands in a bowl of the stuff (https://www.bbc.com/news/business-40593353)!
Deborah Blum covered the whole story in her excellent 2011 book, The Poisoner's Handbook (https://www.amazon.com/Poisoners-Handbook-Murder-Forensic-Me...). Blum excerpted the story of TEL for a piece in Wired, which can be read here: https://www.wired.com/2013/01/looney-gas-and-lead-poisoning-...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatoly_Dyatlov
Still, he didn't get killed by it right away...
There are a lot of "old wives tales" about the lead being useful for lubrication or "cushioning the valves" or other nonsense that has been substantially debunked.