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Comment by probably_wrong | Hacker News Reader

For those that didn't follow the link to Thomas Midgley Jr.'s Wikipedia page, the "Legacy" section is definitely worth a read:

> 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.

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> "had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth's history"

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, ...

If I remember correctly, Haber freed up a great deal of labor to be put into the Germany's military complex which empowered the country for WWI which embittered the country leading to WWII.

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.

On a (slightly) smaller scale he also figured out how to weaponize chlorine gas and heavily evangelized its use (to the extent of bringing a tank to the front against orders and releasing it at Ypres).

As father of chemical weapons he oversaw their use on the battlefield and gave the world Haber's rule for more effective mass gassing. Mustard gas too, and I think he even had some part in development of Zyklon B.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber's_rule

Yeah that dude killed people and damaged the earth on a whole bunch of different scales.

If ethanol was better and unpatentable, competitors could have used it instead of paying patent licensing fees.

Ethanol has downsides too, like eating up the rubber bits in your fuel system.

I thought that was methanol or is it both?

Ethanol too. That's why you need to be careful if you have an older car and live in one of those states that does E85.

E85 pumps are clearly marked. It's E15 that is the threat.

Are you claiming that history Did It Wrong, because econ-101 says so?

No, they are claiming that history did it right: Obviously leaded gasoline actually did appear to be the better choice at that time, or else people would have just used the non-patent-encumbered ethanol.

The grandparent is the one claiming history did it wrong, by using leaded gasoline even though ethanol gasoline would have been the better choice.

This is with the caveat that the inventors had a close association with GM, who presumably could have altered the design of the engines to be compatible with ethanol gas if they chose to. The profit from the patented additive was incentive for them to not make those changes, presumably helping to ensure the other fuel producers couldn't use a different additive.

"Obviously leaded gasoline actually did appear to be the better choice at that time, or else people would have just used the non-patent-encumbered ethanol."

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.

>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 profi

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?

> 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].

[1] https://www.thenation.com/article/secret-history-lead/

[2] https://www.nndb.com/people/727/000205112/

Well, I suppose there was value for some people in these atrocious inventions.

Slightly unfair to condemn a man for risks nobody knew about, no?

He gets a pass on CFCs. Lead, though... the acute toxicity of lead compounds was known at the time. Workers making tetraethyllead were frequently poisoned, often fatally.

Midgely absolutely knew of the risks of lead, or at least he should have -- he had to take a leave of absence from his work to recover from a case of lead poisoning, and so many workers in the plant that made tetraethyl lead (TEL) developed inexplicable odd behaviors from their own cases that locals referred to the plant as "the loony gas building."

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-...

Sure, but just because it’s dangerous to manufacture doesn’t mean you can’t use it. Otherwise we’d never have nuclear power.

Hmmmm. Insight almost dawning.

The health risks of lead have been known since antiquity.

The lesson being that we should let companies profit from stuff? After all, if they could have profited from Ethanol, they would have chosen that...

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