Hacker News Reader

Comment by chuankl | Hacker News Reader

The absolute terrible thing about leaded gasoline is that they were already aware of several other additives (including ethanol, IIRC) that have the desired anti-knocking properties. But they went with tetraethyl lead anyway because it is cheaper and provided a few cents more profit per gallon.

A cent was worth more back then than it does now, but still :-(

View on HN

I would also emphasize a more social issue to this. There's also a tendency for society to discount the dangers of something when the impact is sporadically distributed or long-term. Beyond the endless corporate lobbying and sold out scientists/politicians working to convince everybody that leaded fuel was 100% safe, I think there was also probably a mindset of many in society that 'Well, if leaded fuel is so poisonous and I'm breathing it in everyday, then why am I perfectly fine?' And with such "logic" dismiss any concerns about its safety.

The Nation's story on it dives much deeper. There was an out and out panic about lead and leaded gasoline in the 1920s that GM and Ethyl/du Pont had to squash, which Midgely happily participated in. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/secret-history-lea...

> which Midgely happily participated in

Which moves him from the category of buffoon to evil.

> There's also a tendency for society to discount the dangers of something when the impact is sporadically distributed or long-term.

Doesn't US regulation still approach novel chemicals with a "Safe until proven otherwise" stance? Surely this doesn't help.

It's infinitely more convenient to assume that the leaders in the past were evil and the masses of the past ignorant than it is to assume they weren't let alone assume they were mostly just like us.

It must be nice to be able to make those assumptions and believe them...

Midgley had to be treated for lead poisoning following one of his demonstrations of how safe leaded fuel was. The fact leaded fuel was unsafe would not have come as a surprise to him or anybody else familiar with its development and risks. I don't give much of any consideration to good or evil, but I do to ethics and values. And our society's leaders, corporate and political, have been woefully absent of them for some time, in a trend that seems to be clearly rapidly worsening.

So in that regard I do agree that people of times past were, more or less, the same as today. Yet even the most cursory glance of our history, outside of what is taught in history class, is something that would emphasize that that belief is anything but nice to hold!

It's easy to believe because I see similar things happening in real time, right now.

They also were aware very early on of the health risks lead caused. Midgley himself suffered from lead poisoning. Then they poisoned the world for those few cents per gallon.

Note that despite suffering from it he kept doing stunt in public without realising it was a danger.

Local rationality is a thing. It is not all a plot to suck money out. He believed his own shit.

Money tends to do that to people.

The love of money is the root of all evil.

The most interesting to me is the correlation between the delinquency among children and teens, and the years of introduction of tetraethyl lead in gasoline for anti-knocking properties.

I read somewhere that Thomas Midgley Jr could be considered, in modern history, to be the organism with highest impactful on earth with his invention of Chlorofurocarbons and their impact on the ozone layers.

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesi...

Sort of like the anti Norman Borlaug.

They also knew it was toxic, but deliberately put on displays claiming that it wasn’t, even midgley would pour it over his hands despite knowing the danger and intentionally avoiding it in all other cases.

They also used medical testing to mislead: showing people could consume it and lead wouldn’t be detected in their urine. Apparently that showed it was safe, and no one said “then where did the lead go?”.

Happily he also invented the machine that killed him so at least he was egalitarian in his harm.

A cent was worth more back then, but I guarantee you any oil company today that could save a cent per gallon at the cost of human lives would do it without hesitation.

But how many gallons were sold with lead added? I would imagine that is quite substantial number, so in the end we are talking about large sums of money...

The “couple of cents” seemed like an off the cuff remark to indicate that leaded gas was less expensive than alternatives, but I would be interested in hearing about this delta as a percent rather than a fixed cost. Given inflation, gas price fluctuations, and the sheer volume in which fuel was sold, measuring it as a “couple of cents” is completely meaningless.

It's hard to have any conclusive number on this, it's not only about inflation etc. but also the cost of alternative ways of achieving the required octane (e.g. increasing production of reformate or alkylate, or the refinery buying external blendstocks like ethanol or MTBE), which varies a lot over time (due to technical advancements) and place (what kind of equipment does a refinery have installed), etc.

From a 1998 article (https://www.ifc.org/wps/wcm/connect/d3706d00-3d97-495d-8b8c-.... ) it estimates between $0.01-$0.03/liter for lead removal. US gasoline prices in 1990-2000 were at around $1.20/gallon which works out to about $0.32/liter. Taking the middle value of $0.02/liter for lead removal that would be around 6%. Just as a back-of-the-envelope calculation. I think in reality in many places that cost delta at pump the is lower since the usage of ethanol as an octane enhancer shifts the cost to various agricultural subsidy programs.

Wapo article from 1984 [0] asserts that 85-octane nonleaded gasoline was consistently about 2 cents cheaper to make than 87-octane leaded gasoline.

That said, that was with numerous advancements over the preceding 60 years which most likely would never have happened if we hadn't developed engines capable of taking advantage of high-octane fuels.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1984/04/01/c...

"But, as DeMuth noted, the EPA study is concerned about total costs and benefits to society, not just to one group. The study makes no attempt to predict what would happen to prices at the pump. It points out instead that the cost of manufacturing 87-octane unleaded gasoline, according to market prices, is consistently less than 2 cents a gallon more than for making 89-octane leaded gasoline. Average pump prices are about 7 cents more, however."

I believe this is the EPA study: https://nepis.epa.gov/Exe/ZyPURL.cgi?Dockey=9100YK16.TXT (I clicked the "download as pdf" adobe acrobat icon on the right)

"The DOE model estimates that at current lead levels (1.10 gplg) the marginal manufacturing cost differential between unleaded and leaded regular grades of gasoline is less than two cents per gallon. Retail prices, however, diverge by an average of about seven cents per gallon (Weekly Petroleum Status Report, 1984, various issues)."

7 cents per gallon is right around that 2 cents per liter that you cite, naturally.

A gallon of gasoline back in 1930 (or 1925 for that matter, pre-depression) cost about 20 cents. So, even 2 cents per gallon would be a 10% savings.

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/om030621b has some points of comparison (as well as a lot more historical context of the research that led Midgley & co to leaded gasoline if you're interested).

For what it's worth, per Table 1, ethanol is not anywhere near as effective as tetraethyllead -- it has an effectiveness of 0.1 per mol, vs TEL having a value of 118. Even when normalizing by molar mass (since TEL is a much heavier compound), TEL is still ~100x more effective than ethanol.

"... iodine had a few slight drawbacks. It added over a dollar to the cost of a gallon of fuel and we were afraid that would be considered a trifle excessive by most motorists."

"Further studies with more dilute solutions showed that a one-fortieth of one percent solution of tetraethyllead was equivalent in knock inhibition to 1.3% aniline in kerosene."

"The first public sale of Ethyl gasoline (the name given it by Kettering) occurred on February 1, 1923 in Dayton, OH at 25 cents per gallon (regular gas cost 21 cents per gallon) (Figure 8) before large-scale production had started."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com