Thomas Midgley Jr.: Accidentally The Most Dangerous Man Who Ever Lived[0]
Leaded gas, CFCs, and accidentally created a machine that ended his own existence.[1]
[0]https://allthatsinteresting.com/thomas-midgley-jr [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.
Also leads to another great list-of-lists; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_unusual_deaths
Elaborate contraption, jumps, falls like a stone, is dead. The end.
Imaginary person: "But he had balls and believed in his own theories."
Me: "Ehm but... how difficult would it have been to throw a wooden puppet instead... or run scaled down experiments first,... than to just immediately jump..."
And Edit: He did run dummy experiments and they clearly showed he shouldn't have jumped https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Reichelt#Experiments
Edit 2: That article is very interesting, regarding the jump: "Initial reports speculated on Reichelt's state of mind: none assumed he had been suicidal, but many called him discombobulated in the brain. [...] interview with one of his friends, who claimed that the tailor had felt pressured into giving a dramatic demonstration to attract sponsors, without whom he could not expect to make a profit before any patent expired." (So human nature at play. Financial pressure, wanting to will something to work, guts in the wrong places. An heroic last ditch stunt, combined with a not quite sane state of mind)
> [...] Police and others crowd around the body of Reichelt as it is carried away. They then measure the depth of the hole in the frozen ground made by his fall (15 cm).
At least they got something out of it I suppose :)
Based on the OP, it wasn't at all accidental. They knew it was dangerous and chose it because they could make more money than with safer alternatives such as ethanol.
And plenty of stuff is toxic in large quantities but harmless (or even vital!) in small quantities.
He's not some incidental commentator. He's an engineer and a principle force behind this technology. He is responsible for the outcomes - 'I didn't know' is reckless negligence. And if there were clear acute problems, chronic problems weren't hard to guess at for anyone, much less an engineer, with all those resources, working on it for years.
well he's not some biochemist...
and even biochemists have trouble within their own field because there's so much 'unknown' stuff in biochem (eg Thalidomide scandal)
He would then spend months in Florida recovering from lead poisoning.
He knew, and he didn't care.
I don't think that cumulative toxicity started entering the public mindset until well into the middle of the century.
Fun fact: during their time Dayton had the most patents per capita of anywhere in the US.
The titles like annoy me to no end.
Because Thomas Midgley was an engineer. Not overlord of General Motors. Not director. Not even a large shaholder.
GM Leadership knew effects of TEL. And for decades traded everyone's health for their profits. Midgley is complicit, but he's just a small piece.
Being a prescriptivist creates no end of everyday pains. Language just won't conform.
Midgley used to tour around “proving” the safety of leaded gas by pouring it on his hands. And had to be treated twice for lead poisoning.
He was very much a culprit.
For example Charles Kettering (essentially boss of Midgley) was Director of Research for 27 years at GM. Was large shareholder of GM. And he hired Robert Arthur Kehoe to prove that TEL is safe. And Kehoe did. The "proof" was that "you didn't definitively prove that TEL is unsafe, so it's okay".
Btw Kehoe is also the one who certified that Freon is safe.
Midgley didnt invent most if any of what was packaged up and commodified, he just appropriated research at the time into products without a care in the world. its for that reason that me and many other scientists simply dont publish some results anymore.
The mind it takes to discover and formalize a thing, will understand its problems. The mind it takes to commodify something once formalized, can be many steps down, and so, is unlikely to be capable of seeing the problem.
Therefore, anything which can cause serious issues wont be released. why? because even if we as the inventors go against the profit narrative, we'll be destroyed. people only listen when there's money to be made, but when we say "ok, that's eboygh fossil fuels, we need to slow down" funding gets cut, reputation and character gets attacked, and you largly get deplatformed.