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Leaded Gas, CFCs, and the Dark Side of Progress (hackaday.com)
szczys writes: Leaded Gas did a great job of keeping engines from knocking thanks to tetra-ethyl lead. Unfortunately the fumes from the chemical are highly poisonous. R-12 is a refrigerant that revolutionized the cold storage of vaccines. It turned out to be the first of the chlorofluorocarbons which are well known (and now banned) for damaging the environment. Both are the creations of one inventor: Thomas Migley, Jr. Two deadly inventions seem like more than enough for one person, but his story ends with a third. Stricken with Polio, he invented a system to help him get in and out of bed on his own. A tragic accident ended his life when he was caught and strangled by the system he created.
The summary covers all of the main points of the article, so you won't need to read TFA.
Isn't the summary just what Vsauce put in one of his videos?
Wikipedia has the most interesting quote about him in his article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....
' J. R. McNeill, an environmental historian, opines that Midgley "had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth's history." '
Anyway, it's always been a bit of an unfair slam. Leaded gasoline only became an issue when the car number went from the 7.5 million that were around when TEL was being made, to the over 100 million that were around the time that leaded ramped down in the mid 70s. The miles driven per person were also way lower back then- because most people had to get around without a car, everything was set up for that. If you had it to do all over again, you'd probably STILL use leaded gasoline until about 1955 or so. However, at least everyone knew lead was bad for you back then- not so with Freon's very hard to verify environmental impact, which wasn't understood for a lot longer.
Hardly. Got to break some eggs to make an omelette. Polio is certainly nothing to gloat over.
Read the article, author didn't know difference between "effect" and "affect"
Perhaps this is why he seems to forgive Midgley for being "creative"
Small airports next to elementary schools are probably creating future violent criminals.
This article sparked the memory of wondering why we had to pay more for unleaded gas... Apparently it was expensive to remove the naturally occurring lead from the refined gasoline.
Oh, wait . . .
The evidence is now very strong that leaded gasoline was responsible for much past violent crime. http://www.chicagotribune.com/...
to the improvement of life for millions of people? Tetraethyl lead is a small speedbump on the road to a bright future of advanced chemistry. The global car industry is a marvel. The tree huggers need to bugger off. What Henry Ford said one hundred years ago ring s truer than ever today.
"I will build a motor car for the great multitude...constructed of the best materials, by the best men to be hired, after the simplest designs that modern engineering can devise...so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one-and enjoy with his family the blessing of hours of pleasure in God's great open spaces."
Henry Ford.
You should remember that Thomas Migley was foremost a scientist, and quite representative of the hubris and single-mindedness of scientists. When he advocated for the safety of leaded gasoline, he wasn't lying for financial gain, he was doing so because he believed it. The scientists protecting you from ozone holes or lead or snake oil are indistinguishable from the scientists that create the ozone holes or leaded gasoline in the first place, or the scientists that create better cancer treatments; it's only in hindsight that you know who was right.
So, when scientists tell you how to live your life or tell you that the science is settled and you should just do what they tell you, just remember how this guy died: A tragic accident ended his life when he was caught and strangled by the system he created.
Every modern app apper knows that the best way to get around town or keep your perishable food chilled is with appy apps. Only LUDDITES use gasoline or freon!
Apps!
You go the whole post cracking on crackers, and then suddenly, crtackers are the ones that are stupid and privileged?
I'm not sure how you made that leap from crackers to crtackers. Nothing in the rest of your post even mentions crtackers, much less provides any evidence that they're stupid and/or privileged.
Sounds like Karma to me.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
They've already created sexbots, although the "indistinguishable from the real thing" might still be a bit of a problem. Most blonds I know can't pass a Turing test either!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
fucking polio did.
...he was indeed lying for financial gain, because he was suffering from lead poison and was quite aware of it. What he honestly believed is impossible for us to know, but if honestly believed lead was harmless he was deliberately ignoring evidence to the contrary. The fact that some scientists mislead others (and perhaps themselves) out of love for money or their pet theories, doesn't mean all scientists behave the same way.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
(and no banned)
Do some bloody editing, someone, please.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Whatever, we're just doing what Yakub programmed us to do, right?
I wouldn't exactly call it justice when the organism arguably responsible for the most environmental damage ever seen on the planet died because he screwed up and accidentally strangled himself.
Yea, but the question is, did he know any of that at the time those inventions were made?
Did he have reason to know?
If not, then you can't blame him for them, plenty of things were invented that way and then changed in the future. Lead paint is another example off the top of my head.
Here's another article about the guy:
http://www.damninteresting.com/the-ethyl-poisoned-earth/
He was the meteor that landed 65 million years ago! Wow!
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Where is the evidence that he was trying to make dangerous products?
The common wisdom of the time, was the atmosphere was large enough and the biosphere diverse enough to clear up any toxins, and what men can do would only be a small effect.
This idea was wrong, but it took a lot of science to show this effect.
But if you want to vilify people for being part of their time... How much carbon are we polluting as part of these trivial posts?
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Lets imply that inventors who invent things that are bad for the environment were somehow defective and deserved their fates.
Sadly, this is the mentality taught to young people nowadays.
From TFA:
In 1924, General Motors was headed for a scandal. Although reports of sickness had been coming out of all three tetraethyl refineries, the story was concealed from the newspapers. But things came to a head at the TEL refinery in Bayway, New Jersey. Dozens of workers contracted lead poisoning from breathing the toxic vapors and became violently insane. Five men died within a short time and news coverage was unavoidable.
Midgley stopped at nothing in trying to convince the public that his antiknock additive was safe. He would pour TEL additive onto his own hands and take deep breaths from the bottle in front of large audiences, all the while insisting that it was harmless and that repeated daily exposure was nothing to worry about. What the public didn’t know was that Midgley had recently spent six weeks in Florida, golfing in the sunshine in an attempt to clear his own lungs of lead particles.
So, he might not have known from the very beginning, but he certainly knew early on and did his best to keep it quiet. That strikes me as knowing and willful.
RTFA! He knew the stuff was dreadfully toxic and hushed it up so it could remain in production.
Apparently there are still areas where lead poisoning is still happening......
No he was the thing that caused The Great Dying about 250 million years ago.
Fair enough, I didn't know that since I rarely RTFA...
Then he got what he deserved...
He should have known at the time of its invention that it was highly toxic. Lead toxicity was well understood. As you say, he almost certainly knew no later than during its initial large-scale production.
He was probably insane by 1921, two years before his own collapse, and three before the fifteen deaths and many more permanent disabilities started racking up in the summer of 1924. The outbursts of destructive violence that the eventually totally incapcitated victims at the TEL factories were characterized by the embrace of extremely risky behaviour and ignoring the safety of others; in the worst cases this involved destructive (and even fatal) violence aimed at themselves and others. It's not hard to imagine that a milder form of this stayed with him Midgley for the rest of his life. Kettering may also have suffered similarly.
I wouldn't exactly call it justice when the organism arguably responsible for the most environmental damage ever seen on the planet died because he screwed up and accidentally strangled himself.
Although not a planetary damage thing, I think Cal Air Resources Board Chair Jananne Sharpless (and Gov Pete Wilson that appointed her) was in the pocket of ARCO when she railroaded the mandatory addition of MTBE into the California gasoline blend, recklessly polluting ground water reserves in California for the next few decades.
In the subsequent barrage of anti-trust suits from other oil companies (texaco, unical, chevron) that followed this regulation, ARCO admitted in sworn testimony “CARB adopted reformulated gasoline specifications for all gasoline sold in California after March 1, 1996 that are equivalent to the EC-X formula.” Also, in the days after these decisions, in advertisements published in major California newspapers, ARCO claimed credit for the enactment of the regulations and it admitted that it cleared the ad copy with CARB’s executive officers in advance.
Of course now MTBE is banned from California gasoline, but it certainly shows how often scientists aren't the worst offenders, it's the politicians that enable them.
And almost 100 years later, we've got knuckleheads today saying exactly the same thing.
http://news.heartland.org/news...
You are welcome on my lawn.
This exact fact was discussed in one of the BBC QI episodes. Either the QI elves mine such facts from Wikipedia or the author of this post is a QI fan or both!! https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gZAnnvSOEmw
So, How is this news for nerdz??
It's naught discussing any tech advances, nor did this event happen recently..
Moving past all of that crap, yes if I were a chemist, alchemist, metalurgist, or (stretch) a mechanic then yes I could see how this would fit..
No wonder this cluster F*ck is up for sale again..
An early warning in 1904 from an Australian doctor about the hazard to children from lead in paint and the need for regulation was greeted with derision by both medical professionals and those with commercial interests in lead compounds. By the 1920s, the Australian Medical Congress passed a resolution seeking a ban on lead in paint.
The regulation of lead in paint did not begin in North America until 50 years later.
Also in the 1920s, warnings about the public health consequences of allowing lead in gasoline were largely dismissed. Again, it was not until nearly 50 years later, when worldwide automotive lead pollution had reached 350,000 tons/year, that regulating the level of lead in gasoline was
contemplated. In North America, it was to be a twenty year battle that was not decided in favour of banning lead in gasoline until scientists were able to clearly show that millions of children were already affected
The post was written by a white racist pretending to be a minority, in order to make minorities look stupid.
Don't take it too seriously.
R-12 is a refrigerant that revolutionized the cold storage of vaccines
That barely scratches the surface of the thing.
Charles Kettering, vice president of General Motors Research Corporation, was seeking a refrigerant replacement that would be colorless, odorless, tasteless, nontoxic, and nonflammable.
Dichlorodifluoromethane
The refrigerant of choice for the 19th century ice machine was ammonia, which has the drawbacks of being highly toxic, corrosive, and difficult to compress. The net result is that the ice machines were massive (as big as a typical kitchen), steam powered (the best source of energy in the 19th century for large equipment. needing constant boiler attendance), required a lot of maintenance and were the source of industrial accidents.
Sulfur dioxide is compressed readily and has a good latent heat of 25 kJ/mol. Chemists and physicists were able to put a kitchen sized version of the refrigerator on the market after World War One. Unfortunately, sulfur dioxide isn't the most pleasant refrigerant: Early refrigerators leaked and if they didn't, sulfur dioxide is corrosive, so they soon would.
Dichlorodifluoromethane
The first refrigerator to see widespread use was the General Electric "Monitor-Top" refrigerator introduced in 1927, so-called because of its resemblance to the gun turret on the ironclad warship USS Monitor of the 1860s.
As the refrigerating medium, these refrigerators used either sulfur dioxide, which is corrosive to the eyes and may cause loss of vision, painful skin burns and lesions, or methyl formate, which is highly flammable, harmful to the eyes, and toxic if inhaled or ingested.
Refrigerator
"Refrigerator Day is the Dinosaurs analogue to Christmas and the titular celebration...Refrigerator Day, or Fridge Day for short, celebrates the development of the greatest boon to modern dinosaur, the refrigerator. Thanks to the development of this magical cold box, dinosaurs could store food and no longer had to continually roam, and thus were able to settle down and start families. Fridge Day is traditionally marked with gift-giving, a pageant recalling the first Refrigerator Day, festive decorations, a Fridge Day bonus, and jolly Refrigerator Day carols. Muppet Wiki - Refrigerator Day
Henson was on to something here.
I don't think the geek has any clear picture of what life was like before modern refrigeration and air conditioning.
The ideal refrigerant would have favorable thermodynamic properties, be noncorrosive to mechanical components, and be safe, including free from toxicity and flammability. It would not cause ozone depletion or climate change.
Refrigerant
That ideal refrigerant doesn't exist in 2015 ---
but if you look honestly at the problem from the point of view of someone living in 1935, Freon comes pretty damn close.
because people working in the factories kept getting sick and started acting crazy? Kinda like how they found out nitrates are carcinogenic: a farmer's cows kept dying of liver cancer and they traced it back to massive amounts of canned herring he was feeding them because he got it cheap from a factory after it couldn't be sold.
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and cancers, asthmas and other diseases it causes. How about our wars for oil fought to support the car industry (which couldn't exist without cheap gas) and the horrors wrought to support it. How about the death of public transportation and the stress and misery caused when those masses are forced to struggle to obtain costly transportation better suited for an idle rich? How about fuck you Henry Ford. You were an asshole and I want my clean air and cheap transportation back.
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Everyone knows that mercury is poisonous. Pregnant women are told to avoid larger fish because of the higher mercury concentrations (from eating smaller fish). People freak out when they break a CFC (which contains less mercury than a can of tuna) and spend inordinates amount of money to clean it up.
But then when people to go to the dentist with cavities, what do they do? Fill them with a gold and silver amalgam dissolved in MERCURY. They tell you that it all evaporates away quickly, but it doesn’t. Years later, people end up with measurable quantities of mercury in hair samples, compromised immune systems, and arthritis.
This finally went to court in 2014, the FDA is starting to change how it classifies mercury. So bascally, dentists have been poisoning us for as long as there have been amalgam fillings.
Back in 1996, an Ig Nobel Prize was awarded to the authors of a report on "Transmission of Gonorrhea Through an Inflatable Doll."
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I knew a man like this - a boss of mine at a summer job - who was oblivious to safety concerns whether that meant ancient gas stoves he cavalierly over-rode the safety valves on, canoes, or anything else (he was an avid tinkerer and jerry-rigger, but in his case not truly inventive.) He was more than a bit of a bully in everything, and felt certain he could bully nature, too. I left that summer job glad to still have my skin (after one very close call in one of his boats.) Just a couple years later I read that he had managed to kill both himself and his grown daughter on a ski slope, going where he was clearly warned he shouldn't go (but he knew better.) Believe me, when I read that news story, I didn't say "Gosh, that was a freak accident."
Nature bullied back, in the end.
As for myself, my inventions and clever thoughts have only killed one person, that I know of. (It was years before - looking back - I realized what had caused his death: the incident above happened in between.) One can't always avoid unintended consequences, but one can have more forethought than Midgley, I or my late boss did! Please do. Software kills, too, in many ways - the recent change to Facebook's notification algorithm broke many medical support groups on FB, making it much harder for people to get help quickly or reliably, and hasn't been fixed.
Lead paint was in use for a very long time, BECAUSE it was known to be toxic.
That's why it was used on ocean going ships and submarines. It kills barnacles.
The toxicity of lead has been known about since at least the roman empire.
It's just as abhorrent as your rampant misogyny. Don't try to claim the moral high ground - you have already failed.
It also killed mold. That's part of why it ended up in household paints.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas