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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.
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.
Small airports next to elementary schools are probably creating future violent criminals.
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.
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.
because instead of lead, they had to add other chemicals to raise octane ratings to reduce knocking. Those chemicals cost more.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
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.
...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.
Oh, and you managed to spell his name wrong as well. It's Midgley, not Migley.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
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.
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.
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.
There were always alternatives, just that they were uneconomical. Petrol has always been a blend of products. You could run a car just fine on a single petrol component, but as is the usual with this sort of thing that single component was also the most expensive to make. Two key petrol components are often referred to as liquid gold in refining because their ideal properties allow refiners to fix any stuffed up petrol blend simply by adding more, and also because they are very costly to make; alkylate, and reformate. The first cat-reformer came online shortly after the war, the first alkylation unit came online long before, not long after TEL started becoming popular as a gasoline blend. But good things are always bad for you. Another great octane booster is benzine which is also now restricted.
And/Or blends with more valuable (rare) distillates. TEL, MTBE, etc. are chemical hacks to prevent the lower grade compounds from igniting and burning as readily.
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.
So I am an environmental consultant who deals with contamination like this. I'm not completely disagreeing with you, but like many things, it's complicated. Here are a few other facts that should be in the discussion about MTBE:
1) The reason MTBE was mandated by the federal gov't (not just CA) was that it did significantly reduce tailpipe emissions, which had a real benefit to human health and air quality. (Now ethanol has replaced MTBE to serve the same function, again by federal mandate)
2) Risks associated with groundwater contamination were not as well understood then as they are now, so we can only place blame on MTBE and the regulators who mandated it with the benefit of hindsight.*
3) MTBE got lots of press, but there are other compounds in gasoline with much higher toxicity and are more persistent in soils and groundwater (benzene, ethylbenzene, naphthalene, and tri-methylbenzenes to give a few examples).
4) The vast majority of MTBE [and gasoline contamination in general] was from leaky, old, poorly constructed/maintained underground tank systems that prior to the mid-90's had little to no regulations or industry standards. By the end of the 90's essentially all registered underground storage tanks across the country were replaced or upgraded to comply with new federal standards to make them much more reliable (like double-walled tanks, leak detection systems, corrosion resistance, maintenance standards, electronic monitoring, and more). The federal mandate to replace MTBE with ethanol came about a decade after the country had upgraded the tank systems, so the actual of risk MTBE contamination to groundwater at that time was very low; most contamination of MTBE had happened many years prior.
5) Since the federal mandate to replace MTBE with ethanol the number of nationwide reported leaks from tank systems has spiked because ethanol, unlike MTBE, is very corrosive and degrades tank systems faster, which goes back to point #3 that there are worse compounds in gasoline to worry about. The silver-lining is the new tanks systems are much better at quickly identifying when a leak occurs, significantly reducing the volume of gasoline leaked before it is corrected.
*- Keep in mind the EPA didn't even exist until 1970 and politicians/laws typically lag 5-10 years behind the science. So, it wasn't until around 1990 that our understanding of contamination and environmental regulations started to have any significant impact on how businesses/polluters operated. Relative to many other STEM fields, environmental science is very young and the changes in our understanding of contamination, risk, and regulations over the past couple decades cannot be understated.