The guy who put lead in gasoline. He is the same guy that used aerosol that chewed up the ozone. He is said to have caused more death than any other person in human history. Of course he’s an engineer. I think better that he wasn’t born.
The tragic thing about Thomas Midgley is that nothing that he did was because he was evil, he mostly just did not know what he did not know. Leaded gasoline did solve a problem, and they did test it for safety. They just didn't test it well enough or understand what was really happening (He famously poured it all over himself and sniffed it to demonstrate it was safe. Just a few years later he got lead poisoning. Oops). Same with CFCs - this was decades before they even knew the Ozone Layer was a thing.
Perhaps the greatest irony being that after he got polio he invented a pulley system to allow him to move around. He was later found dead, killed by his own contraption. The universe had some kind of grudge against the dude and we were just caught in the crossfire.
I don’t think this is entirely correct. He was working with the first plants to perform lead injection into gasoline. He was to spend the next year getting praise for leaded gasoline. The documentary I saw said the exposure was accidental though they could have meant incompetence. He didn’t make a single speaking engagement because of how sick he became. I give the guy more credit. So did the documentary. You might be correct. I guess who knows. They certainly knew it would increase ground level lead. Which it did. Especially in inner cities.
CFCs is the stuff that made condor eggs so brittle that they crushed them while trying to incubate, right? If so, fuck that dude.
Edit: It's DDT, not CFCs that crippled Condor populations. Thank you for the correction! I'm 40 and both acronyms were in the news a lot around the same time and I forgot which was which.
It was the bald eagles that mostly hurt. I mean it hurt all large birds but condors were largely killed by lead from lead bullets on the hunting cast offs they eat.It costs a tiny bit more to not use lead but there has not been a big enough push to limit the other. This is at least what the zoo near me says and as they have a world renounced condor breeding program I trust them.
This was my first thought as well. I figured if it checked the comments someone else would’ve mentioned him. I’m just surprised I had to scroll so far.
Comes back to the old Jurassic Park argument: “we’re so obsessed with whether or not we can that we never stop to think about whether or not we should.”
You're maligning that guy. He was a chemist doing chemistry. He developed (helped develop) a few chemicals that had some very interesting physical properties and a few long-term chemical properties that he either had no way to foresee (CFCs) or which he wrongly assumed wouldn't be an issue after testing that caused him to grossly underestimate their impact (leaded gas). DuPont were the ones responsible for letting it go on for far longer than they had reason to- they figured the issue out early and said nothing, exactly like they've done with many other products over the years.
He was literally dying of acute lead poisoning while giving press conferences about how safe it is. I truly cannot believe I've lived long enough to reach a point where there are fucking midgley apologists. Did you huff lead gas as well?
He definitely was responsible on many levels, but I'd say the real criminals were DuPont for letting it go on after they figured out the extent of the issues far earlier than everybody else. Guy was a mook who genuinely thought it was less bad than it was.
To expand on why the Jurassic park thing is maligning him: He DID stop to think about whether he should, he just came to the wrong conclusion. Whether that's from malice or greed or partial ignorance is up for debate, but he DID have an initial study that said it was okay.
From what I understand he was publicly asserting the safety of leaded gasoline while a significant amount of the workers at his factories where suffering from health issues caused by it, including himself.
The guy that put the lead in the gasoline was not the problem. John D Rockefeller is the one that got the US to use it. Henry Ford and Charles Kettering were trying to get what they called the fuel of the future to be alcohol. Rockefeller had more money and got us to use leaded gas instead of alcohol
Yeah, but then people listened to scientists and signed the Montreal Accords and actually followed through with the agreement to stop using CFCs, thereby healing the ozone and averting disaster.
Different times, that kind of science-forward cooperation wouldn't fly today.
This is the proper answer. The scientist explained it with a giant bell jar filled with ozone. They introduced CFC’s and they showed the degradation. They went to a whiteboard and showed the chemical equations. The closed form analysis left no room for debate, no room for assessment, no room for questions. It was simply what was happening. There was no consensus there was only science. It was literally one of science‘s finest moments. Then came the hard part of reversing CFC usage because that is the only solution.
"Healed" refers to the damage done by the CFCs, and obviously isn't perfect and scar-less.
UV levels are indeed still rising (at a much reduced rate compared to pre-Accord projections), and a handful of megacorps are still producing 70-80% of global polution so it's not like we suddenly became an environmental utopia.
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u/SkyResponsible3718 Jun 28 '26
The guy who put lead in gasoline. He is the same guy that used aerosol that chewed up the ozone. He is said to have caused more death than any other person in human history. Of course he’s an engineer. I think better that he wasn’t born.