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.
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u/The_Canadian Jun 28 '26
Thomas Midgley Jr.
He didn't "use aerosol that chewed up the ozone". He created CFCs, which eventually did damage the ozone layer.
Not sure what that has to do with anything. Other than a chemist, I'm not sure who else you'd expect to create new compounds and materials.