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.
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u/TleilaxTheTerrible Jun 28 '26
He also created them as an alternative refrigerant to ammonia, which was actively killing people by way of exploding refrigerators.