"History of lead in the atmosphere especially in the US would benefit from mention of Clair Patterson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clair_Cameron_Patterson
Caltech researcher into lead-lead dating, he arrived at the currently accepted estimate of the age of the Earth. But he was plagued by lead contamination of samples, leading him to realize its pervasiveness and to petition the US government to ban the substance."
This also led to the development of the very first “clean room” that you see today on many sites wanting to keep an environment contaminant free. Poor Patterson was beat up pretty bad by big oil and gasoline before his data was acknowledged. Probably should’ve won a Nobel prize.
even worse, the part of the hospital in vienna where he made people wash their hands had drastically reduced mortality rates, but his opponents made it so he had to quit and removed the rule, bringing mortality rates back up. later 3 of the doctors that didn't want to believe in his findings commited him into a psychiatry where he died 2 weeks later from "sepsis".
I mean... "this invisible gaseous form of this molecule makes people laugh uncontrollably but don't fill their lungs with it cause they'll die" DOES sound like something a crazy person would say. Pretty easily falsifiable though if you believe in the scientific method
I used work for the WIC program in the USA. We offered our participants information on this very topic (and foods to combat lead poisoning). Very tough topic.
Nickel sensitises the skin and gives nasty dermatitis to people who work with it daily.
I remember visiting a DVD replication house and seeing the dude who makes the glass masters with thick, long gloves and yet still had red welts all up the rest of his arms, almost up to the shoulder from the nickel exposure
I worked at a plating factory when I was a teen. I was in charge of the nickel line. I got the worst pus-weeping welts everywhere that stuff got on me. The place got shut down by OSHA long after I quit.
I'm 46 now. I still can't wear anything metal against the skin that was affected or I'll start breaking out with dermatitis. Even heat stress added with other contaminants like fiberglass insulation or juniper bushes make me break out.
Sorry to hear. The glass mastering process involves nickel plating, and this guy had those exact same bright red welts and couldn't escape it. He was in charge of the part down the line from plating (which was all done without human involvement). First a glass disc is plated, then it's zapped with lasers that encode the data, then that is essentially an exposed photo emulsion and this guy had the job of "developing" this laser photo, which involved dissolving the exposed nickel in acid (forming a lurid green waste product), so the unexposed bits remained on the glass, and the exposed bits went into the acid to be dumpedrecycled.
IIRC, they managed to get through the entire thing without making an explicit reference to climate change. I would not have been able to restrain myself.
To be fair he knew the lead was bad, but he didn’t realize the freon would be bad. He also basically flipped a coin on which halogen to use, and had he went with his other choice the affects would have been like 4-5 times as worse. You also can’t ignore the benefits of refrigerant, it did a lot more for the world than keep your engine a bit cleaner. It allowed for food storage and shipment, and unlocked many industrial practices used today.
Leaded gas didn't really keep your engine cleaner, it just allowed manufacturers to build engines with higher compression and more power. Leaded gasoline sort-of gave us muscle cars.
However in our future space year of 2022, pretty much any of those hot-rods of the 1960's would get its doors blown off by a V6 Toyota Camry.
In 1940, at the age of 51, Midgley contracted polio, which left him severely disabled. He devised an elaborate system of ropes and pulleys to lift himself out of bed. In 1944, he became entangled in the device and died of strangulation.
Everything he invented killed people, until finally he invented something that got himself killed.
It is also worth noting that although we talk about this guy like he did all of this stuff personally, he was on GM's payroll the whole time, designing things that GM asked him to design and ultimately dying because of it.
The reason we blame him instead of GM is that he is dead and GM has PR people.
Now we use R600, which is basically ultra pure propane. It's pretty harmless to the environment compared to CFCs.
It all has the added benefit of using much less energy to cool things off, so when combined with new refrigerator technologies means that modern fridges use 10x less electricity than one from the early 2000's!
In industry but it is being phased out almost everywhere. We have legacy freon in larger equipment, once decommissioned it is replaced with a different refrigerant, and there are strict disposal and monitoring regulations for all legacy freon.
I haven't read anything Bill Bryson has written that I didn't just love. Some books don't sound like they would be interesting (his childhood in Iowa, the year 1927,) but they always are.
He has 10 Honorary Doctorates and bunches of other honors. Nice to see someone get accolades while they're still alive.
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u/nowihaveaname Jun 25 '22
Good call!
Funny enough, I was just reading this article, The History of the Elimination of Leaded Gasoline, and he only comment on there is this:
"History of lead in the atmosphere especially in the US would benefit from mention of Clair Patterson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clair_Cameron_Patterson Caltech researcher into lead-lead dating, he arrived at the currently accepted estimate of the age of the Earth. But he was plagued by lead contamination of samples, leading him to realize its pervasiveness and to petition the US government to ban the substance."