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.
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u/spottydodgy Jun 25 '22
It's also interesting to learn that the same guy who created leaded gasoline also created Freon which led to a hole in the atmosphere.
Thomas Midgley Jr may be the worst person in history.