Originally Posted by Bill Bryson - A Shot History of Nearly Everything
In the late 1940's, a graduate student at the University of Chicago named Clair Patterson was using a new method of lead isotope measurement to try and get a definitive age for the Earth at last. Unfortunately, all his rock samples became contaminated - usually wildly so. Most contained something like two hundred times the levels of lead that would normally be expected to occur. Many years would pass before Patterson realised that the reason for this lay with a regrettable Ohio inventor named Thomas Midgley, Junior.
Midgley was an engineer by training and the world would no doubt have been a safer place if he had stayed so. Instead, he developed an interest in the industrial applications of chemistry. In 1921, while working for the General Motors Research Corporation in Dayton, Ohio, he investigated a compound called tetraethyl lead (also know, confusingly, as lead tetraethyl), and discovered that it significantly reduced the juddering condition known as engine knock.
Even though lead was widely known to be dangerous, by the early years of the twentieth century it could be found in all manner of consumer products. Food came in cans sealed with lead solder. Water was often stored in lead-lined tanks. Lead arsenate was sprayed onto fruit as pesticide. Lead even came as part of the composition of toothpaste tubes. Hardly a product existed that didn't bring a little lead into consumers' lives. However nothing gave it a greater and more lasting intimacy than its addition to motor fuel.
Lead is a neurotoxin. Get too much of it and you can irreparably damage the brain and central nervous system. Among the many symptoms associated with over-exposure are blindness, insomnia, kidney failure, hearing loss, cancer, palsies and convulsions. In its most acute form it produces abrupt and terrifying hallucinations, disturbing to victims and onlookers alike, which generally then gave way to coma and death. You really don't want to get too much lead into your system.
On the other hand, lead was easy to extract and work, and almost embarrassingly profitable to produce industrially - and tetraethyl lead did indubitably stop engines from knocking. So in 1923 three of America's largest corporations, General Motors, Du Pont, and Standard Oil of New Jersey formed a joint enterprise called the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation (later shortened to simply Ethyl Corporation) with a view to making as much tetraethyl lead as the world was willing to buy, and that proved to be a very great deal. They called their additive "ethyl" because it sounded friendlier and less toxic than "lead", and introduced it for public consumption (in more ways than most people realized) on 1 February 1923.
Almost at once production workers began to exhibit the staggering gait and confused faculties that mark the recently poisoned. Also almost at once, the Ethyl Corporation embarked on a policy of calm but unyielding denial that would serve it well for decades. As Sharon Bertsch McGrayne notes in her absorbing history of industrial chemistry, Prometheans in the lab, when employees at one plant developed irreversible delusions, a spokesman blandly informed reporters: "These men probably went insane because they worked too hard." Altogether, at least fifteen workers died in the early days of production of leaded gasoline, and untold numbers of others became ill, often violently so; the exact numbers are unknown because the company nearly always managed to hush up news of embarrassing leakages, spills and poisonings. At times, however, suppressing the news became impossible - most notably in 1924 when, in a matter of days, five production workers died and thirty-five more were turned into permanent staggering wrecks at a single ill-ventilated facility.
As rumours circulated about the dangers of the new product, ethyl's ebullient inventor, Thomas Midgley, decided to hold a demonstration for reporters to allay their concerns. As he chatted away about the company's commitment to safety, he poured tetraethyl lead over his hands, then held a beaker of it to his nose for sixty seconds, claiming all the while that he could repeat the procedure daily without harm. In fact, Midgley knew only too well the perils of lead poisoning: he had himself been made seriously ill from over exposure a few months earlier and now, except when reassuring journalists, never went near the stuff if he could help it.
Buoyed by the success of leaded petrol, Midgley now turned to another technological problem of the age. Refrigerators in the 1920's were often appallingly risky because they used insidious and dangerous gases that sometimes seeped out. One leek from a refrigerator at a hospital in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1929 killed more than a hundred people. Midgley set out to create a gas that was stable, non-flammable, non-corrosive and safe to breathe. With an instinct for the regrettable that was almost uncanny he invented chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs.
Seldom has an industrial product been more swiftly or unfortunately embraced. CFCs went into production in the early 1930s and found a thousand applications in everything from car air-conditioners to deodorant sprays before it was noticed, half a century later, that they were devouring the ozone in the stratosphere. As you will be aware, this was not a good thing.
Ozone is a form of oxygen in which each molecule bears three atoms of oxygen instead of the normal two. It is a bit of a chemical oddity in the at ground level it is a pollutant, while way up in the stratosphere it is beneficial since it soaks up dangerous ultraviolet radiation. Beneficial ozone is not terribly abundant, however. If it were distributed evenly throughout the stratosphere, it would form a layer just 2 millimetres or so thick. That is why it is so easily disturbed.
Chlorofluorocarbons are also not very abundant - they constitute only about one part per billion of the atmosphere as a whole - but they are extravagantly destructive. A single kilogram of CFCs can capture and annihilate 70,000 kilograms of atmospheric ozone. CFCs also hang around for a long time - about a century on average - wreaking havoc all the while. And they are great heat sponges. A single CFC molecule is about ten thousand times more efficient at exacerbating greenhouse effects than a molecule of carbon dioxide - and carbon dioxide is of course no slouch itself as a greenhouse gas. In short, chlorofluorocarbons may ultimately prove to be just about the worst invention of the twentieth century.
Time Travelling Assassin
