“What Midgley left behind is a huge legacy for the world, the fruit of a full, varied and extremely creative life.” It is with these words that Professor Charles Franklin Kettering salutes, in 1947, the work of his colleague and friend Thomas Midgley Jr. (1889-1944), who died three years earlier. By all accounts, the inventions of the American engineer and chemist would have made life more pleasant and easier for his contemporaries. “He made science a liberator and we rejoice with him in the satisfactions that must be his to see the fruits of his work”comments another of his admirers.
Charles F. Kettering’s laudatory elegy marks the end of a career crowned with medals, awards and scientific prizes for an individual who, since the beginning of the 20the century, cultivates innovation in the most diverse fields. He has invention in his blood: his maternal grandfather had developed a prototype of a mechanical saw, his father held several patents related to tires. Naturally, the son is no exception. From early school, Thomas Midgley Jr. did not deviate from the periodic table of elements, a sign of an overflowing and obsessive curiosity.
Butter in the engine
With his engineering degree in hand, Thomas Midgley Jr. joined the research division of the General Motors company in 1916. The American titan of the automobile industry then sought to get rid of the “rattle” (engine knocking), microexplosions occurring in the motors and risking damage to them. Digging through his trusty periodic table, Thomas Midgley Jr. tested 143 different compounds to mix with his fuel – arsenic, sulfur and even melted butter – until he came across the ideal candidate: lead.
In 1923, a gas station in Dayton, Ohio, sold the first barrel of tetraethyl leaded gasoline. Success is immediate. Filled with miracle fuel, the engines stop backfiring. Motorists, industries and airlines immediately adopted it. Some voices are being raised: lead is said to be dangerous to the health, particularly that of children who inhale it. To journalists who worried about the harmfulness of his compound, Thomas Midgley Jr. responded in the negative, going so far as to douse his hands with leaded fuel in the middle of a press conference, in October 1924.
The engineer doesn’t stop there. Taking advantage of the media hype, he did it again by developing, during the 1930s, chlorofluorocarbon gases for the Frigidaire brand, a division of General Motors. Used in particular in refrigeration and air conditioning (we know them better under the trade name “Freon”), they replace the flammable and toxic gases responsible for several fatal accidents in previous years. This is how Freons quickly became popular, boosted during the Second World War by their use as an insecticide in the jungles of the Pacific.
Lead in the wing
Towards the end of his life, the American engineer and chemist continued his research – honoring the family tradition, he held 170 patents – but no subsequent invention would have the catastrophic impact of his youthful creations. It’s no coincidence that when you fill up with (expensive) fuel at the gas station, you can only choose between diesel and unleaded.
Accumulating in the body, lead causes impaired cognitive functions, loss of motor skills, tremors, seizures and, sometimes, death. Thomas Midgley Jr. himself could not ignore it. “After about a year of research on organic lead, I noticed that my lungs have been affected and that it is necessary to stop all work and get a breath of fresh air”he wrote in 1923 to the organizer of one of his conferences, after having been forced to cancel it for health reasons.
What we today call anthropogenic climate change – for which humanity is directly responsible – owes much to the inventiveness of Thomas Midgley Jr.
Most countries in the world only understood this later. In 1983, a scientific report sounded the alarm: “It is doubtful whether there is still a part of the earth’s surface or a form of life that is not contaminated by lead of anthropogenic origin.” Three years later, in 1986, Japan became the first country in the world to ban tetraethyl leaded gasoline.
At the same time, expert committees are beginning to realize that chlorofluorocarbon gases, apparently harmless, remain in the atmosphere for decades and damage the ozone layer, accelerating global warming. But it is already too late: it has been more than half a century since the two poisons designed by Thomas Midgley Jr. have been spreading across the globe.
A cataclysmic legacy
What we today call anthropogenic climate change – for which humanity is directly responsible – owes much to the inventiveness of Thomas Midgley Jr. “It has had a more detrimental impact on the atmosphere than any other organism in Earth’s history”estimates environmental historian John McNeill. He who considered himself an architect of progress, with the optimism characteristic of scientists at the beginning of the 20th centurye century (it was before the atomic bomb), will never see the deleterious effects of his creations.
Weakened by polio – and, undoubtedly, by the effects of his exposure to lead –, the American inventor had to take forced retirement in 1940. Paralyzed by the disease, but never short of new ideas, he designed an ingenious lifting cable device, which allowed him to get out of his bed effortlessly. Ironically, Thomas Midgley Jr. was the victim of his own invention: he was found strangled to death in his pulley system on November 2, 1944, at the age of 55. His other inventions, meanwhile, continue to suffocate us.
