This Day in History: 1889-05-18

Thomas Midgley Jr., inventor of leaded gasoline and ozone-depleting chemicals, is born this day in 1889. More than most engineers, Midgley’s legacy points to serious ethical issues engineers must face and the consequences of simply going along with corporate management. In the 1921 – 1925 period, while developing leaded gasoline, Midgley was also working on other octane-boosting fuel additives (especially alcohols but also reformates, carbonyls and aromatics). At an automotive engineers conference in 1921, he was particularly enthusiastic about ethanol as an octane – boosting additive for gasoline. But in 1924, General Motors, Standard Oil and du Pont — which had formed the Ethyl Corp. — preferred the poisonous leaded gasoline compound that maximized their profits. After at least 17 workers died violently insane from lead poisoning in refineries that year, debate broke out over its public health impacts, and public health experts such as Alice Hamilton of Harvard and Yandall Henderson of Yale stepped forward to challenge GM / Standard / DuPont / Ethyl (New Market). Midgley did not remain neutral; he openly lied and claimed that no alternatives existed. Midgley’s work in the 1930s on chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) as refrigerants was in part an attempt to redeem himself because at the time, CFCs were inert substitutes for dangerous ammonia refrigerants; they were not known to contribute to ozone depletion until the 1970s. Midgley expressed remorse for the deaths of workers but disdain for public health “fanatics” during his lifetime, which was cut short by an apparent suicide in 1944.