Anytime Thomas Midgley Jr. pops up, I take the opportunity to re-listen to his episode on the Memory Palace. Wonderful bit of historical biography: https://thememorypalace.us/butterflies/
They didn’t vote differently. There were a larger number of the greatest generation that were more comfortable with shared sacrifice in service of society and less entitled like the baby boomers are.
Read charitably, OP isn’t decrying a disagreement on issues as much as the willingness to burn everything down just to see someone else hurt more than oneself. This is present on the left. But it’s uniquely politically actualised by MAGA. (The Democratic Socialists winning elections aren’t seeking to overturn elections or violently storm governing bodies.)
Yes, the psychological effects of environmental lead last a lifetime. No, they didn’t vote differently, they have always gravitated to actors that promise simple solutions and highlight bad blood and animus.
and still sprayed all around the surrounding land at almost every airport in the USA and worldwide from prop aircraft exhaust despite knowing ANY amount is toxic and irreversible for 30+ years
Also UL94 (https://www.swiftfuelsavgas.com/) could be used in many models. Unfortunately some have been previously upgraded to high-compression engines to get a few more horsepower and they can't use UL94.
Some can run on ethanol-free 87-octane automotive fuel, generally the low-compression engines that already can run 80/87 aviation fuel.
80/87 and 100/130 leaded fuels are all but unavailable, but 100LL is ubiquitous. There is a chicken and egg problem to make G100UL and UL94 available, which will encourage its use. Even automotive fuel is hard to find at airports, possibly because they don't want the liability of improper fueling. (100LL is compatible with almost every gasoline aircraft engine, the rest are not.)
The G100UL also may have an issue with being too good of a solvent, although the developer insists that's a libel.
Swift Fuels is also supposed to introduce a different type of 100-octane unleaded called 100R that has had good results in testing but hasn't been broadly approved yet.
It was like pulling teeth from a dragon to get the FAA to move forward with G100UL as I understand it, and then they suddenly approved it for just about anything provided they write a supplemental type certificate. So maybe the same will happen when/if 100R is approved and someone will handle the marketing.
Cigarette smoking really got going in the world wars, I understand, especially ww2 when the world had manufacturers serving the effort. The custom is dying with the veterans as everyone knows they have a hall pass for it but the rest of us don’t. So smoking was a shorter life but that hardly matters when you’re deployed in theater.
Asbestos gets a bit of a bad rap. There's an enormous difference from e.g. asbestos tiles and siding in a house vs loose clumps of insulation at mass scale in large factories and such.
But at some point people decided that any asbestos was an immediate ticket to mesothelioma and had to eradicate it altogether.
I guess some forms of asbestos are fine to use in residential development.. as long as houses never burn or get damaged in earthquakes or suffer flood damage or need extensive renovations.. and as long as we do not care about some unimportant landscapes and river systems in (ideally, canada or russia or something of the sort) and all of its current and future inhabitants.
Even then, it's overblown. The fibers embedded in the cement siding that was common for a while as an example, that's just never going to be friable to a degree that matters. Not to mention the issue is really more of a long term exposure thing. You'd need to be quite an unlucky person to take one whiff of some asbestos fibers and get mesothelioma decades later.
Yeah, it's always annoying to me how asbestos is equated to things like leaded gas that go into the environment and poison everyone on the planet when it's more like second hand smoke or something like that. Asbestos is banned because the alternatives result in basically 0 mesothelioma without being more expensive or inconvenient so why put up with asbestos at all, it's just easier to not use it than to keep using it and enforce all the strict rules about handling it. Places like Asbest, Russia keep manufacturing it and it's used in many low GDP parts of the world, plus if you're old enough the probability you didn't go in an asbestos building regularly during a good chunk of your life is extremely low. People can't handle nuance so everything has to be all or nothing so asbestos ends up in the "leaded gas" category of bad, probably alongside cyanide and other poisons...
Asbestos in safe forms does not become dangerous from fire or earthquake or flood damage.
It does becomes dangerous from badly done demolition work. And they are harmful to the people mining and manufacturing them.
But for a long while, almost every material was extremely harmful for the people mining and manufacturing them. It really took a while to determine that asbestos is actually worse than fiberglass or gypsum.
Based on the OP, it wasn't at all accidental. They knew it was dangerous and chose it because they could make more money than with safer alternatives such as ethanol.
Elaborate contraption, jumps, falls like a stone, is dead. The end.
Imaginary person: "But he had balls and believed in his own theories"
Me: "Ehm but... how difficult would it have been to throw a wooden puppet instead... or run scaled down experiments first,... than to just immediately jump..."
There just are so many unfortunate deaths, that one feels so preventable as well. I also have to admit to liking the ending of the Wikipedia image description a lot:
> [...] Police and others crowd around the body of Reichelt as it is carried away. They then measure the depth of the hole in the frozen ground made by his fall (15 cm).
At least they got something out of it I suppose :)
People who absolve engineers of all responsibility annoy me to no end. They're omnipresent on this forum and justify working for Facebook with things like "not my decision" or "someone else would do it" or "it's not that bad you just don't understand" or "I'm just following orders"
There is an important subtlety which is that engineers are not responsible for which technical challenges get solved, they are responsible for how those technical challenges are solved. An engineer's ethical obligation is not to avoid working on something that could be used in a harmful way, it is to prevent incidental harm from its deliberate usage. There's nothing unethical about working on a fuel additive to prevent engine knock; knowingly using a poisonous compound which is going to create immense public health problems to solve the problem was the sin.
Are we going to measure things by who got most sick or by who got the most out of it? Because if Midgley gets sick and his boss who knows everything gets a million dollars, I will blame his boss more.
For example Charles Kettering (essentially boss of Midgley) was Director of Research for 27 years at GM. Was large shareholder of GM.
And he hired Robert Arthur Kehoe to prove that TEL is safe. And Kehoe did. The "proof" was that "you didn't definitively prove that TEL is unsafe, so it's okay".
I live near Dayton, OH, where Kettering's name features prominently in an affluent suburb of Dayton and a hospital system, amongst other things. Kettering is praised as a father of industry and a famous Daytonian.
When I hear his name I think about leaded gasoline and the decision to pursue TEL instead of just using ethanol because of the profit potential in TEL being patentable.
I don't absolve Midgley of any blame, but it would be nice to see Kettering get some of it too. At least here, close to Dayton, his name is only associated with the good his money has done.
people like him exist today. people who will do things the scientific community knows is dangerous for pay. Due to a lack of morals or intellect required to understand rammifications is unknown.
Midgley didnt invent most if any of what was packaged up and commodified, he just appropriated research at the time into products without a care in the world. its for that reason that me and many other scientists simply dont publish some results anymore.
The mind it takes to discover and formalize a thing, will understand its problems. The mind it takes to commodify something once formalized, can be many steps down, and so, is unlikely to be capable of seeing the problem.
Therefore, anything which can cause serious issues wont be released. why? because even if we as the inventors go against the profit narrative, we'll be destroyed. people only listen when there's money to be made, but when we say "ok, that's eboygh fossil fuels, we need to slow down" funding gets cut, reputation and character gets attacked, and you largly get deplatformed.
I was in Dayton Ohio to see the Wright brothers stuff. There were sidewalk plaques for inventors and celebrities who lived in the city, and they had one for Thomas Midgley Jr. I was shocked!
Fun fact: during their time Dayton had the most patents per capita of anywhere in the US.
Robert Kehoe, working for GM, was the chief advocate for leaded gasoline, and really the only person/lab doing research on lead until Clair Patterson stumbled into it while measuring the age of the earth. [0,1]
A modern equivalent might be if Facebook was the only organization researching social media's impact on society, while being able to set the paradigm/assumptions about said safety for half a century.
So even when Patterson's research was published in 1965, it took time to change the paradigm, and more time to phase out lead's use.
Should anyone want to read a narrative about the intertwined lives of Midgley, Patterson, Kehoe and lead, then this Mental Floss article is a good read. [2]
I think it’s important not to use the “we” word here.
1) Many people know and care.
2) some people lie for profit
3) other people are willfully ignorant and allow the liars keep at it because it’s more convenient.
And even among those who know and care there’s different amounts people are willing to do about it. I imagine you (who theoretically know and care) still drive, fly, use plastic, Eat foods grown with petroleum based fertilizers, buy products shipped long distances with petroleum. (As do I)
The key is to go after the liars so we can set sane policies based on findings of fact pursued in good faith.
When your house has termites, it's quite correct to say that the termites don't care about the house, even though each individual termite cares deeply about having an infinite supply of wood to chew on.
"We" live in a democracy and our leaders are chosen by "us". You don't get to pick and choose. You are your government assuming you're from any western democracy.
The planet is becoming inhospitable for humans and honestly likely for the best. At least some folks will get rich out of it.
25 years ago in the UK, leaded petrol was being phased out but still pretty common. The UK Government was giving people grants to have existing cars converted to run on LPG, so they'd only run on a coke can of petrol for a minute or so on startup then switch over to gas.
Catalytic converters? Don't need 'em! There's no CO or unburnt fuel in the exhaust to catalyse because they run as lean as a vegan's dog!
CO2 emissions? Sure, but the stuff is getting flared off as waste at refineries anyway, and we're not going to stop making plastics and fertilisers any time soon, so may as well extract useful work from burning it!
We could have had incredibly clean cities everywhere by now, by simply keeping older cars on the road and adapting them to run on much cleaner safer fuel.
But there was a problem, an absolute bombshell of a problem. The fatal flaw that killed LPG as a road fuel.
It didn't sell new cars. It didn't sell anyone any debt.
So they came up with "scrappage schemes" where you'd get a couple of hundred quid for your old car, it would get destroyed, and then all you had to do was buy a nice new Cleaner Greener Diesel car instead, at some swingeing rate of interest (expect to pay well over twice the sticker price by the end of it - and no, you didn't get the Scrappage Scheme cash if you didn't take the finance package).
LPG had the same problem as electric cars. In the early years there was no infrastructure and so if you buy one you're an early adopter and you can't actually go anywhere. It took a while to get that infrastructure and now electric cars are useful for most trips. You can use LPG cars to go for most trips in the US even today. However, you better plan ahead because finding a place of fuel is going to require some effort. I had a few LNG stations near me, but they seem to have all been torn out, meaning that never made it.
Gas cars faced the same thing when they first came out but by the time they became used for longer trips there was gas everywhere and in the meantime there was gas at least where you bought the car and so it was good enough for the short trips that bought it for.
LPG was really popular in Holland, that wasn't the problem. You could get it everywhere. It was cheap too.
There were just some artificial issues:
- The government didn't want LPG owners to be cheaper off (it was much cheaper per kilometer) so they raised road tax substantially making it only economical if you drove a lot
- There were no cars running on LPG off factory. You always had to deal with an aftermarket install with a big tank that took up half your trunk. It didn't replace the original tank because that was needed for starting, though part of it could have been replaced by LPG storage. They didn't do that however. Some cars had donut tanks that fit in the spare wheel space but they were tiny and you had to fill up constantly.
- Engine performance was significantly reduced on LPG.
- The tanks were pressurised which were a bit dangerous and didn't store a lot of mileage for the space. You couldn't fill them up 100% either.
We had one for a while but it was kinda a clumsy affair. Lack of places to fill up was however not a problem at all.
Engine performance is actually increased on LPG if you do it properly. It's less energy dense, so you use more of it, but you get a bigger slower bang, giving you more torque. You need the timing a bit different.
The tanks are far safer than the leaky plastic yoghurt pots that people carry petrol around in under their cars. They can't explode, they can't be ripped open, they can't even be dented. I have attempted to knock a hole in one with a 16-tonne excavator and only succeeded in squashing it a little bit. I've taken LPG tanks out of burnt-out taxis that were still half-full.
They're not even under any pressure, they're at 8 bar or so. The main danger if the gas gets out is that it's really really cold!
It's still a fossil fuel causing CO2 release but it's a fossil fuel that would just be burnt in a flare stack if you didn't burn it in a car. No-one is going to stop making propane, as long as we make plastics and fertilisers.
LPG and CNG had a consistent niche, but they weren't transformative and ended up not being significantly cheaper either. And recently we saw the problem with natural gas supply availability.
With EVs, all of this goes away and you can charge at home, including off your own solar panels. The technology has finally got to a tipping point, thanks to a couple of decades of phone batteries.
> you didn't get the Scrappage Scheme cash if you didn't take the finance package
[Citation needed] .. but yeah the scrappage schemes (various) were of dubious value and something of a bung to the motor industry and to quieten opposition to things like the LEZ.
There are two major sub-fields in materials science. 1: Making materials with interesting new properties. 2: figuring out how to remove the lead from them.
People like to point and laugh at the Romans at their use of lead in plumbing and wine. But they were never even close to being as stupid and callous as we managed to be the last 150 years. They are going to be shaking their head at us for thousands of year hopefully.
Gas itself is poison. Just take a deep huff at the gas station.
EVs are the only way to go.
At least the pollution is localized, not down every inner city street with exhaust and other vapors.
Still an ongoing issue, interesting article it seems, some insane metrics in that image though: `relative IQ cost` as in `estimated loss of earning due to less IQ`, boy oh boy, that's an estimate to make... starting with incomplete exposure data, estimating the resulting IQ loss, and then translating that into lifetime earnings.
Switzerland banned in in 1926, the Soviet Union in major cities in the 50s. Everyone knows lead is deadly, but so is going outside. Policy makers have to weight the risks of velocity now vs crashing later.
83 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 49.2 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48872443
The elderly are simply more engaged and that's what happened.
* https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/leaded-gas-wa...
https://g100ul.com/
Some can run on ethanol-free 87-octane automotive fuel, generally the low-compression engines that already can run 80/87 aviation fuel.
80/87 and 100/130 leaded fuels are all but unavailable, but 100LL is ubiquitous. There is a chicken and egg problem to make G100UL and UL94 available, which will encourage its use. Even automotive fuel is hard to find at airports, possibly because they don't want the liability of improper fueling. (100LL is compatible with almost every gasoline aircraft engine, the rest are not.)
The G100UL also may have an issue with being too good of a solvent, although the developer insists that's a libel.
Swift Fuels is also supposed to introduce a different type of 100-octane unleaded called 100R that has had good results in testing but hasn't been broadly approved yet.
It was like pulling teeth from a dragon to get the FAA to move forward with G100UL as I understand it, and then they suddenly approved it for just about anything provided they write a supplemental type certificate. So maybe the same will happen when/if 100R is approved and someone will handle the marketing.
You might want to update your knowledge.
But at some point people decided that any asbestos was an immediate ticket to mesothelioma and had to eradicate it altogether.
It does becomes dangerous from badly done demolition work. And they are harmful to the people mining and manufacturing them.
But for a long while, almost every material was extremely harmful for the people mining and manufacturing them. It really took a while to determine that asbestos is actually worse than fiberglass or gypsum.
Thomas Midgley Jr.: Accidentally The Most Dangerous Man Who Ever Lived[0]
Leaded gas, CFCs, and accidentally created a machine that ended his own existence.[1]
[0]https://allthatsinteresting.com/thomas-midgley-jr [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.
Based on the OP, it wasn't at all accidental. They knew it was dangerous and chose it because they could make more money than with safer alternatives such as ethanol.
Also leads to another great list-of-lists; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_unusual_deaths
Elaborate contraption, jumps, falls like a stone, is dead. The end.
Imaginary person: "But he had balls and believed in his own theories"
Me: "Ehm but... how difficult would it have been to throw a wooden puppet instead... or run scaled down experiments first,... than to just immediately jump..."
And Edit: He did run dummy experiments and they clearly showed he shouldn't have jumped https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Reichelt#Experiments
> [...] Police and others crowd around the body of Reichelt as it is carried away. They then measure the depth of the hole in the frozen ground made by his fall (15 cm).
At least they got something out of it I suppose :)
The titles like annoy me to no end.
Because Thomas Midgley was an engineer. Not overlord of General Motors. Not director. Not even a large shaholder.
GM Leadership knew effects of TEL. And for decades traded everyone's health for their profits. Midgley is complicit, but he's just a small piece.
Midgley used to tour around “proving” the safety of leaded gas by pouring it on his hands. And had to be treated twice for lead poisoning.
He was very much a culprit.
For example Charles Kettering (essentially boss of Midgley) was Director of Research for 27 years at GM. Was large shareholder of GM. And he hired Robert Arthur Kehoe to prove that TEL is safe. And Kehoe did. The "proof" was that "you didn't definitively prove that TEL is unsafe, so it's okay".
I live near Dayton, OH, where Kettering's name features prominently in an affluent suburb of Dayton and a hospital system, amongst other things. Kettering is praised as a father of industry and a famous Daytonian.
When I hear his name I think about leaded gasoline and the decision to pursue TEL instead of just using ethanol because of the profit potential in TEL being patentable.
I don't absolve Midgley of any blame, but it would be nice to see Kettering get some of it too. At least here, close to Dayton, his name is only associated with the good his money has done.
Midgley didnt invent most if any of what was packaged up and commodified, he just appropriated research at the time into products without a care in the world. its for that reason that me and many other scientists simply dont publish some results anymore.
The mind it takes to discover and formalize a thing, will understand its problems. The mind it takes to commodify something once formalized, can be many steps down, and so, is unlikely to be capable of seeing the problem.
Therefore, anything which can cause serious issues wont be released. why? because even if we as the inventors go against the profit narrative, we'll be destroyed. people only listen when there's money to be made, but when we say "ok, that's eboygh fossil fuels, we need to slow down" funding gets cut, reputation and character gets attacked, and you largly get deplatformed.
Fun fact: during their time Dayton had the most patents per capita of anywhere in the US.
2021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28500508
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IV3dnLzthDA
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clean_Room
https://youtu.be/IV3dnLzthDA?is=MorITIg_MvFrKtvR
> Two beliefs became entrenched:
1. that lead is natural to the human body, and
2. that a poisoning threshold for lead existed
Robert Kehoe, working for GM, was the chief advocate for leaded gasoline, and really the only person/lab doing research on lead until Clair Patterson stumbled into it while measuring the age of the earth. [0,1]
A modern equivalent might be if Facebook was the only organization researching social media's impact on society, while being able to set the paradigm/assumptions about said safety for half a century.
So even when Patterson's research was published in 1965, it took time to change the paradigm, and more time to phase out lead's use.
Should anyone want to read a narrative about the intertwined lives of Midgley, Patterson, Kehoe and lead, then this Mental Floss article is a good read. [2]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A._Kehoe
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clair_Patterson#Campaign_again...
[2] https://www.mentalfloss.com/science/environment/clair-patter...
1) Many people know and care. 2) some people lie for profit 3) other people are willfully ignorant and allow the liars keep at it because it’s more convenient.
And even among those who know and care there’s different amounts people are willing to do about it. I imagine you (who theoretically know and care) still drive, fly, use plastic, Eat foods grown with petroleum based fertilizers, buy products shipped long distances with petroleum. (As do I)
The key is to go after the liars so we can set sane policies based on findings of fact pursued in good faith.
The planet is becoming inhospitable for humans and honestly likely for the best. At least some folks will get rich out of it.
Catalytic converters? Don't need 'em! There's no CO or unburnt fuel in the exhaust to catalyse because they run as lean as a vegan's dog!
CO2 emissions? Sure, but the stuff is getting flared off as waste at refineries anyway, and we're not going to stop making plastics and fertilisers any time soon, so may as well extract useful work from burning it!
We could have had incredibly clean cities everywhere by now, by simply keeping older cars on the road and adapting them to run on much cleaner safer fuel.
But there was a problem, an absolute bombshell of a problem. The fatal flaw that killed LPG as a road fuel.
It didn't sell new cars. It didn't sell anyone any debt.
So they came up with "scrappage schemes" where you'd get a couple of hundred quid for your old car, it would get destroyed, and then all you had to do was buy a nice new Cleaner Greener Diesel car instead, at some swingeing rate of interest (expect to pay well over twice the sticker price by the end of it - and no, you didn't get the Scrappage Scheme cash if you didn't take the finance package).
And you see how well that worked out.
Gas cars faced the same thing when they first came out but by the time they became used for longer trips there was gas everywhere and in the meantime there was gas at least where you bought the car and so it was good enough for the short trips that bought it for.
There were just some artificial issues:
- The government didn't want LPG owners to be cheaper off (it was much cheaper per kilometer) so they raised road tax substantially making it only economical if you drove a lot
- There were no cars running on LPG off factory. You always had to deal with an aftermarket install with a big tank that took up half your trunk. It didn't replace the original tank because that was needed for starting, though part of it could have been replaced by LPG storage. They didn't do that however. Some cars had donut tanks that fit in the spare wheel space but they were tiny and you had to fill up constantly.
- Engine performance was significantly reduced on LPG.
- The tanks were pressurised which were a bit dangerous and didn't store a lot of mileage for the space. You couldn't fill them up 100% either.
We had one for a while but it was kinda a clumsy affair. Lack of places to fill up was however not a problem at all.
The tanks are far safer than the leaky plastic yoghurt pots that people carry petrol around in under their cars. They can't explode, they can't be ripped open, they can't even be dented. I have attempted to knock a hole in one with a 16-tonne excavator and only succeeded in squashing it a little bit. I've taken LPG tanks out of burnt-out taxis that were still half-full.
They're not even under any pressure, they're at 8 bar or so. The main danger if the gas gets out is that it's really really cold!
It's still a fossil fuel causing CO2 release but it's a fossil fuel that would just be burnt in a flare stack if you didn't burn it in a car. No-one is going to stop making propane, as long as we make plastics and fertilisers.
With EVs, all of this goes away and you can charge at home, including off your own solar panels. The technology has finally got to a tipping point, thanks to a couple of decades of phone batteries.
> you didn't get the Scrappage Scheme cash if you didn't take the finance package
[Citation needed] .. but yeah the scrappage schemes (various) were of dubious value and something of a bung to the motor industry and to quieten opposition to things like the LEZ.
Note: it’s now banned for road vehicles everywhere [1].
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/every-country-has-n... Algeria, 2021
Leaded gas was a known poison the day it was invented (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28500508 - Sept 2021 (399 comments)
Trying to find it I stumbled upon this https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2118631119 -> "The average lead-linked loss in cognitive ability was 2.6 IQ points per person as of 2015."
Regarding the map, not what I was looking for, but https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/... from https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-025-02735-x is interesting.
Still an ongoing issue, interesting article it seems, some insane metrics in that image though: `relative IQ cost` as in `estimated loss of earning due to less IQ`, boy oh boy, that's an estimate to make... starting with incomplete exposure data, estimating the resulting IQ loss, and then translating that into lifetime earnings.