By Juan Antonio Pascual Estapé
He was a prestigious scientist who revolutionized the automobile and aerosol industry. But he has a terrible dark side. Millions of deaths and a huge hole in the ozone layer are due to his inventions.
Science is the engine of human evolution. But when it is subjected to the benefits, and the secondary effects are neglected, the entire Humanity is in danger.
This is the story of Thomas Midgley Jr, inventor of two chemicals that revolutionized the industry… and also caused millions of deaths, a decline in intelligence worldwide, increased crime and street violence, and the hole of the ozone layer. A record for a single person…
Historian John McNeill said of it that it “had more impact on the atmosphere than any other organism in the history of the Earth.” It is a very interesting lesson that explains why scientists have to think about the consequences of their inventions before applying them. And also the politicians who approve them…
It all begins at the end of World War II, when geochemist Clair Cameron Patterson was commissioned to do a doctoral job: calculate the age of the Earth, which no one had achieved. Patterson decided to use radioactive rocks, because they are constantly changing state.
When he started looking for rocks all over the world, this geochemist discovered something inexplicable: all the rocks contained a very high concentration of lead.
This contamination prevented the use of radioactive rocks for his experiment, so he used another method: as the meteorites that fall to Earth were formed at the same time as our planet, by measuring their age we will know ours.
Indeed, all that he could measure gave the same value: 4,550 million years old. Today it is considered the age of the Earth, with a margin of error of just over 1%.
Clair Patterson entered history in 1953 by being the first to measure the age of our planet. But he was concerned about something else: the concentration of lead in all the rocks. His colleagues told him that lead was a natural element in the environment, something he denied, because it is toxic even in small amounts.
If it was natural, it should be everywhere. He searched for it at the bottom of the sea, and the concentration was much lower than on the surface. Lead is known to get into bones, so he looked for it in the molars of Egyptian and Mayan mummies, and in recent cadavers. The lead concentration was 1,000 times higher in the latter.
It was clear that lead was not a natural phenomenon. So how do you know when the contamination started? The answer was in the ice of Antarctica. The snow there accumulates constantly year after year, so the ice shards have layers like the rings of a tree. It was how he discovered the exact moment the lead contamination began.
That brings us back to Thomas Midgley Jr., an engineer and chemist working at General Motors, around 1920. In those days, cars made a lot of noise, and engines suffered greatly from exploding pistons.
Midgley was tasked with finding a fuel that would solve these problems. After many failed tests, he discovered that adding ethanol to gasoline eliminated noise and popping, but it was expensive and had no benefits. So in 1921 he introduced tetraethyl lead, an additive added to gasoline that achieved the same effect as ethanol, but was much cheaper.
They marketed it under the name Ethyl, removing any reference to lead, because Midgley knew it was toxic: he had spent time sick with lead poisoning while preparing the additive. He concealed this fact, and leaded gasoline became a great success.
It was the most used throughout the world for decades, until in 1965 Clair Cameron Patterson, the geochemist who had measured the age of the Earth, presented his report accusing leaded gasoline, and the lead used in paints, cans of food and many other places, of contaminating the Earth and infiltrating people’s blood and bones.
Antarctic ice had revealed to Patterson that lead contamination began at the same time leaded gasoline became available for sale.
Later studies blamed lead for 250,000 deaths a year by hardening the arteries, in addition to diminishing the intellectual capacity of children, by contaminating the brain, and increasing crime rates in many countries around the world, in the 1970s and 1980s.
Leaded gasoline began to be banned in the late 1980s, sixty years after it was first sold. In Spain it was not prohibited until 2001. The last country to eliminate it was Algeria, in 2021.
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