Thomas Midgley, Jr. was well-respected in his time, but two of his best-known inventions would eventually change that opinion.
The first of the ill-fated inventions was an additive used to stop internal combustion engines from knocking. The product was chemically known as tetra-ethyl lead and was marketed as Ethyl. Today, we more commonly refer to it as the lead in gasoline.
Midgley was working with the Dayton Research Lab, a General Motors subsidiary, when he set out to find a way to keep engines from knocking. History tells us that he initially thought that tinting the gasoline red with iodine would help the fuel absorb some of the heat and therefore limit knocking. Iodine
didn’t work. After some further testing, he gave up on the
notion that the color of the fuel would make a difference and found that tetra-ethyl lead
would stop the noise.
Several people, including Midgley himself, became ill due to lead poisoning from handling this product. In fact, he was forced to take time off from work in order to recuperate and allow his body to expel the lead he had inhaled. Meanwhile, lead continued to be released into the air from the engines that Ethyl was designed to keep
quiet.
Awarded the Nichols Medal for this invention, Midgley defended the lead gasoline additive until he was eventually replaced as vice president of the GM subsidiary where the product was produced.
Midgley remained employed by General Motors and was later tapped to find a safe, non-toxic refrigerant for household appliances. Eventually becoming just as infamous as Ethyl, the new product was dichlorodifluoromethane, a chlorinated fluorocarbon or “CFC” as it was known. Midgley called the discovery Freon.
Again, the awards came to Midgley. And Freon moved into general use as both a refrigerant in air conditioners, refrigerators and the like, as well as a propellant in spray cans and inhalers. It was “strike two” for Midgley as scientists discovered that Freon was slowly destroying the atmosphere.
If Ethyl and Freon were strikes one and two for this engineer’s career, certainly strike three would not be far behind. In 1940, Midgley was diagnosed with polio and became bedridden. The inventor
designed an intricate system of ropes and pulleys that were to be used to raise him out of bed.
The rope and pulley system malfunctioned and led to Midgley’s death by suffocation, entangled in the ropes of his own invention.
Midgley's work was well-respected in its day. And given the
scope of technology available at the time, both Freon and CFCs
were indeed cutting-edge solutions to the issues at hand. Thomas
Midgley, Jr. did not live long enough to see the banning of CFC or to see the use of lead fuel additives abolished.
In fact, he had no way of knowing the potential issues with these
products. But as is often the case, the inventor has been
judged by those with the benefit of hindsight. And, deserved
or not, Thomas Midgley, Jr. has become known as History’s Most Dangerous Engineer.
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