Thomas Midgley Jr.: History's Most Harmful Inventor`

Thomas Midgley Jr. gave the world leaded gasoline and Freon, the first CFC refrigerant, and collected medals for both. The first put a neurotoxin into the air people breathed; the second ate the ozone layer. Both were sold as safe, and he proved each one with his own lungs. In 1924 he washed his hands in tetraethyl lead for the cameras, a year after taking weeks off to recover from lead poisoning. That same year workers at the Bayway plant began collapsing; five were dead within months. Washington's 1925 conference heard the warnings and asked the industry to study itself. In 1930 he inhaled CFC on stage and snuffed out a candle. From the 1930s to the 1970s, essentially every tank of petrol on Earth carried his lead. Chapters: 00:00 A Bottle of Poison for the Cameras 01:06 A Boy Raised on Patents 03:26 The Boss and His Lieutenant 04:45 Not a Garage, a Payroll 07:09 Why an Engine Pings 09:12 Friday, 9 December 1921 10:08 A Spoonful per Tank 13:42 A Name With No Lead in It 16:58 One Pump in Dayton 18:12 The Fuel Nobody Could Own 20:29 A Beach Cure for His Own Product 22:38 Two Companies, One Additive 23:43 The Loony Gas Building 26:37 The Company Tries Its Workers 27:28 Sixty Seconds for the Cameras 30:43 New York Closes the Beach 31:48 Nobody Could Have Known? 35:43 Washington, 20 May 1925 38:00 Too Small to Matter 39:11 The Poison Makers Will Look Into It 42:45 No Immediate Cause for Alarm 44:03 A New Job for the Lieutenant 46:10 The Dangerous Kitchen 47:09 Freon-12 48:33 The Candle in Atlanta 51:48 The Good Invention? 54:20 The Spray Can and Everything Else 56:47 Every Tank on Earth 57:54 Where the Lead Went 1:01:08 The Homework Comes Back 1:04:02 The Butcher's Ledger 1:06:32 The Crime-Wave Theory 1:07:40 824 Million Points 1:10:51 Vice President, Twice 1:13:30 The Chemists' Verdict 1:16:03 Polio, 1940 1:16:55 The Third Machine 1:20:38 A Medal He Couldn't Collect 1:22:03 The Villain Dies, the Tanks Don't Stop 1:24:42 Fresh Air The scenes are illustrated re-creations, the voice is synthetic, and every fact is documented in the sources below. Music: "Distorted reality" - zero-project (Jamendo, CC BY 3.0, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/) "My Freedom" - Keffy Kay (Jamendo, CC BY 3.0, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/) "The Life Countdown" - Paulo Kalazzi (Jamendo, CC BY 3.0, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/) "Lament, Part 2" - Frozen Silence (Jamendo) Images: A field in Roaring Creek Township, Columbia County, Pennsylvania - Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fi... Sources: S1. Wikipedia, Thomas Midgley Jr. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgl.... S2. McFarland, Hauer and Reuben, Half of US Population Exposed to Adverse Lead Levels in Early Childhood (2022) - https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2118631119 S3. Bill Kovarik, Ethyl-Leaded Gasoline: How a Classic Occupational Disease Became an International Public Health Disaster (2005) S4. World Health Organization, Lead Poisoning and Health - https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/... Further reading: Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003); David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz, A Gift of God? (1985) #ThomasMidgley #LeadedGasoline #History