Trickle Down Episode 15: Earth's Most Destructive Organism Part 1 (Sample)
Thomas Midgley Jr. invented two things that were used all over the world. Firstly, he invented leaded gasoline. This helped car engines operate more efficiently, but at the cost of spewing poisonous gas everywhere. The second invention is Chlorofluorocarbons or "CFCs." These substances, which were sold under the brand name Freon, had widespread applications in refrigerators and aerosols. But it was eventually discovered that these CFCs were eating away at the ozone layer in Earth’s atmosphere. Ozone depletion allows more UV radiation to reach the Earth's surface, which can lead to skin cancer, cataracts, and weakened immune systems.
The fact that a single individual invented both leaded gasoline and CFCs led Environmental historian J. R. McNeill to say that Midgley "had more adverse impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth's history."
Before Thomas Midgley died in 1944, he didn’t see himself as destructive. The scientific community showered him with praise and prizes and accolades during his lifetime. And he didn’t even have reason to think he was doing anything bad. Government regulators who were tasked with protecting the American public gave his inventions a pass.
This story represents a complete failure of tech entrepreneurs to consider the adverse impacts that their inventions might have, a failure of the scientific community to check one of their own, and a failure of supposed protectors of the public interest to do their jobs. And all of these failures meant that the generation after Midgley was forced to clean up his mess.
REFERENCES
McGrayne, Sharon Bertsch. “Prometheans in the Lab: Chemistry and the Making of the Modern World.” Sharon Bertsch McGrayne, 2001.
Markowitz, Gerald, and David Rosner. “Deceit and denial: The deadly politics of industrial pollution.” Vol. 6. Univ of California Press, 2013.
Cagin, Seth, and Philip Dray. "Between earth and sky: how CFCs changed our world and endangered the ozone layer." 1993.
Tylecote, Ronald F. "Roman lead working in Britain." The British Journal for the History of Science 2, no. 1 (1964): 25-43.
Kovarik, William. "Ethyl-leaded gasoline: how a classic occupational disease became an international public health disaster." International journal of occupational and environmental health 11, no. 4 (2005): 384-397.
Kovarik, Bill. "Charles F. Kettering and the 1921 Discovery of Tetraethyl Lead In the Context of Technological Alternatives", presented to the Society of Automotive Engineers Fuels &
Lubricants Conference, Baltimore, Maryland., 1994
Kitman, Jamie Lincoln. "The secret history of lead." NATION-NEW YORK- 270, no. 11 (2000): 11-11.
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/secret-history-lead/
On February 1, 1923, American motorists began to change how they fuel their cars.
On that day, a service station in Dayton, Ohio sold gasoline with an additive called ethyl.
It was 25 cents a gallon, 4 cents more than regular fuel, and it was an immediate hit.
Word spread that it offered cars more power on hills, that it stopped engine knock, and that it helped vehicles run cooler.
In truth, the name of the Ethyl brand was coined to avoid using its technical name, Tetraethyl Lead.
Soon, leaded gasoline, with the full approval of federal regulators, would be offered in service stations all over the country.
Its inventor would be showered with wealth and accolades from the scientific community.
And it would take more than 40 years before health authorities fully realize the consequences of allowing lead to be poured in every gas tank in America.
I'm Travis View, and this is Trickle Down, a podcast about what happens when bad ideas flow from the top.
With me are Julian Field and Jake Rokitansky.
Episode 15, Earth's Most Destructive Organism, Part 1.
Like everyone else born after the Industrial Revolution, we are living in a time of rapid
technological change, and this change is usually presented as being both inevitable and good in the long term.
And some act as if questioning this march of progress means that you're some sort of Luddite who would prefer it if we were all illiterate substance farmers who die of smallpox at the age of 30.
But all technological advancements come with a cost, and sometimes that cost is worth bearing for greater benefits.
Other times, the costs of advancements are much greater than any benefits.
The problem is that, like in popular culture and usual education, we're only told about the inventors and captains of industry that supposedly helped people.
We're told about Thomas Edison, who invented the commercial lightbulb and illuminated the world, or the Wright Brothers, who gifted humanity with powered flight, and there's much less focus on technological breakthroughs that are ultimately disastrous.
But there are instances where inventors and tech entrepreneurs are not heroes of humanity in like the Ayn Randian sense, but villains who would have done more good if they did nothing at all.
And so for this and the next two episodes of Trickle Down, I'm going to talk about one of the most famous instances of an inventor creating things that harmed both the planet and humanity in general.
And that is the inventor Thomas Midgley Jr.
Oh, I thought this was going to be about us and the podcast.
Well, I can only hope to be as harmful as Thomas Midgley Jr.
Honestly, he's the king.
He's in terms of a one-man wrecking ball, one-man poisoner of and cancer-causing entity.
He's quite the goat.
So he invented two things that were used all over the world.
So firstly, he invented leaded gasoline.
So this helped car engines operate more efficiently, but at the cost of spewing poisonous gas everywhere.
The second invention is chlorofluorocarbons or CFCs.
And these are substances which were sold under the brand name Freon and had widespread applications in refrigerators and aerosols, but it was eventually discovered that these CFCs were eating away at the ozone layer in Earth's atmosphere.
And ozone depletion allows more UV radiation to reach the Earth's surface, which can lead to skin cancer, cataracts, and weakened immune systems.
The fact that a single individual invented both of these things, which were slowly killing humanity before they were eventually phased out, led environmental historian J.R.
McNeil to comment that Midgley, quote, had more adverse impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth's history.
Oh my gosh.
I know, it's quite a legacy.
I'm feeling insecure.
Don't worry, Julian.
Nobody, nobody on Earth present can do as much environmental harm as this guy.
I know, that's my point.
I can never live up to this hero.
No, no.
Before Thomas Midgley died in 1944, he didn't see himself as destructive because the scientific community actually showered him with praise and prizes and accolades during his lifetime.
He didn't even have a reason to believe that he was doing anything bad because government regulators who were tasked with protecting the American public gave his inventions a pass.
This is a super fascinating story for me because it represents a complete failure of tech entrepreneurs to consider the adverse impacts that their inventions might have, a failure of the scientific community to check on one of their own, and a failure of the supposed protectors of the public interest to do their jobs.
All of these failures basically meant that the generation after Midgley was forced to clean up his mess.
So for this episode, I'm going to talk about the rise of Thomas Midgley Jr.
and how leaded gasoline became a widespread commercial product.
And for the next one, I'm going to get into the discovery of the environmental disaster that is leaded gasoline and how it was dealt with.
And for the episode after that, I'm going to discuss the rise and fall of Freon.
It's a triple header of ways one man destroyed the ozone layer.
So let's start at the beginning.
So Thomas Midgley Jr.
was born in 1889 in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, but he grew up and attended public school in Columbus, Ohio.
At the age of 16, he was sent to a college prep school in Stanford, Connecticut.
And it was immediately obvious that he was a unique genius.
You know those stories that end with, And that young boy who said that thing to the teacher was Albert Einstein.
Well, he had his own version of this while attending this school, which was called Betz.
So, during his senior year, his chemistry instructor claimed that the regular arrangement of the elements in the periodic table was proof of the existence of God.
And Midgley said that it indicated only that the atoms were composed of smaller particles.
So this event took place in like 1906 or 1907, just a few years after the discovery of electrons and before the existence of protons and neutrons were discovered.
So this indicates either that young Tom Midgley, like as a teenager, kept up to date on the latest discoveries in atomic structure and correctly extrapolated what wasn't discovered, or he somehow was able to just intuitively understand that the periodic table implied the existence of subatomic particles before it was experimentally proven.
By the way, he had a really fantastic scientific mind from birth.
It's so sad, because this clearly could have been a Professor Xavier story, but I know it's going to be Magneto.
No, that's awesome to understand all science stuff through that.
Those first two doctors I thought of!
Yeah, scientific genius, you think of Marvel comics, of course.
Yeah, yeah.
In 1907, Midgley went on to attend the Sibley College of Engineering at Cornell University, where he majored in mechanical engineering.
And there, he was a bit of an antisocial nerd.
He didn't join any fraternity, even though he did take part in the athletic program at his high school.
He didn't do any sports in college.
His photograph didn't appear in any of his class yearbooks.
His name only appeared in the college newspaper one time, in 1911, because he co-founded a school club to discuss This is my dad's biggest pet peeve, by the way.
absolute peak of technology at the time.
But even then, the newspaper editors managed to misspell his name.
So not a popular, well-known guy.
This is my dad's biggest pet peeve, by the way.
Anytime I've ever done anything in my life, the first thing he says is, well,
remember that they spell your name right.
Now, despite not being well-known among his peers, his brilliance was evident to
the school administrators.
And we know this because a recruiter from a company called the National Cash Register Company wrote seeking to know the identity of the school's most promising engineering graduates.
And the administrators gave that recruiter just one name, Thomas Midgley Jr.
This was back when, you know, the cash register actually was like a piece of high tech.
In fact, the National Cash Register Company had a research and development wing called the Inventions Department, which hired brilliant engineers to tinker and come up with new ideas for the future.
This is so cool because they couldn't have predicted back then that their invention would be used as the sound effect for anti-Semitism on YouTube.
Hey there, you've been listening to a sample clip of Trickle Down.
This is a side project that I've been working on.
It's a 10 episode series about misinformation and bad ideas that flow from high authority sources.
I think it's fascinating and I mean it's a way for I guess me to explore the way people who should know what they're talking about don't always actually.
I'm not gonna lie some of it's kind of a bummer but if you're anything like me that's actually more of a reason to dive into the subject matter.
Like with the premium episodes of QAnon Anonymous, all the episodes of Trickle Down are available to people who support us through Patreon.
Still the same five bucks a month, double the extra content, same price that we've been doing since 2018.
