Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - The Inventor Who Almost Ended the World

Episode Date: November 11, 2022

Thomas Midgley's inventions caused his own death, hastened the deaths of millions of people around the world, and very nearly extinguished all life on land.  Midgley and his employers didn't set out to poison the air with leaded gasoline or wreck the ozone layer with CFCs - but while these dire consequences were unintended... could they have been anticipated? For a full list of sources used in this episode visit Tim Harford.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Pushkin. Thomas Smigley, Jr. was born on College Hill in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, May 1889. His father, Thomas Mjjely Sr., was a prolific inventor in a variety of fields, but notably that of automobile tires and his mother had he ever... A unigee, fraul, and inventing. A hero of industrial science who changed the world, and who died tragically young, aged just 55. Thomas Micheli Jr. studied mechanical engineering, but he was just as fascinated by chemistry. As a young researcher employed by general motors,

Micheli took to carrying a copy of the periodic table around in his pocket to inform his quest for new ideas. By the end of his life, Midgeley had accumulated over a hundred patents. We're going to hear about three of his inventions. In 1916, Midgeley became a member of our research staff, and began then his long association with me and his remarkably productive career in research. The eulogist is Charles Boss Kettering.

Himself an inventor of some renown. Kettering was Thomas Micheli's boss in the General Motors Research Department. He went on to become a lifelong friend, mentor and business associate as the two men built lucrative careers with general motors and the DuPont Corporation. What do you want me to do next boss? That simple question and the answer to it turned out to be the beginning of a great adventure in the life of a most versatile man. Versatile indeed. The brain children of Thomas Midgley touched many areas of life. This pudgy, bespect-cled inventor seemed to personify the mid-20th century ideal of progress,

as summed up by DuPont in their famous 1930s advertising slogan. Better things for better living, through chemistry. In his eulogy, Boss Kettering runs through midgeles long list of accomplishments. President of the American Chemical Society, winner of the Nichols Medal, the Perkin Medal, the Priestly Medal, the Willard Gibbs medal, the long-struth medal, honorary doctorates from the College of Wousta and the Ohio State University. Ketwing quotes the citation from Ohio State. Midsually contributed so greatly to more pleasant and efficient living. He has made science a liberator, and we rejoice with him in the satisfactions that must be his in seeing the fruits of his labor.

Posterity will acknowledge their permanent value. Posterity, alas, was not as kind to midgely as his many admirers had expected, but they were absolutely right to say that he would change the world he did. He made it much much worse. I'm Tim Halford, and you're listening to cautionary tales. Music What do you want me to do next, boss? One day when Thomas midgely asked that question of Charles Kettering, the boss had a problem he wanted midgely to solve, the Charles Kettering, the boss had a problem he wanted midgely to solve, the problem had to do with refrigeration. At the time, people didn't have fridges

at home, it was too dangerous. The chemicals you needed for the cooling coils were either toxic or flammable, so refrigeration was mainly used in industrial settings by trained personnel. Even then, accidents were common. Kettering wanted mentally to invent a way to cool things safely. Midshli took the periodic table out of his pocket. He soon zeroed in on Flurrine as a promising element for creating a compound that might have the right properties as Ketuing's eulogy recalls.

He and his helpers prepare such a compound. Dichlority fluoromythane. It proved to have just the properties required. It is highly stable, non-inflammable, and altogether without harmful effects on man or animals. Dichloro-dichloromythane. It did seem to be altogether without harmful effects. Midschley tested this by replacing all the nitrogen in air with Dichloro-dichloromythane and seeing what happened to animals who breathed it in.

Happily for the animals, they were completely fine. Midgeley wasn't just an inventor, he was a showman. He presented his new product in a dramatic lecture to the American Chemical Society. Midgeley lights a candle. He produces a container of die-chloro-difluromethane. He sucks it in, a long deep galt filling his lungs. And then, slowly and gently, he breathes out over the candle.

The flame goes out. It's a bravure performance. Die-chloro-difluromethane belongs to a class of chemicals called CFCs, or chlorofluorocarbons. Under Michelis guidance, General Motors and the DuPont Corporation start to produce a whole range of CFCs. They give them the trade name, Frion. Thanks to these new non-hazardous coolants, people soon had refrigerators in their own homes. That was a game-changer. Food stayed fresh. The housewives of America could spend

less time endlessly shopping for groceries. Food poisoning was easier to avoid, and it wasn't just fridges. Air conditioners too. Even better, it soon turned out that CFCs had use his beyond cooling. They were ideal for making aerosol sprays. Insect repellents, air fresheners, hairspray, deodorants, it was just like DuPont said. Better things, better living, through chemistry. In the summer of 1973, nearly three decades after Thomas Midgeley's untimely death, the chemistry professor named Sherwood Roland welcomes a new postdoctoral researcher to his team at the University of California, Irvine. Mario Molina is from Mexico, he's 30 years old, and he needs Professor Roland to give him a project to work on. Roland recalls something he heard over coffee at a conference

the previous year, about a precise new way of measuring trace gases in the atmosphere, gases like dichloro-difluoromethane. It turns out that CFCs are present in the air around us at 230 parts per trillion. That's like detecting a drop of gin in a swimming pool of tonic. Roland is intrigued to hear that. Not because the amount sounds so small to him, but because it sounds so big. He knows that it's only a few decades since CFCs started to be manufactured on an industrial scale, not much more than that drop-full can ever have been produced. Roland is a radio chemist, he studies how particles react and decay. Most chemicals break down in the environment sooner or later, but CFCs

just seem to be hanging around. So he makes a suggestion to Mario Molina. Why don't you look into CFCs? Molina recalls, we thought it would be a nice, interesting academic exercise. We both knew that these CFCs were rather stable, so there was nothing obvious that would damage them soon after they'd be released. That's about as much as I knew at the time. If CFCs aren't interacting much with anything in the atmosphere close to Earth, Malena reasoned, they'll eventually drift upwards to the stratosphere, where the air is thinner. It would take decades, but they'd get there. When they did, they'd encounter more ultraviolet bee waves from the sun.

And maybe that would cause the CFCs to break down because UVB waves are pretty destructive. They're the main reason why too much sunshine can give you skin cancer. In fact, if the Earth had no protection from UVB radiation, life on land might not be possible. What does protect the Earth? The ozone layer. Ozone is a gas made from oxygen atoms. Up in the stratosphere, a thin layer of ozone blocks

most of the sun's UVB radiation. Mario Molina sat down to work out what would happen to a CFC molecule when it drifts up to the stratosphere. It would get hit by a wave of UVB radiation. That would knock off the chlorine atom. The chlorine atom would soon meet an ozone molecule. When it did, it would split the ozone apart and form oxygen and chlorine monoxide instead. But that's not the end of the story because chlorine monoxide isn't stable, it breaks down quickly. That frees up the chlorine atom again to take out another ozone molecule and the cycle

repeats. Chlorine atoms pinballing around the stratosphere, hopping ozone as they go. Melina was intrigued by this, but not alarmed. After all, there weren't that many CFC molecules in the atmosphere. It was a drop in a swimming pool. They couldn't possibly destroy enough of the ozone layer to cause a problem. Could they? Melina got the data, showing how much CFC gas had been produced. He sat down with a pencil,

paper, and a calculator, and did the sums. Oh, that can't be right. He checked them. He checked them again and again. He checked them at dozen times. That night, when he got home, Molina's wife asked how his day had been. The work's going well. Molina said. But it looks like the end of the world. Corsion retails will be back in a moment. customer emails, texts, and social media messages, keep your edge with Thrive Small Business Off-Dware and never miss a message again. Thrive offers one solution to communicate, market, and run your business.

But simply, small businesses run better on Thrive. Get Command Center for free today at thrive.ca. That's THR-Y-V dot CA. Terms and conditions apply. Free plans have limited functionality. at the University of California, Irvine, Mariamalena tracks down Sherwood, Roland, and may have found something important. Roland checks Malena's sums. He checks them again. That can be right, but it was. The CFCs drifting slowly up towards the stratosphere were a ticking time bomb.

Belly 40 years had passed since DuPont started to manufacture their CFCs under the free-on brand on an industrial scale. That wasn't long enough to expect any obvious impact yet, but more and more CFCs were being produced every year. If that continued, what might it mean by, say, the middle of the 21st century? Molina and Roland calculated that up to half the ozone layer could disappear. As Malina had put it, it looked like the end of the world. The two scientists wrote up their research.

They published it in Nature, in the summer of 1974, and hardly anyone noticed. A few reporters got in touch from local newspapers. That was nice, but this wasn't really a local story. An executive from DuPont, phoned Sherwood Rowland. Thanks for getting in touch. It is appalling. about Friond. Don't you know that Friond's a Dupont registered brand name? You need to refer to CFCs generically not Friond specifically. I have to tell you, we take this very seriously. Uh, oh. Okay. Roland and Melina were dispirited. They're discovered the end of the world, and nobody cared. They looked for another opportunity to get attention.

The annual meeting of the American Chemical Society was coming up, the very same event that Thomas Midgeley had wowed 44 years earlier by filling his lungs with dye, chlorodi, fluoromethane, and softly extinguishing a candle. Roland and Molina submitted their paper to the annual meeting, but lots of papers get submitted, so it's the job of the American Chemical Society's news manager to decide which papers to publicize. Her name was Dorothy Smith. She decided to go big,

much to the displeasure of DuPont. Hello? I've just seen your press release. You're making a big thing of this paper on CFCs and Ozone. Yes, it seems important. We think it's an insignificant story. A lot of people are interested. Dorothy Spith stood her ground.

She put Roland and Melina on stage at a press conference and finally their work started to gain some traction. Environmental activists called for a ban on CFCs. A few politicians took up the cause. But the industry fought back. Yes, the scientific theory seemed sound, but that's all it was. Theory No ozone depletion has ever been detected, despite the most sophisticated analysis, all ozone depletion figures to date are computer projections based on a series of uncertain assumptions. The initial burst of attention slowly began to fade. Roland and Melina kept speaking out, but fewer and fewer people were bothering to listen.

Progress towards banning CFCs ground to a halt. It was clear that only one thing might reboot the interest of the world's governments. Hard evidence of damage to the ozone layer. But if it took decades for CFCs to drift up to the stratosphere, the first ones to be manufactured would only just be making it there. Would the evidence come in time to avert disaster? We'll pick up the story of CFCs and the Ozone layer, but I promised you three inventions by Thomas Midgeley, and as we'll see, those three inventions have a theme, that theme unanticipated consequences. I mentioned that Thomas Midgeley died young. How did he die exactly? Boss Ketuin's eulogy tipped out around that delicate question.

In the early fall of 1940, Midgeley was struck by an acute attack of polio mylitis, which deprived him of the use of his legs and made him a semi-involent, Midshli died unexpectedly on November 2nd, 1944, at the age of 55. Confined to his bed, Vipolio, Midshli had applied his inventive mind to devising a series of pulleys and ropes by which he could move himself around. He died unexpectedly when a rope in this device

got wrapped around his neck and strangled him. So, one of Mitchell's inventions had ended up killing him, and another was going to destroy the ozone layer and fry the planet. It's fair to say that unanticipated consequences is the right description for both these inventions. The phrase unanticipated consequences was coined a few years before Michel's death. In a much cited article by the great American sociologist Robert K. Merton. That article was called the unanticipated consequences of purposeive social action. Throughout history, Merton argued, philosophers have grappled with the idea of unanticipated

consequences, using various different words to describe it. But nobody had thought systematically about how unanticipated consequences come about. Merton set himself the task of categorising all the possible ways in which our actions might backfire. Simple error is one way we might get unanticipated consequences. We think we know what will happen, but we're wrong. Another is what Merton called the imperious immediacy of interest, roughly speaking, we're so keen to solve some pressing problem that we don't much care what else might happen down the line.

And then there's ignorance, when we don't have the knowledge that would be necessary to anticipate what might happen. In some cases, that might be because we haven't put in the time and energy that would be necessary to get that knowledge. Or maybe the situation is so novel, we can't imagine what we might need to know. That's a good description of what happened with CFCs. Midshli had tried to get some knowledge about potential risks. By making animals breathe in, dichloro-difluromethane.

But the interaction with ozone came completely out of the blue. This phrase of Robert K. Merton, unanticipated consequences, has a twist. To find out what it is, we need to turn to the third of Thomas Mijlis' disastrous brainwaves, arguably the worst of all. It came, again, from that fateful question.

What do you want me to do next, boss? This time, the problem Charles Kettering wanted midgely to solve was... engine knob. When you rev your car, and it sounds like you're firing a machine gun. It's not a common sound nowadays, but it blighted the lives of early motorists. General Motors wanted to invent a product that would stop it. But nobody even understood why it happened. Thomas midgely worked it out. In an internal combustion engine, a piston in a cylinder,

compresses a mixture of air and fuel until a spark plug ignites it. Engine knock happens when the mixture explodes before the piston has compressed it fully. It's not just an unpleasant noise, it can damage the engine. But where would you even start to look for a solution? Ketwing and Midgeley talked it over. We thought that maybe if the fuel were colored red, it would absorb more radiant heat and evaporate more completely, thus preventing the rough combustion.

This theory came to us then because we both happened to know that the leaves of the trailing are buddhas, are red on the back back and that they grow and bloom under the snow. Midgeley went to a chemist's shop and bought iodine. He put the iodine in some fuel which turned it red and he ran the engine. No knock. Midgeley and Kettering were astonished but was it really the colour red that was stopping the knock? Midgeley tried otherettering were astonished, but was it really the colour red that was stopping the knock? Midgeley tried other ways of dying fuel, but with no success. Apparently, it wasn't the red colour, but something else about the iodine. The leaves of the trailing arbutus had been a red herring.

Midgeley then tried Ethel iodide, which has iodine, but no colour. It stopped the knock just as well. Unfortunately, it also corroded the engine. Undeterred, Midgeley pulled the periodic table from his pocket and began to work his way through it. Many anti-knock agents were discovered along the way, compounds of iodine, of nitrogen, of phosphorus, of arsenic, of antimony, of selenium, of telurium, but everyone had some limitation or shortcoming, which prevented it from being used in a practical way. Eventually, Thomas Midgley's perseverance

paid off. He discovered something that he could add to gasoline that would stop engine knock without damaging the engine. Tetraethyl lead. Thomas midgely had invented, leaded gasoline. Because of Mitchell's invention, I'm about 5 IQ points stupider than I would otherwise have been. And so are you if you're around my age or older because you too will have spent your childhood inhaling fumes of leaded gasoline from car exhausts. The air pollution messed up brain development for whole generations of kids and it caused

cancers and heart disease and strokes. It's estimated that leaded gasoline hastened tens of millions of deaths. Leaded gasoline completes an astonishing trifecta. Thomas midgely invented a rope and pulley device that killed him, an additive for fuel that killed lots of other people, and a refrigerant that was on course to wipe out life on Earth altogether. How unlucky can one man be? But luck isn't the whole story. Business notifications getting out of hand buried under an avalanche of customer emails, texts, and social media messages?

Keep your edge with Thrive Small Business software and never miss a message again. Thrive offers one solution to communicate, market, and run your business. But simply, small businesses run better on Thrive. Get Command Center for free today at thrive.ca. That's THR-YV.ca. Terms and conditions apply. Free plans have limited functionality. In the early 1980s, the radio chemist Sherwood Roland

and his colleague Mario Molina kept on talking about the danger of CFCs to the ozone layer. Nobody wanted to listen. Roland became more and more exasperated. What's the use of having developed a science well enough to make predictions, if, in the end, all we're willing to do is stand around and wait for them to come true? The predictions, however, were all too easy for the industry to dismiss. Remember the line from DuPont, all ozone depletion figures to date are computer projections based on a series of uncertain assumptions. Only actual evidence of damage to the ozone layer would get CFCs back on the agenda,

but the evidence would be hard to come by. The first CFCs to on the agenda, but the evidence would be hard to come by. The first CFCs to be produced decades earlier would only just have reached the stratosphere. If they were starting to reduce the levels of ozone, that might be hard to see, for a couple of reasons. First, ozone levels fluctuate naturally. Second, there are different ways to measure Ozone from the ground, from satellites, from special instruments tied to helium balloons, which were most accurate, no one was entirely sure. Tantalizing hints of evidence began to emerge. Some Japanese researchers

sent balloons to the stratosphere. The Ozone readings came back, worryingly low, but you really needed a long-term series of data points to establish there was a trend, the Japanese team didn't have that. But someone else did. For 25 years, an obscure organisation called the British Antarctic Survey had been toiling away on a shoestring budget, sending researchers to a remote outpost in Antarctica to measure all sorts of things. They weren't looking for anything in particular, they just liked to collect data, in case it ever happened to show anything interesting for 25 years, it never had. Now, in the early 1980s, it did.

The ozone measurements were all over the place. The researchers suspected that their instruments had gone haywire. They sent new ones to Antarctica, but the data came back the same. At first, it seemed random, but when the researchers looked more closely, they realized there was a pattern to the unusually low readings, a pattern related to the seasons, a pattern that reactions with chlorine could plausibly explain. NASA's satellites had also picked up some surprisingly low readings over the Antarctic. So low, the computers had initially thrown them out as obvious anomalies.

Now, it was clear that something was happening. There was still room to doubt why. Was it really a chemical reaction caused by chlorofluorocarbons? Or was it solar activities or wind? There was only one way to be sure. NASA rushed to put together a team of scientists and flew them to Antarctica. In charge of the mission was 30-year-old Dr. Susan Solomon, an atmospheric chemist. Solomon had never been to Antarctica before, and she didn't have the right equipment. Her team

had brought instruments to analyze light from the moon, but they hadn't had time to build a tracking device to focus the moon's rays. Instead, someone had to sit on the laboratory roof at night, holding a mirror at just the right angle. The first time Solomon took the roof shift, she squinted, to direct the mirror's reflection. Found that her eye had frozen shut, but the results of the experiments pointed only in one direction. On October 20, 1986, journalists gathered in Washington, DC to hear Solomon relay her team's preliminary findings over a crackly satellite link from Antarctica. At print, we have not conclusively established the cause of the ozone hole. However, we have strong evidence against theories that upward winds or high solar activities cause the depletion.

We suspect a chemical process is fundamentally responsible for the formation of the hole. Solomon was right. More experiments confirmed it. The world's leaders acted with commendable speed. In 1987, they agreed the Montreal Protocol to phase out CFCs. Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina shared a Nobel Prize. The end of the world was averted. By now, the impacts of leaded gasoline on human health were equally plain to see. Governments around the world were banning that, too, albeit more slowly. As for Thomas Midgley, well, with hindsight, boss Ketuing's eulogy

sounds a little different. Midgeley contributed so greatly to more pleasant and efficient living. So he did. Safe refrigerators, aerosols, smoothly running gas engines, pleasant and efficient, just deadly too. 70 years after Ketuing's Eulogy, the new scientist looked back on Mitchell's life,

memorably describing him as a one man environmental disaster. Far from the epitome of industrial progress, he starts to look more like a byword for that phrase coined by the great sociologist, Robert K. Merton, unanticipated consequences. And yet unanticipated consequences. And yet unanticipated consequences isn't a phrase you hear much anymore. It's given way to unintended consequences. Merton himself switched from using one phrase to the other.

They might sound like synonyms, but they're not. A professor of political science, named Frank Doshvart, points out that this shift in language obscures a whole category of impacts, ones that you don't intend, but you might nonetheless anticipate. Think of a doctor prescribing a drug that often has side effects. She doesn't want you to suffer the side effects, but she does foresee the possibility, or at least, she should. And she should be honest about it too. We expect doctors to speak truthfully about risks and trade-offs. Other decision-makers might not, when they stand to gain, while the risks fall on others.

In cases like that, says Dejevt, we should be skeptical when someone apologizes for unintended consequences. It can be an attempt to evade responsibility for harms they didn't intend, but should have foreseen. That CFCs would destroy the ozone layer was genuinely unanticipated, until Mario Molina sat down with his pencil and paper and calculator, it simply hadn't occurred to anyone as a possibility.

But when Thomas Midgley and Boss Kettering launched Tetraethile Lead as a fuel additive to stop engine knock, the danger was all too predictable. It had been known for centuries that lead was poisonous. America's foremost expert in lead was Dr. Alice Hamilton. In 1925, she pleaded with US regulators not to allow midslee and kettering to put lead in gasoline. I am not one of those who believe that the use of this lead in gasoline can ever be made safe. No lead industry has ever, even under the strictest control lost all its dangers. Where there is lead, some case of lead poisoning sooner or later develops,

even under the strictest supervision. They had already been ample evidence of the risk. At a plant making tetraethyl lead in New Jersey, five of the 49 workers had died. Most of the rest had been taken to hospital in straight jackets, hallucinating, screaming and convulsing. Midshle in Ketting said that they could make the factories safe for workers. Even if that were true, said Alice Hamilton. You'd still have millions of cars belching lead in exhaust fumes into the air we all breathe. You make control conditions within a factory, but how are you going to control the whole country?

Minshli insisted that there'd be two little led in exhaust fumes to cause any problems for human health. He didn't intend to poison people, but he should have anticipated that he might. Alice Hamilton did, and she warned him. Faced with this kind of criticism, Boss Kettering knew that he needed to get public opinion on his side. Fortunately for him, Thomas Midgeley wasn't just an inventor, remember? He was that consummate showman we heard about earlier, filling his lungs with dichloro-difluomethane to blow out a candle. At a press conference on leaded gasoline, midgely put on a similar kind of show. He produced a container of tetraethyl lead,

poured the liquid all over his hands, and ostentatiously breathed in the fumes. I'm not taking any chance whatever, nor would I take any chance doing that every day. The journalists were wowed. But Midgley must have known how disingenuous he was being, and how reckless, he'd just taken months off work to recover from lead poisoning himself, catering and midgely knew the risks. Was there really no alternative? Well, when governments finally banned ledigastoline, scientists found different ways to prevent engine knock. When governments banned CFCs, scientists found alternative ways to make fridges, and air conditioners, and aerosols. Science is great.

Midshli and Kettering knew of at least one promising potential alternative, ethyl alcohol. But any old farmer could make ethyl alcohol from grain, whereas tetraethyl lead, was something that could be patented and monetized. They just had to get past experts such as Alice Hamilton first. Midshli went to work on the job of introducing the new product to the public, and Endeavour which he met with and finally overcame many obstacles and much opposition. Overcoming obstacles and opposition, it's a fitting line for eulogy, but I can't help thinking of another fine phrase.

The sociologist Robert K. Merton, the imperious immediacy of interest. Letted gasoline would make a lot of money. Who really cared what might happen next? would make a lot of money. Who really cared what might happen next? For a full list of our sources, please see the show notes at timhalford.com. Corsinary Tales is written by me, Tim Halford, with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Ryan Dilly with support from Courtney Garino and Emily Vaughn. The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Weiss.

It features the voice talents of Ben Crow, Melanie Gutridge, Stella Halford, and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Mia LeBel. Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fane, John Schnarrs, Julia Barton, Carly McGleory, Eric Sandler, Roiston Besserv, Maggie Taylor, Nicole Marano, Daniel Lacan and Maya Caning.

Corsairry Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. Tell a friend, tell two friends, and if you want to hear the show ads-free and listen to four exclusive cautionary tales short, then sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show ads-free and listen to four exclusive cautionary tales short, then sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show page and Apple Podcasts or at Pushkin.fm-plus. you