Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Get the Lead Out

Episode Date: November 26, 2020

Clair Patterson was a geochemist who worked at CalTech from the 1940s through the 1990s. His work involved studying the age of rocks and the age of the Earth. His greatest discovery, however, was one that was totally by accident and ended up directly impacting the lives of every person on the planet. Learn more about the remarkable Clair Patterson and how he helped get the lead out on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Claire Patterson was a geochemist who worked at Caltech from the 1940s through the 1990s. His work involved studying the age of rocks and the age of the earth. His greatest discovery, however, was one that was totally by accident and ended up directly impacting the lives of every person on the planet. Learn more about the remarkable Claire Patterson and how he helped get the let out on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Fear is the virus is trending on TikTok. Vaccines are poison. Then your yoga teacher says that sex traffic children are being sacrificed by satanic liberals, but it's all okay. The Great Awakening is coming.

What is happening? Every week on Conspiratuality Podcast, we explore the fever dreams that suck friends, family, and wellness gurus down the right-wing cult spiral in a search for salvation. This episode is sponsored by CuriosityStream. Television is a lot like food. You can spend your time consuming junk or you can spend your time consuming something healthy. Curiosity Stream is like Health Food for Television. They have over 2,500 educational programs available for streaming on almost any device on an incredibly wide variety of subjects, including shows like Hidden Killers, the Victorian Home.

I've been a Curiosity Stream subscriber since the service was first launched in 2015, and I watch it several times a week. Prices start at a low $299 per month or $1999 per year. one of the cheapest streaming services online. If you're a curious person, and let's face it, you are because you're listening to this show, then you can start your subscription by visiting everything-everywhere.com or by clicking on the link in the show notes. Claire Patterson might be the most important scientists that you've never heard of.

He is responsible for at least four things that dramatically changed the course of science and modern civilization. He was a geochemist, which is not really a branch of science which lends itself to society-altering discoveries. While he was in grad school, he focused his studies on lead, which again, isn't necessarily something which seems world-chattering. But as we'll see, it actually was. Early in his career, he worked on the Manhattan Project. His assignment was separating uranium 238, from which you could not make an atomic bomb, from the much more rare uranium 235, which could be used to make an atomic bomb. Most of the separation was done via a mass spectrometer. More on that later. After the war, he went back to geochemistry, where he focused on the first of his four major advances, radiometric dating.

In rocks and minerals, you'll find naturally occurring radioactive elements like uranium and thorium. They're weekly radioactive with half-lives that measure in the billions of years. As the atoms decay, they follow a decay path, which leads to the stable element lead. Minerals such as zircon contain uranium, but what you won't find a natural zircon is lead. If you do find lead, it has to have come from the natural decay of uranium atoms inside the zircon. Uranium 235 and uranium 238 decay at different rates and create different lead isotopes. Moreover, their decay rate is well known. Patterson realized that if you could measure the ratio of lead isotopes,

then you could figure out how long the uranium has been decaying since the mineral was formed, and hence determine the age of the rocket was in. You could also measure the amount of uranium still in the crystal and compare that to the amount of lead. This was one of the first big advances in radiometric dating. In 1948, while at the University of Chicago, Patterson began measuring lead and uranium in samples. Measuring lead isotopes required something called a mass spectrometer, which I mentioned before. I'm not going to get into too much detail, but it involves ionizing atoms and then sending them through a charged field. How much they deviate while they're in that charged field will depend upon their mass,

and their mass will determine what element they are, or even what isotope they are. Patterson had a problem with his measurements. The amount of uranium in the samples of a known geologic age fit perfectly with the theory. However, there was way too much lead. No matter what they did, they found lead where there shouldn't have been any lead. They found lead in water. They found lead in hair. Basically, everything they tested had lead in it.

He then got a job as a professor at Caltech in 1952, and he was able to set up his own lab. He created a special facility for his mass spectrometer to eliminate the possibility of any lead contamination. To do this, he created what was his second major advancement, the world's first clean room. Today, clean rooms are pretty ubiquitous in electronics and semiconductor manufacturing. Patterson built his clean room to remove any possibility that outside lead could contaminate his samples. He filtered the air and controlled everything which went into the room. He acid washed all of the equipment and distilled all the chemicals that were used. I used to study geology at the University of Minnesota.

There they had a mass spectrometer and they had similar procedures. No metal whatsoever could be brought into the facility. No jewelry, no jeans with metal rivets, no shoes with metals around the shoelace holes. Nothing. With this new clean facility and the removal of trace amounts of background lead, he could then get to work on his real quest, which was determining the age of the Earth. He worked on a sample of the Diablo Canyon meteorite. This was the meteor that slammed into the Earth in Arizona leaving Meteor Crater.

In 1956, with his clean room at Caltech and his lead-led dating technique, he was able to finally nail down a date for when the Earth and other rocky substances in the solar system were formed. This is his third major scientific advancement. The date he arrived at was first. 4.55 billion years ago. Since 1956, more precise techniques and better equipment have been developed, but even the best current dates for the formation of the Earth are within Patterson's original margin of error. The date used by scientists today is 4.54 billion years. So at this point, Patterson had a pretty good career. He worked on the Manhattan Project. He helped pioneer radiometric dating. He

created the world's first clean room, and he figured out the age of the earth. That's a pretty good run for anyone. However, there was one thing still nagging him. Why was his clean room necessary in the first place? What was causing all of the background lead which was skewing his measurements? He started testing lots of things for lead. He tested deep ocean water and compared it to the water near the surface. He discovered that water near the surface had over 20 times the amount of lead as deep ocean water, which took a long time to get down to that depth. He checked for other metals and did not find this large discrepancy. He checked ice cores from Greenland in Antarctica, and again he found that ice near the surface had way more lead than what was found further down. His initial observations

from back in the 40s were correct. There was lead everywhere. What his research on deep ocean water and ice cores showed was that lead was a very recent phenomenon. It wasn't something that gradually appeared since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. It appeared quite suddenly in the ice cores about three decades before. In the next, 1920s. Here I have to take a short detour off the story of Claire Patterson to point out something that most of you probably already know. Lead is very poisonous. Lead is considered a neurotoxin. While lead poisoning can cause a host of symptoms, it's the brain which is most susceptible to lead damage, and children are especially susceptible. This isn't something that modern science

needed to figure out. Lead was known to cause illness as far back as ancient Greece in Rome. The great Roman architect Vitruvius noted, quote, water is much more wholesome from earthenware pipes than from leaded pipes, for it seems to be made injurious by lead, because white lead is produced by it, and this is said to be harmful to the human body, unquote. So, lead bad. I think we all know that. So what happened in the 1920s that caused lead to suddenly start appearing everywhere on earth? The early 20th century saw a dramatic rise in the use of automobiles. One problem that early automobiles had was called engine knock. Engine knock happens when fuel is burned

unevenly in cylinders. It creates an audible noise and it causes a major drop in the performance of an engine. In the 1920s, chemists made a discovery that a certain additive to gasoline all but eliminated engine knock. That substance was tetraethyl lead. The introduction and wide-scale use of tetraethyl lead

in gasoline fit almost perfectly with the sharp increase in lead seen around the world in the late 1920s. If you're old enough, you probably remember seeing gas stations selling ethyl gasoline. That was gas that had tetraethyl lead as an additive. In 1965, Patterson published his seminal paper, contaminated and natural lead environments of man. Lead wasn't just in gasoline. Lead could be found in the soldering which sealed canned food and also in paint. Patterson started a fight to remove lead from daily life. He found that

the amount of lead in canned tuna was 1,400 nanograms per gram, whereas in fresh tuna, it was only 0.3 nanograms per gram, over 4,666 times more lead in canned tuna. The amount of lead in modern humans he found was 700 to 1,200 times the amount found in Peruvian mummies. The oil and lead industry fought back hard. He lost research grants. He was sued for defamation. They tried to pressure the Board of Trustees at Caltech to silence him. In 1971, when the National Research Council created a panel on atmospheric lead, he was denied a seat on it, even though he was the world's leading expert on atmospheric lead. Eventually, his perseverance paid off.

The United States mandated the use of unleaded fuel in new cars in 1975, and eventually completely phased it out in 1986. Most countries followed suit, and today there are only three countries in the world that still use lead additives, Iraq, Yemen, and Algeria. In addition, lead was removed from paint, plumbing, and from use in canned foods. This was Claire Patterson's fourth great accomplishment. By the end of the 1990s, the average amount of lead found in most humans had decreased by over 80%. The worldwide decrease in lead and the reduction in human exposure to lead was all due to one determined scientist who just wanted to collect his data properly.

Executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is James McAlla. The associate producer is Thor Thompson. Remember to leave a five-star review to get your review read on the show. They can be left at Apple Podcasts, Podcasts, Podcast Republic, or wherever you listen to the show. Also, you can help support the show over at patreon.com. Patrons can get merchandise like t-shirts and hoodies, as well as having direct access to provide suggestions for future episodes.