Pushkin.
Thomas Midgley Junior was born on College Hill in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, May eighteenth, eighteen eighty nine. His father, Thomas Midgley Senior, was a prolific inventor in a variety of fields, but notably that of automobile times and his mother.
A eulogy for an inventor, a hero of industrial science who changed the world, and who died tragically young, aged just fifty five. Thomas Midgley Junior studied mechanical engineering, but he was just as fascinated by chemistry. As a young researcher employed by General Motors, Midgley 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, Midgley had accumulated over one hundred patents. We're going to hear about three of his inventions.
In nineteen sixteen, Midgley 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 Midgley'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. Life. This pudgy, bespectacled inventor seemed to personify the mid twentieth century ideal of progress, as summed up by DuPont in their famous nineteen thirties advertising slogan better things for better living, living through chemistry Hemistry. In his eulogy, Boss Kettering runs through Midgley's 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 Longstreth Medal, honorary doctorates from the College of Wooster and the Ohio State University. Kettering quotes the citation from Ohio State.
Midgley contributed so greatly to more pleasant and efficient living. He has made science a liberator, and we rejoice with him at the satisfactions that must be his In seeing the fruits of his labor, Asterity will acknowledge their permanent value.
Posterity alas, was not as kind to Midgley 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 Harford and you're listening to cautionary tales?
What do you want me to do? An next bus?
One day, when Thomas Midgley asked that question of Charles Kettering, the boss had a problem he wanted Midgley 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 Midgley to invent away to cool things safely. Midgley
took the periodic table out of his pocket. He soon zeroed in on fluorine as a promising element for creating a compound that might have the right properties. As Kettering's eulogy recalls.
He and his helpers prepared such a compound, dichloridy fluoromethane. It proved to have just the properties required. It is highly stable, non inflammable, and altogether without harmful effects on man or animals.
Dichloro difluoromethane it did seem to be all together without harmful effects. Midgeley tested this by replacing all the nitrogen in air with dichlorodifluoromethane 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 di chlorodfluoromethane. He sucks it in a long, deep gulp, filling his lungs. Then slowly and gently he breathes out over the candle. The flame goes out. It's a bravura performance. Dichlorodifluoromethane belongs to a class of chemicals called CFCs, or chlorofluora carbons. Under Midgley's guidance, General Motors and the DuPont Corporation start to produce a whole range of CFCs. They give them the trade name free On. 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 uses beyond cooling. They were ideal for making aerosol sprays, insect repellance, air freshness, hair spray deodorance. It was just like DuPont said, better
things for better living through chemistry. In the summer of nineteen seventy three, nearly three decades after Thomas Midgley's untimely death, a 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 thirty 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 dichlorodifluoromethane. It turns out that CFCs are present in the air around US at two hundred and thirty 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 dropful 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 that CFCs just seemed 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, Molina 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 BE 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, popping 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. Molina 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 a 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. Cautionary tales will be back in a moment. At the University of California, Irvine, Maria and Melina tracks down Sherwood Roland and may have
found something important. Roland checks Molina's sums. He checks them again. That can't be right, but it was. The CFCs drifting slowly up towards the stratosphere were a ticking time bomb. Barely forty 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 impacts yet, but more and more CFCs were being produced every year. If that continued, what might it mean by say, the
middle of the twenty first century. Molina and Roland calculated that up to half the ozone layer could disappear. As Molina 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 nineteen seventy four, 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 Roland, I.
Read your paper. I was appalled.
Thanks for getting in touch. It is appalling.
Throughout your paper. You talk about Freon. Don't you know that Freon's are DuPont registered brand name. You need to refer to CFC's generically, not Freeon specifically. I have to tell you we take this very seriously.
Uh oh okay.
Roland and Molina were dispirited. They'd 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 Midgley had wowed forty four years earlier by filling his lungs with die chlorod fluomethane and softly extinguishing a candle.
Roland and Melina 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 CFC's and.
Ozone yes, it seems important.
We think it's an insignificant story.
A lot of people are interested.
Dorothy Smith 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 Molina kept speaking out that fewer and fewer people were bothering to listen. Progress towards banning CFC's 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 CFC's and the oz But I promised you three inventions by Thomas Midgley, and as we'll see, those three inventions have a theme. That theme on anticipated consequences. I mentioned that Thomas Midgley died young. How did he die exactly? Bossquttering's eulogy tiptoed around that delicate question.
In the early fall of nineteen forty, Midgley was struck by an acute attack of poliomylidis, which deprived him of the use of his legs and made him a semi invalid. Middley died unexpectedly on November two, nineteen forty four, at the age of fifty five.
Confined to his bed by polio. Midgley 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 Mitchelly'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 Mitchelly's death in a much cited article by the great American sociologist Robert K. Murton. That article was called The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive 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 categorizing 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. Midgley had tried to get some knowledge about potential risks by making animals breathe in dichlorodifluomethane, 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 Midgley's disastrous brain waves, 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 Midgley to solve was engine knock. When you read 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 Midgley 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? Ketoing 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 arbuddhis are red on the back, and that they grow and bloom under the snow.
Midgley went to a chemist's shop and brought 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 color red that was stopping the knock. Midgeley try other ways of dyeing fuel, but with no success. Apparently it wasn't the red color, but something else about the iodine. The leaves of the trailing arbutus had been a red herring. Midgley then tried
ethyl iodide, which has iodine but no color. It stopped the knock just as well. Unfortunately, it also corroded the engine. Underterreed, Midgeley pulled the periodic table from his pocket and began to work his way through it.
Many anti Knoch agents were discovered along the way, compounds of iodine, of nitrogen, of phosphorus, of arsenic, of antimony, of selenium, of tillurium, 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 without damaging the engine, tetra ethyl lead. Thomas Midley had invented leaded gasoline because of Midgeley's invention. I'm about five 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 trifector. Thomas Midgley 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 all together. How
unlucky can one man be? That luck isn't the whole story. In the early nineteen eighties, the radio chemist Sherwood Rowland and his colleague Mario Molina kept on talking about the danger of CFC's 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 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 that 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 twenty five years, an obscure organization called the British Antarctic Survey had been toiling away on a shoe string 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 twenty five years, it never had. Now, in the early nineteen eighties, it did. The ozone measurements were all over the place. The researchers suspected that their instruments had gone haywire. They send 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 solo. 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 thirty 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 reflect found that her eye had frozen shut. For the results of
the experiments pointed only in one direction. On October the twentieth, nineteen eighty six, journalists gathered in Washington, d C. To hear Solomon relay her team's preliminary findings over a crackly satellite link from Antarctica.
At present, we have not conclusively established the cause.
Of the oath on whole.
However, we have strong evidence against theories that upward wins or high solar activities caused the deplete it. We suspect a chemical process is fundamentally responsible for the formation of the whole.
Solomon was right. More experiments confirmed it. The world's leaders acted with commendable speed. In nineteen eighty seven, they agreed the Montreal Protocol to phase out CFC's Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina share and 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 Ketowing's eulogy sounds a little different.
Midgeley contributed so greatly to more pleasant and efficient living.
So he did. Safe refrigerators, air assaults, smoothly running gas engines, pleasant and efficient, just deadly too. Seventy years after Ketoing's eulogy, the New Scientist looked back on Midgeley'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 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 Dejevart 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 Dejerrat, 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 CFC's would destroy the ozone layer was genuinely unanticipated until Mariomalina 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 tetra ethyl 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 doctor Alice Hamilton.
In nineteen twenty five, she pleaded with US regulators not to allow me and Kettering to put lead in gasoline.
I am not one of those who believe that the use of this leaded 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.
There had already been ample evidence of the risk. At a plant making tetra ethyl lead in New Jersey, five of the forty nine workers had died. Most of the rest had been taken to hospital in strait jackets, hallucinating, screaming, and convulsing. Midgeley and Ketching said that they could make the factories safe for workers. Even if that were true, said Alice Hamilton, could still have millions of cars belching lead in exhaust fumes into the air we all breathe.
You may control conditions within a factory but how are you going to control the whole country?
Midgley insisted there'd be too little lead 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, Bossquttering knew that he needed to get public opinion on his side. Fortunately for him, Thomas Midgley wasn't just an inventor. Remember he was that consummate showman we heard about earlier, filling his lungs with di chlorodie
fluoromethane to blow out a candle. At a press conference on leaded gasoline, Midgley put on a similar kind of show. He produced a container of tetra ethyl lead, poured the liquid all over his hands, and ostentatious 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 had just taken months off work
to recover from lead poisoning himself. Kettering and Midgeley knew the risks, was there really no alternative? Well? When governments finally banned leather gasoline, scientists found different ways to prevent engine knock. When governments banned CFCs, scientists found alternative ways to make fridges and air conditioners and air assaults. Science
is great. Midgeley and Kettering knew of at least one promising potential alternative, ethyl alcohol, but any old farmer could make ethyl alcohol from whereas tetra ethyl lad was something that could be patented and monetized. They just had to get past experts such as Alice Hamilton.
First, Mitchley went to work on the job of introducing the new product of the public and endeavor, which he met with and finally overcame many obstacles and much opposition.
Overcoming obstacles in opposition. It's a fitting line for a eulogy, but I can't help thinking of another fine phrase. The sociologist Robert K. Merton, the imperious immediacy of interest leaded gasoline 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 Timharford dot com. Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright.
It's produced by Ryan Dilley with support from Courtney Gerino and Emily Vaughan, but the sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Wise. It features the voice talents of Ben Crow, Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Mea LaBelle, Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fane, John Schnaz, Julia Barton, Carlie mcgliori, Eric Sandler, Royston Basserv Maggie Taylor, Nicol Morano,
Daniel Lacahan and Maya Kanig. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rape and review, tell a friend, tell two friends, and if you want to hear the show ads free and listen to four exclusive Cautionary Tale shorts. Then sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show page and Apple podcast or at pushkin dot fm, slash plus