> Kettering was elected as president with Midgley as vice president. However, after two deaths and several cases of lead poisoning at the TEL prototype plant in Dayton, Ohio, the staff at Dayton was said in 1924 to be "depressed to the point of considering giving up the whole tetraethyl lead program". Over the course of the next year, eight more people died at DuPont's plant in Deepwater, New Jersey. …
> The risks associated with exposure to lead were known at least 150 years before, when Benjamin Franklin wrote about his experiences as a typesetter.
Holy cow. I always chocked up leaded gasoline as one of those “well how could they know” kind of things but people were dropping dead just making it, and Midgley himself was sickened from it by researching its production. Absolutely fucking evil people.
I think we've known about the dangers of lead since Roman times so it's even worse. Quoting Vitruvius [1]:
> Water conducted through earthen pipes is more wholesome than that through lead; indeed that conveyed in lead must be injurious, because from it white lead [PbCO3, lead carbonate] is obtained, and this is said to be injurious to the human system. Hence, if what is generated from it is pernicious, there can be no doubt that itself cannot be a wholesome body. This may be verified by observing the workers in lead, who are of a pallid colour; for in casting lead, the fumes from it fixing on the different members, and daily burning them, destroy the vigour of the blood; water should therefore on no account be conducted in leaden pipes if we are desirous that it should be wholesome. That the flavour of that conveyed in earthen pipes is better, is shewn at our daily meals, for all those whose tables are furnished with silver vessels, nevertheless use those made of earth, from the purity of the flavour being preserved in them
We've known about the danger of the fumes for over two thousand years!
Wow, first time hearing of this.. so terrible.. no money in the world is worth the lasting damages he contributed to.
There are few of such people still alive in the world, without which we'd have millions of less deaths and people left disabled..
Hope someone finds out and the PR stops them from continuing somehow :/
> In 1923, Midgley took a long vacation in Miami to cure himself of lead poisoning. He said, "I find that my lungs have been affected and that it is necessary to drop all work and get a large supply of fresh air."
one man was so absolutely prolifically bad to the environment.