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Thomas Midgley Jr. His Inventions Poisoned the Whole Planet
One man changed the air of the entire planet. Twice.
Thomas Midgley Jr. was a brilliant, cheerful engineer. In 1921 he found a cure for knocking car engines: tetraethyl lead. The company sold it as "Ethyl" and left the word lead out. In 1924 factory workers began to hallucinate and at least fifteen died; newspapers called it "looney gas". Midgley answered with a press conference, pouring the liquid over his hands and breathing its fumes, months after he himself had been treated for lead poisoning.
Then he gave the world Freon, a refrigerator gas that seemed perfectly safe. It went into fridges, air conditioners and spray cans, and decades later it was found to be tearing a hole in the ozone layer. In 1940 polio paralysed his legs, and he built himself a system of ropes and pulleys to get out of bed. In 1944 he was found tangled in those ropes. Whether it was an accident is still debated.
The facts behind this file
What the record shows
- At least 15 workers died at the tetraethyl lead plants in Dayton, Deepwater (DuPont) and Bayway (Standard Oil) in 1923–1924.
Legends, disputes & careful wording
- His death in 1944 is often told as 'killed by his own invention'. The official record and historians disagree on whether it was an accident or suicide.
- The line that he had 'more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth's history' is the judgement of one historian, J. R. McNeill, not a measured fact.
Main sources
- J. R. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun (2000)
Spotted a mistake or know a better source? Tell us.
Image & film credits
- Portraits of Thomas Midgley Jr.: Blank & Stoller, N.Y., via Wikimedia Commons (no known restrictions).
- All other archival images are public domain or CC0 (Library of Congress, NASA, USDA, John Margolies Roadside America collection); video clips from Pexels.
- Music and sound made for this video.
