Lead for Life - the history of leaded gasoline - an excerpt

sometimes faith in progress can be so overwhelming that the world is willing to go to any lengths to ensure a new technological leap forward regardless of the threat it may present to both mankind and his environment at the beginning of the 1920s the leading American oil and automobile industry added led to gasoline to obtain a more efficient fuel at that time that was already unknown poison harmful to the nervous system especially of children however led quickly won over the use of other less harmful additives and profits within the oil industry sold for decades to come but hundreds of thousands of tons of lead were spread around the world causing injuries such as impairing the IQ of millions lead from gasoline has literally made a lot of us a little more dim gasoline powerful stuff modern magic our lives our business our cities our patterned on motor transportation which gasoline has made possible nothing has had such a profound impact on the development of society in the 20th century as the Motor Co during a few decades a car has become mankind's preferred means of efficient transport to which our streets and highways bear witness more and more the world over right from its early beginnings our enthusiasm for the car and its qualities has simply never ceased it was that wonderful day not so long ago when the automobile first came to an American town the youngsters swarmed excitedly after man's latest mechanical marvel adventurous riders held tight as the contraption Kareem crazily along sending into frightened flight horses which had served their masters so well and so long with the rapid spread of cars the production of fuel quickly became a very lucrative industry the beginning of the century cars ran on anything which could turn over a combustion engine to propel a four wheeled vehicle there was an abundance of them you could get benzene from coal you could get other kinds of synthetic gasoline and you could make out alcohol from farm crops for example France Germany Denmark Sweden England Poland all these other countries were using blends of alcohol now that was considered to be the universal choice of the future but it was a little bit more expensive than oil competition between suppliers of the most popular fuel gasoline and alcohol was tough and the car manufacturers were competing for faster and more efficient cars which drove on the relatively expensive fuel new high-compression engines were developed but the automobile industry run into problems with their new engines due to their irregular combustion which caused knocking then General Motors who were producing the well known brands Chevrolet and Cadillac discovered that fuel was the problem so the industry invested large amounts of money in raising the octane level the General Motors research effort was headed by Thomas Midgley and he tried something like 15,000 different combinations of elements they did find that benzene from coal would work they did find that alcohol from farm crops would work so you could add 10% alcohol to gasoline and get a higher quality fuel less knocking in the engine in 1920 Thomas Midgley took out a patent on a mixture of refined benzene and 30 percent alcohol and in October of 1921 at a meeting of motor engineers he told participants that the alcohol mixture had incredible advantages such as pure combustion without the emission of soot and in addition fuel combustion gave more horsepower without engine knocking but Thomas Midgley continued with his research and within a few months made a new discovery it was discovered that a rare compound of lead mixed in proper proportions with gasoline made an ideal anti-knock fuel horsepower increased speed picked up and the knot was gone no land can look at the amazing record of accomplishment here in this research division without confidence that these men are going ahead with an eye to the future looking for new facts and principles which will make things better and make life easier for all of us in 1923 Midgley writes to his boss charles kettering at GM from florida he's on vacation because he's actually got lead poisoning from all the research and he says can you imagine how much money we're going to make with this we're going to make two hundred million dollars maybe more the oil industry was even more carried away by this discovery and the biggest American oil company Standard Oil together with General Motors created a joint corporation ethyl corporation and built huge factories for the manufacture of the lead additive tetraethyl lead why pick leaded gasoline over alcohol if they both did the same thing well let a gasoline was far more profitable for one thing if you add a large percentage of alcohol into gasoline you've lost the petroleum sales so you've lost ten fifteen percent maybe twenty percent of your market right there whereas if you add leaded gasoline you've got a product that you control you the oil industry control that's what they wanted LEED is an old and well-documented poison as early as the Year 105 in the silver mines where they were exposed to lead from the dust by giving them crude masks to to prevent them from inhaling too much dust this is 2,000 years ago and so we knew that lead was poisonous what happened over the years was that we started to appreciate that LED toxicity could occur at lower and lower concentrations lead is one of the best known poisons in history it was a well known occupational poison in the industries of France and England and Germany in the industrial revolution and in the United States it was a well known industrial poison so when Standard Oil and General Motors wanted to use it in gasoline public health officials were very very concerned they couldn't imagine why anybody would want to do a thing like this in the autumn of 1922 the general manager of the American health department asked General Motors for an estimation of the health impact of using lead in gasoline at that time General Motors hadn't studied the question that closely and offered to finance an investigation and the American Ministry of mining recognizing the sensitivity of the matter and showing great understanding for some of the sponsors demands agreed to word their findings General Motors Corporation specifically asked the US Bureau of Mines not to refer to the study as a leaded gasoline study to simply not use the word lead so they would use a substitute word they would use the word which was the name of their product which was ethyl now ethyl is a woman's name and it's a very nice name for a woman my grandmother was named Ethel so they called it ethyl gasoline but in fact it was leaded gasoline and the point was to move the attention away from lead but it was difficult to draw attention away from lead when for those factory workers producing tetraethyl lead the substance already had a bad reputation loonie gas means something that drives you crazy and that's what the workers called it because they knew that working in this particular part of the refinery was very dangerous in the DuPont facility down in deep water somebody had scrawled an enormous butterfly on the side of the wall to represent that this was the house of butterflies because what was happening was the workers saw butterflies they weren't there they were hallucinating because the poison was so malicious during the autumn of 1924 more and more reports were published about workers growing ill and on October the 27th the New York Times printed an article about a mr. McSweeney who felt ill after coming home from work the newspaper wrote that early next morning his sister-in-law rung the police because he was acting irrationally and a patrolman was sent to the house to question him it ended with the patrolman having to enlist the aid of three other men to subdue McSweeney and taken to the Alexian Hospital where he was put into a straitjacket the same day the newspaper reported that another employee and mr. Dimmick had according to family members woken in the middle the night and walked out of his second-story bedroom window when standard oil company opened its tetraethyl ed plant in 1924 they had created a process so hazardous that within a month of opening operations five people died violently insane and another 45 or so were severely injured by the worst lead poisoning any of the coroner's or doctors had ever seen this caused an enormous outcry people said how the heck did that happen and when they find out that the same substance is being put in their gasoline and they didn't even know it then there is a call for a government investigation in many cities such as New York Philadelphia and Washington the sale of leaded gasoline was forbidden

Channel: Jakob Gottschau

Views: 36,015

Rating: 4.8620691 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: pqg9jH1xwjI

Length: 11min 28sec (688 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 16 2013