He was wanting to help, but good intentions don’t always lead to positive results.
The inventor who changed our lives... for the worse: meet the anti-hero whose inventions are still hurting us
When people talk about history’s villains, they tend to mention dictators, warmongers, and tech bros. But Thomas Midgley Jr might have done more lasting damage than all of them – armed not with an army or an app, but with a lab coat and good intentions.
I hadn’t heard of Midgley until relatively recently. As it turns out, that’s part of the problem. He’s one of the most consequential American inventors of the 20th century, and not in a good way, as was detailed in Prof. Frank T. Edelmann’s paper for AvH Kolleg at Hobart.
What did Thomas Midgley Jr invent?
Working at General Motors in the 1920s, Midgley was trying to fix the annoying “knock” in car engines. His answer was Tetraethyl lead (TEL), a chemical that made engines quieter but pumped toxic lead into the air for decades. Even back then, scientists knew how dangerous lead was. Still, the fuel was sold under the name “Ethyl,” scrubbing any mention of its actual contents from gas pumps and public awareness.
How dangerous was leaded gasoline?
If you were wondering about the danger of this, let’s just say workers at the production plant started hallucinating and dying almost immediately. Midgley himself staged a publicity stunt in 1924 where he poured TEL on his hands and inhaled it to prove its safety. He was lying to himself and soon fell seriously ill from lead poisoning and spent over a year recovering.
You’d think that would be enough, but Midgley wasn’t done.
His next big invention was CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons), the chemicals that made refrigerators safer and aerosols more convenient. They also, somewhat infamously, ripped a hole in the ozone layer and supercharged global warming. Again, he meant well. And again, the fallout was massive. I’ll give him this: he had a rare talent for choosing exactly the wrong breakthrough at exactly the wrong time.
What happened to Thomas Midgley Jr?
Ironically, Midgley was killed by one of his own inventions. After contracting polio later in life, he built an elaborate system of pulleys to move around in bed – and was strangled by it in 1944.
By then, he’d racked up accolades and medals, praised for making modern life more comfortable. Only later did we realize he’d also helped make it more toxic. Remember that next time a new invention hits the stores...
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