THE INVENTOR WHO DESTROYED
Thomas Midgley Jr. is the definitive answer to the age-old question “Who is the most destructive human being of all time?“. He was neither an atrocious fascist nor a ruthless conqueror, he was a mechanical engineer from Pennsylvania, whose inventions were single handedly responsible for the insurmountable destruction of our planet and the gradual yet inevitable descent of humanity into chaos.
Thomas was born on May 18.1889 into a family of inventors. His father was a notable inventor in the field of automobile tyres. Following his father’s footsteps, Midgley joined the General Motors company in 1916 and started working on a problem that was plaguing the automobile industry, the occurrence of “knocking” in internal combustion engines. He soon discovered that the addition of tetraethyllead (TEL) to gasoline was an effective solution for preventing “knocking”. Midley had devised a product which would revolutionise the automobile industry and would put the General motor company miles ahead of their competition. But, there was a HUGE catch, lead was extremely poisonous and GM knew that they would face huge public backlash for selling a product that actively harmed its users. So instead of entirely scrapping the idea of leaded gasoline, they named their ‘groundbreaking’ new product, “Ethyl” and removed all mentions of lead from reports and advertising. Ethyl took the world by storm, Midgley became an overnight success. He was facilitated with numerous awards and accolades and GM continued to rake in an outrageous amount of profit by selling a deadly commodity.
Everything was going well up until 1923, when Midgley discovered that lead, the miracle element that had been responsible for his fame, was literally killing him. He shifted to Miami to recuperate.
He apparently said — “that my lungs have been affected and that it is necessary to drop all work and get a large supply of fresh air.”
When he returned after a year, things had taken a turn for the worse . Dozens of factory workers had suffered from intense hallucinations and a handful of them died, pushing several state governments to ban Ethyl. This prompted Midgley to take drastic measures, during a press conference held in 1924, he demonstrated the safety of TEL by rubbing it all over his bare skin and directly inhaling its fumes. Obviously this led to him developing a serious case of lead poisoning. But none of this fazed Midgley, he continued to aggressively promote leaded gasoline.
He also led a team of scientists that developed a non-flammable and non-toxic refrigerant called dichlorodifluoromethane, the very first of the chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs),and sold it under the brand name Freon-12. Midgley demonstrated its effectiveness and safety to the American Chemical Society by inhaling a lungful of the Freon-12 and blowing out a candle.
Freon-12 and other CFCs became ubiquitous around the world as propellants, refrigerants and were even used in the treatment of asthma! Little did they know that CFCs would become one of the major compounds which accelerated climate change and global warming.
His discoveries were responsible for the poisoning of several generations, increased risk of cancer in the general population and the formation of holes in the ozone layer. It is almost poetic that his death occurred at the hands of his own invention. He contracted polio in 1940, which disabled him and confined him to his bed. He invented a pulley system to get out of bed without any help. His final invention, like all of his previous ones, proved to be lethal when he died of asphyxiation after his own pulley system strangled him.
Midgley has been described by Environmental historian J. R. McNeill as having “had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth’s history”. History will remember him as the man whose career was a catalyst for global catastrophe.
