Tetraethyl Lead and the Unfortunate Thomas Midgley

..."He devised an ingenious system of pulleys and strings. They tangled around his neck, and killed him."...

There you have it, the man had a subconscious death wish...

..."As of June 2016 only Algeria, Yemen, and Iraq continue widespread use of leaded gasoline.^[8]"..

^..."Leaded gasoline remained legal as of late 2014^[19] in parts of Algeria, Iraq, Yemen, Myanmar, North Korea, and Afghanistan."...

...."In 1921, at the direction of Dupont Corporation which manufactured TEL, it was found to be an effective antiknock agent by Thomas Midgley, working under Charles Kettering at General Motors Corporation Research.^[64] General Motors patented the use of TEL as an antiknock agent and used the name "Ethyl" that had been proposed by Kettering in its marketing materials, thereby avoiding the negative connotation of the word "lead".^[5] "...

We were all poisoned by the lead additive in gasoline, who knows how many lives were ruined, how much production was lost, and great minds dulled...It's a dark chapter in the history of environmental stewardship...but just one of many I think....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead

Quite.

It's easy to "Monday morning quarterback" what was done almost 100 years ago knowing what we do now. After a World War where soldiers were killed in the trenches with poison gas and an influenza pandemic that killed ten times as many as the war, possibly lead emissions from cars, which were much fewer in number back then, didn't seem as important as it does today.

Just sayin'. I'm sure we're doing things today that will be judged harshly in 100 years.

https://virus.stanford.edu/uda/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I

So are we leaning to absolutism or relativism here on this thread?

I lean toward absolutism since in fact, nature (and also the materials not naturally made, but only made by man) does not care whether it kills me or not.

Science is supposed to be not so gray for a reason. If no one ever reached a conclusion, there could never be any real progress at all.

Conclusions are good things, but sometimes the misinformed conclusions are the deadliest ones.

Maintaining a strong economic position in the world is necessary to preserve freedom, everything else is secondary....that doesn't mean you can't be held liable for your decisions, and judged accordingly...unfortunately it's usually the whipping boy that takes the beating...

Are we referring to the Ginger haired step son again? Oh woe is me.

You can go from being 'on the bus' to being 'under the bus' in the blink of an eye...

Tell me about it.

Like keeping coal mines open and using coal fired power stations going beyond their sell by date. In so many cases, and certainly in the case of TEL/TML the science (and the deadly problem) were well understood. Worse still there were viable alternatives - high octane fuels and hardened valve faces - go figure.

OK Lyn, you can take your mask off now.

Heck, I used to virtually play with gasoline all the time when I was a kiddo. Now look at me, the picture of health, and I only revert to my Mr. Hyde side on Sundays. I seldom twitch on Fridays. Twitch, twitch.

Whatever lyn. Virtue signalling or just spewing your spin on a long past reality we can't change as if you think we can?

We, as I'm sure many incidences of "advanced" life in the universe, are not on course to survive our technological infancy. :(

Remember we could evolve into something else....

Once we poison the planet and exhaust the ability to produce food in the biosphere, we will have no alternative but to make the jump to silicon (or whatever the technology might be at that time). If and when we can produce computers that can mimic the human experience or more, it will happen. Unfortunately the only learning model for them will be humans so not much else will really change. We'll be machines building machines to kill other machines.

No reason to have a bleak outlook, it may turn out to be way better....that is the nature of evolution....

I hate to say that, but those Frankendroids do not look one bit "sexy" to me. I prefer something with some - je ne sais quoi, a soothing female voice, actual lovely skin, nice clothing, and a smile, and a warm plate of food from the actual kitchen once in a while.

I do not care one bit whether this female is of any particular race, just that she be healthy, loving, and give a hoot about what is important to me, just as I concern myself with her well-being and interests.

I don't think you need to worry about having a relationship of a physical nature with these examples, your software is not compatible...

And your point is what exactly?

Are you sitting on the sidelines, or are you doing something useful to expand energy horizons, harness energy more efficiently, or making life more convenient, or just whining and tearing down stuff you don't understand. Not really just picking on you, I ask that question of a whole generation that does not seem to understand the mission here.

You may want to check into reality once in awhile. As of today we are growing more food on less land than ever before plus the planet is getting greener too.

In my books things like that suggest that if we humans have any measureable influences in the large scale environment and general ecosystems we are improving things far more than harming them.

Follow the money... same old same old...
Del

So we have proven once again how perfect hindsight is. It is always 20/20. And, we damn the people behind bad decisions they couldn't really see the outcome of.

I still contend that neither he or any of the corporations involved could ever imagine how much traffic volume and total miles traveled would develop in the future. At the time, even with the Ford "T", many could not afford the automobile. They couldn't figure how much lead would be pumped into the atmosphere at that time, let alone in a future they did not envision.

Plus, most still had a naive feeling that we couldn't possibly load up the Earth with pollutants that much - it would all be dissipated across a a huge volume of air and soak into the ground and just be spread so thin it couldn't possibly matter. The majority held that belief well into the 1960's. We are trying to impose the saner logic of the 2000's on the thought trains of the early 1900's.

It is sane to simply lower the tolerated levels of pollutants as the detection limits of the instrumentation ( MS³, GC-MS, ICP, AA, etc.) decrease over time? I sat and watched that take place in front of my very eyes. Did they actually have toxicity studies that proved the need, or was it just a money-making ploy by the big bucks scientific firms, and the EPA activists idiom: "if it is a chemical it does not belong in the environment"!

Granted, I concur with that statement to the extent that if the chemical is in the EPA toxic substances list, or EHS list, we do need to tightly round up any contamination, and ban or severely limit the use of the targeted menu of chemicals.

Lead in the form of TEL, etc. got pretty bad back in the 1970's, until phase out. Mostly, issues arise where the chemical does not in fact dissipate to the general surroundings, get neutralized by soil bacteria, become bound by mineralization, etc.

Then the unsuspecting come into contact with toxic residues, and bad things begin to happen.

To concur with your assessment, concerning possible over reaction to some chemicals, especially in lesser amounts, I present the old and still producing oil fields of western Pa. If the chemicals in oil are so bad, how is it that the area around here:

1. has countless intentional oil spills, from prior to 1970

2. had water separation started in tanks, but actually finished in surface ponds (unlined of course) up until the later portion of the last century. You still have to be careful you don't fall into one of these, as you will come out quite black with old crude. What a mess to clean this up, especially if it is on your dog. (been there and done that)

3. still has producing wells spilling on the ground at times so much that there is at least a three foot ring around every well of black ground. I've personally chased down well tenders to inform them that one of their wells has loose packing and is running oil onto the ground.

4. has tanks still venting petroleum fumes to the atmosphere so much, on a foggy day that the valleys smell like fresh sweet crude

5. has wells that have been pulled and cemented in, but you should see the mess of black crude left on the ground around them from what leaks out of the pulled string of pipe

6. have known leakers in the wells drilled prior to about 1960, so much so that the stream in the valley behind my house has an oil sheen on it year round

7. still has dirt roads being "oiled down" to prevent dust in summer

But, we don't seem to have an inordinately high cancer rate, or any other disease linked to such chemicals.A bit odd wouldn't you say. My secondary water source in the house I previously lived in would produce a bit of oil when first turned on. It came from a well owned by a local oil field producer. I have pictures of trees growing quite fine and healthy in ground that actually has a cake of crud left from crude spilled on the ground. The fauna around here seem to be fine as well.

Not that I want the old ways to come back. just wondering how bad some chemicals really are?

Three words to that: Pennsylvania sweet crude!

It is well-known that Pennsylvania sweet crude oil has the lowest aromatic and naphthene content, and the highest paraffinic content of anywhere, and very low in sulfur and nitrogen compounds. Hence the lower toxicity would be my first guess.

TEL also helped win WWII powering all of our reciprocating engines!

Yes, and it probably helped get us at least nearer to being in range before the Tigers and Panthers could hear our little Shermans. The only chance our boys had was to be more, faster, and better handling their guns than even the Germans, as you were ever only going to get one shot at those fellows, and it had better be from behind their tank in the "soft" spot.

Should we go back over the men and materiel moved into position by the Red Ball Express? Should we mention our bombers and fighter planes that never really ran out of sufficient fuel for their sorties to begin in the first place?

My hat is off to the folks that kept producing, kept pushing, kept building Liberty ships (including one of my mother-in-laws). You can't teach that, it is in the breeding.

Apart from the floating survivors, there is one sunken off Sheerness that still has 1.5 kilotons of explosive on board.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Richard_Montgomery

More's the pity, almost all of that cargo is still there? Why not demolition it, and clear the estuary (I know it is quite wide enough without tampering with this). Still, it might make an impressive showing!

And the Luftwaffe: "The Truman committee, which was investigating various aspects of wartime industrial affairs, also found out from the Justice Department that Standard Oil had withheld patents from the US Navy which had been supplied to the Nazis. Worse yet, the department revealed that Standard Oil had been supplying the Luftwaffe and German Navy gasoline and tetraethyl lead."

http://theamericanchronicle.blogspot.ie/2012/02/treason-of-standard-oil-exxon-during.html

So then, SO was in bed with Hitler...I don't expect they were hoping he would imbibe this import.

If you're a fan of the TV series "Foyle's War" you may have seen this covered in the episode "High Castle."

I am afraid I have yet to run across that series. I noticed it is not aired on PBS or BBCA. Wifey likes to check in on Dr. Who, but not many others on BBCA.

She usually catches whatever serial drama is on PBS on Sunday nights. It keeps her chin up and stiff upper lip, and all that rot.

Regardless of the mistakes of the past, don't worry.

We will always have bigger and better mistakes to make in the future.

I had a friend in NJ get lead poisoning. According to him the doctors told him to drink lots of beer.

Lead bad, Beer good.

So the story goes with Mercury miners. They have rotating tours of duty. Two weeks in, one month off to pull epic beer drunks.