lead, bath, and beyond

Or, the colossal bad luck of the world's worst inventor, Thomas Midgley Jr.

Hello, friends!

A fun side effect of writing a newsletter like this is that people often send me links to whimsical people in history, hoping that I will enjoy the story and perhaps feature them in an upcoming issue. I always enjoy receiving these! If I don’t accept a suggestion, it’s usually because the person has one or two wacky anecdotes, but it’s difficult to stitch them together into a longer story.

But sometimes, a suggestion just hits right, as evidenced by my response to the one-paragraph overview I received a few weeks ago:

So with thanks to one of Dirtbags Through the Ages’ first 10 readers (it’s literally my dad), it’s my pleasure to present the story of:

Thomas Midgley Jr., Cosmic Proof that the Phrase “If at First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again” Is Not Always the Best Advice

excuse me sir are you Dr. TJ Eckleburg because your glasses are haunting and you’re about to fuck up the American dream

Midgley was born in 1889 in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania and got a degree in engineering from Cornell University. (Not the same year. This is not a baby college story, unfortunately.) He came from a family of inventors and quickly decided he was going to be an inventor too, coming up with gadgets to help baseball pitchers throw balls faster.

My sources are all unanimous that his early inventions were pretty good and worked well, but it is impossible for me to hear “preteen inventor” without imagining Calvin and Hobbes standing in front of a cardboard box, which tempers how impressed I’m likely to get.

thomas midgley jr. (right), circa 1901

In 1916, age 27, Midgley moved to Dayton, Ohio and got a job at General Motors, which was then ramping up as the biggest local competition to Henry “White Supremacist” Ford and his eponymous Motor Company. Working under lead engineer Charles Kettering, Midgley was given a particularly tricky engineering challenge: solving the problem of “engine knock.”

What is engine knock, you ask? Best I can tell, it’s small uncontrolled explosions in an engine that can either make an annoying sound or literally blow up your car. I read exactly three paragraphs on the subject of engine knock, thought “Oh yeah, the thing that happens to the old man’s car in Disney’s The Aristocats,” and immediately lost interest. Car enthusiasts may clarify in the comments if they so choose.

ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay, motherfuckers

Better Off Lead

Midgley and Kettering tried all kinds of chemical solutions to stop engine knock, most of which apparently smelled so awful Midgley’s wife made him sleep in the basement. But at long last, in 1921, the two men came up with a solution: tetraethyllead, or TEL.

Also known as… lead.

Not to throw myself under the bus, but it took researching this story for me to realize why all the gas pumps specify unleaded gasoline. I’ve always thought it’s a real “my ‘no lead in this here gasoline’ shirt is raising lots of questions that are already answered by the shirt” situation. But by god, apparently gasoline really used to have lead in it! And we have Midgley to thank!

The lead worked like a charm to solve engine knock, and soon General Motors cars weren’t regularly undergoing minor explosions like they were being driven by whimsical animated French gentlemen. But even back in 1921, Kettering and Midgley knew that saying “this gas is full of lead” was going to be a hard sell to the public.

Y’know, because the word most people think of right after “lead” is either “pencil” or “poisoning,” neither of which are very good to drive. We’ve known lead is not great for you since 200 BC. This was not exactly a low-risk maneuver.

not ominous in the slightest

In a real classic marketing play, Midgley and Kettering decided to take the name of the chemical compound tetraethyllead and focus on the cute middle two syllables, calling the product Ethyl. The energy here is like giving voice-activated personal assistants female names like Alexa so we forget they’re actually letting billionaires spy on our homes.

And then as now, it worked!

No Place Like Catacomb

People loved Ethyl, and Midgley very quickly became very rich and very famous. He received a medal from the American Chemical Society in 1923 for his invention, in addition to all the profits rolling in from Ethyl itself.

It gives me great delight to say that Midgley did exactly what I would have done if I got very rich and famous in the early 1920s: he bought a fancy mansion in Dayton and paid a massive crew of workmen to come and install a labyrinthine network of underground tunnels styled to look like the Parisian catacombs.

No, guys. Look at them. I’m so serious. This is in OHIO.

nice cask of amontillado you have there. sure would be a shame if someone asked you to go in the vault and check on it.

Why did he do this, you ask? And I respond, does one need a reason? Allegedly he liked to invite people over to his house and then open up a secret door with a big gilded skull full of candles on it, revealing the catacombs to freak out his houseguests.

I have never related to a historical figure more than I relate to Thomas Midgley Jr. in this moment. Look at this shit. It is incredible.

don’t mind if I DO, you SPOOKY BASTARD

Of course, Midgley didn’t spend all of his time toodling around in his house tunnels. He also periodically had to travel to a sanitarium to get treatment for lead poisoning. And occasionally he had to answer inquests about all of the people who were dropping dead in Ethyl factories or rapidly developing mental illness—all classic symptoms of lead poisoning.

All completely unrelated, I am sure! Nothing to see here! Move along!

Like a Lead Balloon

To his credit, Midgley did start to get a little nervous at this point. It does not take a genius to figure out why people working with leaded gasoline are getting lead poisoning, and Midgley understood chemistry far better than I do (that is to say, at all). But his engineering partner Kettering pushed him to shut up and keep going, reasoning that the financial benefits of their invention were worth the lives of a few workers. This sounds so much like a thing a supervillain would say that you’d think I’m making it up, but it’s true.

Charles Kettering, carrying on the grand tradition of making sure everything in Michigan and Ohio is named after the worst 20th-century men

So Midgley went on the PR circuit, trying to convince people that working with lead all day is a great idea, actually. In one famous instance, he poured Ethyl all over his hands before straight huffing leaded gasoline for sixty uninterrupted seconds, telling the press basically “no worries, I can do this all day!” One wonders why Kettering wasn’t standing next to him backing him up, except one doesn’t wonder, because fuck Kettering.

In a turn of events that will surprise nobody, Midgley had to quit his job at GM in 1925 due to—wait for it—severe lead poisoning.

CFC You on the Flip Side

This would be a pretty good story if it ended here, though it would still be just one whimsical anecdote. But never fear, reader! There’s more! Because what do you think Midgley did after he left GM? If you guessed “invented chlorofluorocarbons, literally the thing that burned a hole in the ozone layer,” DING DING DING YOU WIN!!

After leaving GM, Midgley partnered with the chemist Albert Leon Henne and invented an air conditioning and refrigeration solution called Freon that absolutely would not hasten the onset of climate change, not at all, no siree. He also received medals for this invention and became even more rich and famous. It would take a few decades before the world realized that Midgley’s second big discovery was also absolutely killing people.

This man, I swear to god. The only thing he invented that didn’t actively make the world worse was his Super Fast Baseball Pitcher 9000, and I personally wish he had stopped there.

Though Midgley kept working and inventing, things were not looking great for him personally. In 1940, he suddenly contracted polio, which left him with severe physical disabilities. I have no idea if huffing leaded gasoline and swimming in a pool of Freon makes you more likely to contract polio, but I do have to imagine it didn’t help.

Midgley post-polio, receiving what I assume is the “Accidental Inventor of the Worst Thing in the World, Twice” award

Midgley retreated to his Catacomb Home, inventing an elaborate system of wires and pulleys that would help him get out of bed in the morning so he could continue to work on discovering the next thing to ruin the world.

This thing, guys. He invented this.

Unfortunately, this thing proved to be just as dangerous in real life as it looked in Wallace and Gromit. In 1944, Thomas Midgley Jr. would be found dead in his bed contraption at age 55, strangled by the wires and pulleys. The court would rule it a suicide, though many people claim he was strangled by accident by his own invention—probably because it sure seems like a thing that would happen to this guy.

That’s all for this time, my friends! Thanks as always for joining me. Until next time, be well, and please let me know to whom at Disney I must speak so I can get a live-action movie of the old guy from The Aristocats that’s just Danny DeVito yelling “ta ra ra boom-de-ay” for 124 minutes,

-Allison