Leaded gasoline was safe. Its inventor was sure of it. Facing skeptical reporters at a press conference, Thomas Midgley produced a container of tetraethyl lead—the additive in question—and proceeded, theatrically, to wash his hands in it. “I’m not taking any chance whatever,” Midgley declared. “Nor would I take any chance doing that every day.”
Midgley was, perhaps, being a little disingenuous. He might have mentioned that he’d recently spent several months in Florida, recuperating from lead poisoning.
Some of those who’d been making Midgley’s invention hadn’t been so lucky, and this was why the reporters were interested. One Thursday, in October 1924, at a Standard Oil plant in New Jersey, a worker named Ernest Oelgert had started hallucinating. By Friday, he was running around the laboratory, screaming in terror. On Saturday, with Oelgert dangerously unhinged, his sister called the police; he was taken to a hospital and forcibly restrained. By Sunday, he was dead. Within a week, so were four of his laboratory workmates—and thirty-five more were in the hospital.
Only forty-nine people worked there.1
None of this surprised workers elsewhere in Standard Oil’s facility. They knew there was a problem with tetraethyl lead. They referred to the lab where it was developed as “the loony gas building.”2 Nor should it have shocked Standard Oil, General Motors, or the DuPont corporation, the three companies involved with adding tetraethyl lead to gasoline. The first production line, in Ohio, had already been shut down after two deaths.3 A third plant, elsewhere in New Jersey, had also seen deaths; workers kept hallucinating insects and trying to swat them away. The lab was known as “the house of butterflies.”4
Leaded gasoline is banned now, almost everywhere. It’s among the many regulations that shape the modern economy. And yet “regulation” has become a dirty word: politicians often promise to sweep them away; you rarely hear calls for more. It’s a trade-off between protecting people and imposing costs on business. And the invention of leaded gasoline marked one of the first times that trade-off sparked a fierce public controversy.
Scientists were alarmed. Was it really sensible to add lead to gasoline, when cars belch fumes onto city streets? Thomas Midgley breezily responded that “the average street will probably be so free from lead that it will be impossible to detect it or its absorption.” Was his insouciance based on data? No. Scientists urged the U.S. government to investigate, and researchers did—with funding provided by General Motors, on the condition the company got to approve the findings.5
In the middle of the media frenzy over Ernest Oelgert’s poisoned workmates, the report landed. It gave tetraethyl lead a clean bill of health. And the public greeted it with skepticism. Under pressure, the U.S. government organized a conference in Washington, D.C., in May 1925. It was a showdown. In one corner: Frank Howard, vice president of the Ethyl Corporation—a joint venture of General Motors and Standard Oil. He called leaded gasoline a “gift of God,” arguing that “continued development of motor fuels is essential in our civilization.”6
In the other corner: Dr. Alice Hamilton, the country’s foremost authority on lead. She argued that leaded gasoline was a chance not worth taking: “Where there is lead,” she said, “some case of lead poisoning sooner or later develops, even under the strictest supervision.”
Hamilton knew that lead had been poisoning people for thousands of years. In 1678, workers who made lead white—a pigment for paint—were described as suffering ailments including “dizziness in the Head, with continuous great pain in the Brows, Blindness, Stupidity.”7 In Roman times, lead pipes carried water (the Latin for lead, plumbum, gave us the word “plumber”). Even then, some realized the folly. “Water conducted through earthen pipes is more wholesome than that through lead,” wrote the civil engineer Vitruvius two thousand years ago. “This may be verified by observing the workers in lead, who are of a pallid color.”8
Eventually, the U.S. government decided to ignore Alice Hamilton, and Vitruvius. Leaded gasoline got the go-ahead. Half a century later, the government changed its mind: the Clean Air Act of 1970 began a process of gradually weaning cars of lead. And a couple of decades after that, the economist Jessica Reyes noticed something interesting: Rates of violent crime were starting to go down. There are many reasons this might have happened, but Reyes wondered: children’s brains are especially susceptible to chronic lead poisoning. Is it possible that kids who didn’t breathe leaded gasoline fumes grew up to commit less violent crime?
Different U.S. states had phased out leaded gasoline at different times. So Reyes compared the dates of clean air legislation with subsequent crime data. She concluded that nationally over half the drop in crime—56 percent—was because of cars switching to unleaded gas.9
That doesn’t, on its own, prove that the initial decision to allow leaded gasoline was morally wrong. When countries are poor, they might decide that pollution is a price worth paying for progress. Later, as their incomes grow, they decide they can afford to bring in laws that clean up the environment. Economists have a name for this pattern of increasing and then decreasing pollution: it’s called the “environmental Kuznets curve.”10
But for leaded gasoline, it was never a trade-off worth making. True, the lead additive did solve a problem: it enabled engines to use higher compression ratios, which made them more efficient. But ethyl alcohol had much the same effect, and it wouldn’t mess with your head, unless you drank it.11 Why did General Motors push tetraethyl lead instead of ethyl alcohol? Cynics might point out that any old farmer could distil ethyl alcohol from grain; it couldn’t be patented, or its distribution profitably controlled. Tetraethyl lead could.12
There’s another way to assess the economic benefit of leaded gasoline: ask how much it cost to adapt cars to unleaded fuel, when clean air laws were enacted. Jessica Reyes crunched the numbers: it came to about twenty times less than the cost of all the crime.13 And that’s before you count the other costs of kids breathing lead, such as learning less in school.14
How did the United States get this so wrong for so long? It’s the same story of disputed science and delayed regulation you could tell about asbestos,15 or tobacco,16 or many other products that slowly kill us. The government did, in the 1920s, call for continued research. And for the next four decades, those studies were conducted by scientists funded by the Ethyl Corporation and General Motors.17 It was only in the 1960s that American universities developed policies on conflicts of interest in research.18
Today’s economy isn’t short of health scares. Is genetically modified food safe? What about nanoparticles? Does Wi-Fi cause cancer? How do we tell the wise words of an Alice Hamilton from the ill-informed worries of an obstructive crank? We’ve learned something about research and regulation-making from disasters like leaded gasoline, but you’d be optimistic to think the problem is solved completely.
And what of the scientist who first put lead in gasoline? By all accounts, Thomas Midgley was a genial man; he may even have believed his own spin about the safety of a daily hand-wash in tetraethyl lead. But as an inventor, his inspirations seem to have been cursed. His second major contribution to civilization was the chlorofluorocarbon, or CFC. It improved refrigerators, but destroyed the ozone layer.
In middle age, afflicted by polio, Midgley applied his inventor’s mind to lifting his weakened body out of bed. He devised an ingenious system of pulleys and strings. One day they tangled around his neck and killed him.