SPEAKER_00: Amazing, fascinating stories of inventions, ideas and innovations. Yes, this is the podcast about the things that have helped to shape our lives. Podcasts from the BBC World Service are supported by advertising.
SPEAKER_02: 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy with Tim Harford
SPEAKER_01: Leaded petrol was safe. Its inventor was sure of it. Facing sceptical reporters at a press conference, Thomas Midgley dramatically produced a container of tetraethyl lead, the additive in question, and proceeded to wash his hands in it.
SPEAKER_04: I'm not taking any chance whatever, Midgley declared. Nor would I take any chance doing
SPEAKER_04: that every day. Midgley was perhaps being a little disingenuous. He might have mentioned
SPEAKER_01: 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 is why the reporters were interested. One Thursday in October 1924, at a standard oil plant in New Jersey, a worker named Ernest Earlgert had started hallucinating. By Friday, he was running around the laboratory, screaming in terror. On Saturday, with Earlgert dangerously unhinged, his sister called the police. He was taken to hospital and forcibly restrained. By Sunday, he was dead. Within a week, so were four of his laboratory workmates, and 35 more were in hospital. Only 49 people worked there. 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 Luny gas building. Better working practices could make tetraethyl lead safe to produce. But was it really sensible to add it to petrol, when the fumes would be belched out onto city streets? When General Motors had first proposed adding lead to petrol a couple of years earlier, scientists were alarmed. They urged the government to investigate the possible public health implications. Thomas Midgley breezily assured the Surgeon General that, The average street will probably be so free from lead that it will be impossible to detect
SPEAKER_04: it or its absorption. Although he conceded that, No actual experimental data has been taken. General Motors funded a government bureau
SPEAKER_01: to conduct some research. They added a clause saying they had to approve the findings. The bureau's report was published amidst the media frenzy over Ernest Olgert's poisoned workmates. It gave tetraethyl lead a clean bill of health, and it was met with some scepticism. Under pressure from the public, the government organised a conference in Washington DC in May 1925. The debate there exemplified the two extremes of approach to any new idea that looks risky but useful. In one corner, Frank Howard, vice president of the Ethyl Corporation, a joint venture of General Motors and Standard Oil. He called leaded petrol, A gift of God, arguing that,
SPEAKER_04: Continued development of motor fuels is essential in our civilisation.
SPEAKER_01: In the other corner, Dr Alice Hamilton, the country's foremost authority on lead. She argued that leaded petrol was a chance not worth taking.
SPEAKER_03: Where there is lead, some case of lead poisoning sooner or later develops, even under the strictest
SPEAKER_03: supervision.
SPEAKER_01: 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. In Roman times, uses included water pipes. The Latin for lead, plumbum, gives us the word plumber. Water conducted through earthen pipes is more wholesome than that through lead, wrote the civil engineer Vitruvius 2,000 years ago. This may be verified by observing the workers in lead, who are of a pallid colour. Many societies still grapple with the general question on which Howard and Hamilton disagreed. How much pollution is a price worth paying for progress? There's some evidence that as countries get richer, they initially tend to get dirtier, and later they clean up. Economists call this the environmental Kuznets curve, and it makes intuitive sense. If you're poor, you prioritise material gains. As your income grows, you want to spend some on a nicer, safer environment. But was lead-free petrol really such an expensive luxury? True, the lead additive solved the problem. It enabled engines to use higher compression ratios, which made cars more powerful. However, it wasn't the only way to solve the problem. Ethyl alcohol had much the same effect, and it wouldn't mess with your head unless you drank it. General Motors knew this, midgely having experimented with combining petrol with practically every imaginable substance from iodine to camphor to melted butter. Why did General Motors push tetraethyl lead instead of ethyl alcohol? Cynics might point out that any old farmer could distill ethyl alcohol from grain, it couldn't be patented, or its distribution profitably controlled. Tetraethyl lead could. It took the United States until the 1970s to tax lead in petrol and then finally ban it, part of clean air legislation, as the country moved down the far side of the environmental Kuznets curve. Two decades later, in the 1990s, rates of violent crime started to go down. There are many reasons why this might have happened, but the economist Jessica Raze had an intriguing thought. Children's brains are especially susceptible to chronic lead poisoning. Is it possible that kids who didn't breathe leaded petrol fumes grew up to commit less violent crime? Raze could test her hypothesis. Different US states had phased out leaded petrol at different times. By comparing the dates of clean air legislation with subsequent crime data, she concluded that more than half the drop, 56%, was because of cars switching to unleaded petrol. You can put a dollar figure on the crime reduction that Raze found. It's about 20 times higher than the cost of de-leading petrol. How did the US get this so wrong for so long? The answer is a tale of disputed science and delayed regulation, much like you could tell about asbestos or tobacco or other products we now know slowly kill us. The problem is that people who want to ban things aren't always disinterested visionaries like Alice Hamilton. Sometimes they're obstructive cranks. The only way to tell the difference is by conducting studies. And for four decades, the only people who studied tetraethyl lead were funded by the Ethyl Corporation and General Motors. And what are the scientists who first put lead in petrol? By all accounts, Thomas Midgley was a genial man. He may even have believed his own spin about the safety of a daily handwash 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. They tangled round his neck and killed him.
SPEAKER_02: Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner wrote a history of industrial pollution, including leaded petrol. It's called Deceit and Denial. For a full list of our sources, please see bbcworldservice.com slash 50 things.
SPEAKER_01: Think of anything sciencey, anything you want to know. Ask the CrowdScience team and they will find out the answers. It's fascinating.
