The Midgley

Why the name

Thomas Midgley Jr. invented leaded gasoline and Freon. Both solved real problems, and the world spent decades cleaning up after them.

What it is

The Midgley goes to an invention, product, policy or decision that solved a real problem, worked, and caused harm on a large scale somewhere else. Leaded gasoline. Plastics. The highway that split a city.

How a nominee wins

1. Anyone can nominate. Moderators check each nomination against the guidelines.
2. Goat and the Goat Farm judges give each nominee an Oops Score. Readers vote for the Herd Score. How scores work.
3. Winners are announced once a year, here and in The Weekly Oops.

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Thomas Midgley Jr. was an American mechanical engineer and chemist. He was born in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, in 1889, studied engineering at Cornell, and spent most of his career working for General Motors in Dayton, Ohio, under the inventor Charles Kettering.

Leaded gasoline

Early car engines "knocked." The fuel exploded unevenly, which damaged engines and limited how powerful and efficient they could be. In December 1921, after testing thousands of compounds, Midgley's team found that a small amount of tetraethyl lead added to gasoline stopped the knocking. GM and Standard Oil began selling it as "Ethyl" gasoline in the 1920s.

It worked. Engines could run at higher compression, cars got more powerful, and leaded gasoline became the standard fuel around the world for more than fifty years.

The lead came out of the tailpipe. For decades it settled into the air, soil and dust of every city with cars, and into the people who lived there. Lead is a neurotoxin. Children are the most affected, and exposure is linked to lower IQ and other lasting harm to health.

Freon

Refrigerators in the 1920s used gases such as ammonia and sulfur dioxide, which are toxic or flammable. Leaks could kill people. In 1928 Midgley, working with Albert Henne and Robert McNary, developed chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, sold as Freon. They were nonflammable and far less toxic. In 1930 he demonstrated this to the American Chemical Society by breathing in the gas and using it to blow out a candle.

It worked too. CFCs made home refrigerators and air conditioning safe and common, and were later used in aerosol sprays and foam.

The same stability that made CFCs safe at home let them drift intact into the upper atmosphere. There, sunlight breaks them apart, and the chlorine destroys ozone. The ozone layer screens out ultraviolet light that causes skin cancer and damages crops. In 1985 scientists reported a large seasonal hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica.

What was knowable

The two inventions are judged differently.

The danger of lead was known. Lead poisoning had been described for centuries. In 1923 Midgley himself took time off to recover from it. In 1924 several workers making tetraethyl lead died of lead poisoning and dozens more were hospitalized. That year Midgley held a press conference where he rubbed the additive on his hands and breathed its fumes to show it was safe.

The damage to the ozone layer was not knowable at the time. The chemistry was first described by Mario Molina and F. Sherwood Rowland in 1974, thirty years after Midgley died. They shared the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Paul Crutzen for that work.

The cleanup

The geochemist Clair Patterson's research in the 1960s showed how much lead from gasoline had spread through the environment. The United States phased out leaded gasoline for cars by 1996. The last country to stop selling it, Algeria, did so in 2021.

The Montreal Protocol of 1987 phased out CFCs. Every country in the United Nations has ratified it. The ozone layer is recovering, and scientists expect it to return to 1980 levels over Antarctica around 2066.

Both cleanups took decades and depended on scientists, regulators and international agreements. They are the kind of fix this site asks nominators to name.

His life

In his lifetime Midgley was celebrated. He received the Perkin Medal in 1937 and the Priestley Medal in 1941, the highest honor in American chemistry, and was elected president of the American Chemical Society in 1944. In 1940 he contracted polio, which left him paralyzed. He designed a system of ropes and pulleys to lift himself out of bed. In November 1944, at 55, he was found strangled by the ropes of that device. His death was ruled a suicide.

The environmental historian J. R. McNeill later wrote that Midgley had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth's history.

Why he holds the first award

Midgley solved two real problems with skill. The harm from both inventions showed up far from the engine and the refrigerator, in children's blood and in the sky over Antarctica, and took most of a century to clean up. That pattern is what the Backfire Awards are for. His award is permanent and sits above the vote.

On Wikipedia: Thomas Midgley Jr., tetraethyl lead and chlorofluorocarbons.

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