Guerrilla Warfare

On 30 October 1924, within days of five men dying raving at a refinery in New Jersey, the inventor of leaded petrol called a press conference in Manhattan, poured tetraethyl lead over his hands, held the bottle under his nose and breathed it in for a full minute to prove how safe it was. Thomas Midgley was a General Motors engineer, and in 1921 he had cured the knock that was holding back the car engine. A few drops of tetraethyl lead in the tank and the fuel burned smoothly. General Motors and Standard Oil set up the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation to sell it, with DuPont making it, and kept the word lead out of the name. The men making it knew better. At Standard Oil's Bayway plant they called the building the loony gas building. Workers got lost on a site they had walked for years, then started hallucinating. One of them, Ernest Oelgert, ran through the plant screaming that three of them were coming at him at once, and was dead the next day. Within a week five were dead and more than 30 in hospital. At DuPont's works in Deepwater men had been dying since 1923. Midgley himself had spent a long holiday in Miami the year before, recovering from lead poisoning. So the company blamed the men. Gloves and masks had been provided and they had not worn them. And Midgley washed his hands in the stuff for the reporters and told them he was taking no chances whatever. New Jersey shut the plant. A federal committee sat for a few months and let production resume. The industry paid its own toxicologist, Robert Kehoe, who spent the next forty years insisting that lead in the human body was natural and that nobody had proved petrol made it worse. It took a geochemist dating the age of the earth, Clair Patterson, to find lead contaminating everything he tested and to show it had arrived with the motor car. America banned leaded petrol for road vehicles in 1996. Britain followed in 2000. By then it had been in the blood of every child on earth for seventy years, taking points off their intelligence. Midgley went on to invent the CFCs that tore open the ozone layer. In 1940 he caught polio and rigged a harness of ropes and pulleys to haul himself out of bed. In 1944 he was found strangled in it. The man who tells you the product is safe is very often the man who invented it, and he will always wash his hands in it for the cameras.