When Lead Covered the Earth By Bridget Mackie Like many children born in the early 2000s, I grew up in a world with relatively little lead. My toys were lead-free, and the paint that chipped off of my walls was no more harmful than dust on the floor. Most importantly, I lived in a world without leaded gasoline. The same cannot be said for my parents’ generation, who grew up in a perpetual snowfall of lead. It plumed from the exhaust of cars, accumulated in the atmosphere, and fell, dusting the ground. There, it settled and remained for decades of children to play in. Leaded gasoline has its origin in the early 1900s. As cars grew in popularity, desire for more powerful and efficient cars grew as well. However, as cars got more powerful, a strange phenomenon emerged; the engines began to make a loud knocking sound. The cause of “engine knock” eluded scientists for years. That is until Thomas Midgley hit the scene. Midgley, an American mechanical and chemical engineer, seemed to have had a mind for inventing from a young age. It is this mind, and its products, that came to define his life and legacy. By 1916, Midgley was an engineer working at General Motors when he stumbled upon the problem of engine knocking. Contemporaries blamed the problem on the battery ignition, but Midgley hypothesized something different. Engine knocking, he discovered, was a result of the compressed fuel and air within the engine exploding. If Midgley could solve this problem, engines could run smoother and more efficiently than ever before. By 1920, researchers were developing fuel additives to reduce engine knock. There were especially promising formulas us-
ing combinations of ethanol and petroleum, and Midgley himself filed a patent application for one such formula. Ultimately, these developments would be overshadowed by a different fuel additive. Midgley began his search for this new additive by taking out his periodic table and testing all sorts of elements. Eventually, he had a list of several elements that were found to raise a fuel’s octane rating, a measure of a fuel’s resistance to engine knock. However, all these elements were expensive or scarce and wouldn’t be economically practical. On a whim, Midgley tried tetraethyl lead (TEL), a form of lead that dissolved easily in gasoline. It turned out that TEL was effective, cheap, and abundant, so it became the winning solution. Thus, inspired by Midgley’s findings, the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation was born, whose name conveniently dropped all mentions of lead. At the time lead had been a known toxin for centuries. In fact, ancient Romans had observed the ill effects on laborers working with the element. It is not surprising, then, that the public was concerned when reports surfaced of workers suffering psychosis —and in some cases dying—in factories producing leaded gasoline. These factories became known as “houses of butterflies’’ because of a common hallucination suffered by workers. One factory in New Jersey was reportedly full of butterflies. They would land on the workers’ jackets tenderly, almost as if they weren’t there at all. Then they would brush them off and watch as they disintegrated into the air. These hallucinations of butterflies often preceded a bleaker fate. In the early 1920s, at least fifteen workers at this New Jersey plant died of acute lead poisoning, while dozens of others suffered permanent brain damage. Reports of these occurrences left the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation with a PR problem. In an effort to combat the bad press, the Ethyl Corporation—along with several other companies, including Gen-
Headwaters Magazine 4
