Are you familiar with the name Thomas Midgley? If not, you should be. It’s probable that no one in United States history has more to do with the poisoning of America than Thomas Midgley, a chemist who worked for the Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company in the 1920s.
Midgley’s first contribution to the poisoning of America came in 1921 when he discovered that tetraethyl, when combined with gasoline, worked as well as ethanol or grain alcohol as a fuel. The problem is that tetraethyl contains lead. Lead is poisonous to ingest, either in the form of lead oxide in the air or when it settles to the ground on crops or in bodies of water.
When the U.S. Public Health Service inquired of the Du Pont Corporation about lead’s effect on the environment in 1923, Midgley answered for the corporation that the impact would be negligible. His evidence? There was none. He himself confirmed this when he stated this was his personal belief and that Du Pont conducted no actual experiments and collected no data regarding the issue.
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Getting Away With the Poisoning of America
The U.S. government then undertook some studies, of course, but industry sponsored all of them and the U.S. government never followed them up with independent research. Thomas Midgley, meanwhile, came down with lead poisoning resulting from his research. The consequences? Automobiles burned over 7 million tons (14 billion pounds) of lead by automobiles between 1923 and 1986.
The lead poisoning was not in time, however, to stop Thomas Midgley from developing new ways to contribute to the poisoning of America. He also invented Freon, the original chlorofluorocarbon. Air conditioners, hair sprays, refrigerators, and so forth used this gas. When released into the air, it interacts with the Earth’s ozone layer and depletes it. This contributes to increased ultraviolet radiation reaching the Earth’s surface. This, in turn, helps cause skin cancer.
What We Might Learn From the Poisoning of America
The dangers pointed up by the story of Thomas Midgley should be clear enough. Independent scientific research is the best way the public can objectively understand the risks of certain actions. Relying on the data of industry invites disaster because industries aim to produce profit rather than take in interest in the health of the public. For politicians to put any stock in industry research is a betrayal of the public who elected them.
Likewise, this points up the stupidity of people refusing to believe in science simply because they dislike its conclusions. Refusing to believe in research and scientific data is bad enough when leaders take bribes not to believe it. This becomes doubly tragic when people injure themselves willingly simply for the sake of feeling morally righteous in their political ideology or safe in their worldview.
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