Speaker 1: Pushkin.
Speaker 2: Thomas Midgley Junior was born on College Hill in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania,
Speaker 2: May eighteenth, eighteen eighty nine. His father, Thomas Midgley Senior,
Speaker 2: was a prolific inventor in a variety of fields, but
Speaker 2: notably that of automobile times and his mother.
Speaker 1: A eulogy for an inventor, a hero of industrial science
Speaker 1: who changed the world, and who died tragically young, aged
Speaker 1: just fifty five. Thomas Midgley Junior studied mechanical engineering, but
Speaker 1: he was just as fascinated by chemistry. As a young
Speaker 1: researcher employed by General Motors, Midgley took to carrying a
Speaker 1: copy of the Periodic Table around in his pocket to
Speaker 1: inform his quest for new ideas. By the end of
Speaker 1: his life, Midgley had accumulated over one hundred patents. We're
Speaker 1: going to hear about three of his inventions.
Speaker 2: In nineteen sixteen, Midgley became a member of our research
Speaker 2: staff and began then his long association with me and
Speaker 2: his remarkably productive career in research.
Speaker 1: The eulogist is Charles Boss Kettering, himself an inventor of
Speaker 1: some renown. Kettering was Thomas Midgley's boss in the General
Speaker 1: Motors Research department. He went on to become a lifelong friend, mentor,
Speaker 1: and business associate as the two men built lucrative careers
Speaker 1: with General Motors and the DuPont Corporation.
Speaker 2: What do you want me to do next?
Speaker 3: Boss?
Speaker 2: That simple question and the answer to it turned out
Speaker 2: to be the beginning of a great adventure in the
Speaker 2: life of a most versatile man.
Speaker 1: Versatile Indeed, the brain children of Thomas Midgley touched many
Speaker 1: areas of life. Life. This pudgy, bespectacled inventor seemed to
Speaker 1: personify the mid twentieth century ideal of progress, as summed
Speaker 1: up by DuPont in their famous nineteen thirties advertising slogan
Speaker 1: better things for better living, living through chemistry Hemistry. In
Speaker 1: his eulogy, Boss Kettering runs through Midgley's long list of accomplishments.
Speaker 1: President of the American Chemical Society, winner of the Nichols Medal,
Speaker 1: the Perkin Medal, the Priestly Medal, the Willard Gibbs Medal,
Speaker 1: the Longstreth Medal, honorary doctorates from the College of Wooster
Speaker 1: and the Ohio State University. Kettering quotes the citation from
Speaker 1: Ohio State.
Speaker 2: Midgley contributed so greatly to more pleasant and efficient living.
Speaker 2: He has made science a liberator, and we rejoice with
Speaker 2: him at the satisfactions that must be his In seeing
Speaker 2: the fruits of his labor, Asterity will acknowledge their permanent value.
Speaker 1: Posterity alas, was not as kind to Midgley as his
Speaker 1: many admirers had expected, but they were absolutely right to
Speaker 1: say that he would change the world. He did, he
Speaker 1: made it much much worse. I'm Tim Harford and you're
Speaker 1: listening to cautionary tales?
Speaker 2: What do you want me to do? An next bus?
Speaker 1: One day, when Thomas Midgley asked that question of Charles Kettering,
Speaker 1: the boss had a problem he wanted Midgley to solve.
Speaker 1: The problem had to do with refrigeration. At the time,
Speaker 1: people didn't have fridges at home. It was too dangerous.
Speaker 1: The chemicals you needed for the cooling coils were either
Speaker 1: toxic or flammable, so refrigeration was mainly used in industrial
Speaker 1: settings by trained personnel. Even then, accidents were common. Kettering
Speaker 1: wanted Midgley to invent away to cool things safely. Midgley
Speaker 1: took the periodic table out of his pocket. He soon
Speaker 1: zeroed in on fluorine as a promising element for creating
Speaker 1: a compound that might have the right properties. As Kettering's
Speaker 1: eulogy recalls.
Speaker 2: He and his helpers prepared such a compound, dichloridy fluoromethane.
Speaker 2: It proved to have just the properties required. It is
Speaker 2: highly stable, non inflammable, and altogether without harmful effects on
Speaker 2: man or animals.
Speaker 1: Dichloro difluoromethane it did seem to be all together without
Speaker 1: harmful effects. Midgeley tested this by replacing all the nitrogen
Speaker 1: in air with dichlorodifluoromethane and seeing what happened to animals
Speaker 1: who breathed it in. Happily, for the animals, they were
Speaker 1: completely fine. Midgeley wasn't just an inventor, He was a showman.
Speaker 1: He presented his new product in a dramatic lecture to
Speaker 1: the American Chemical Society. Midgeley lights a candle. He produces
Speaker 1: a container of di chlorodfluoromethane. He sucks it in a long,
Speaker 1: deep gulp, filling his lungs. Then slowly and gently he
Speaker 1: breathes out over the candle. The flame goes out. It's
Speaker 1: a bravura performance. Dichlorodifluoromethane belongs to a class of chemicals
Speaker 1: called CFCs, or chlorofluora carbons. Under Midgley's guidance, General Motors
Speaker 1: and the DuPont Corporation start to produce a whole range
Speaker 1: of CFCs. They give them the trade name free On.
Speaker 1: Thanks to these new non hazardous coolants, people soon had
Speaker 1: refrigerators in their own homes. That was a game changer.
Speaker 1: Food stayed fresh. The housewives of America could spend less
Speaker 1: time endlessly shopping for groceries. Food poisoning was easier to avoid,
Speaker 1: and it wasn't just fridges. Air conditioners too. Even better,
Speaker 1: it soon turned out that CFCs had uses beyond cooling.
Speaker 1: They were ideal for making aerosol sprays, insect repellance, air freshness,
Speaker 1: hair spray deodorance. It was just like DuPont said, better
Speaker 1: things for better living through chemistry. In the summer of
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy three, nearly three decades after Thomas Midgley's untimely death,
Speaker 1: a chemistry professor named Sherwood Roland welcomes a new postdoctoral
Speaker 1: researcher to his team at the University of California, Irvine.
Speaker 1: Mario Molina is from Mexico. He's thirty years old, and
Speaker 1: he needs Professor Roland to give him a project to
Speaker 1: work on. Roland recalls something he heard over coffee at
Speaker 1: a conference the previous year about a precise new way
Speaker 1: of measuring trace gases in the atmosphere, gases like dichlorodifluoromethane.
Speaker 1: It turns out that CFCs are present in the air
Speaker 1: around US at two hundred and thirty parts per trillion.
Speaker 1: That's like detecting a drop of gin in a swimming
Speaker 1: pool of tonic. Roland is intrigued to hear that, not
Speaker 1: because the amount sounds so small to him, but because
Speaker 1: it sounds so big. He knows that it's only a
Speaker 1: few decades since CFCs started to be manufactured on an
Speaker 1: industrial scale, not much more than that dropful can ever
Speaker 1: have been produced. Roland is a radio chemist. He studies
Speaker 1: how particles react and decay. Most chemicals break down in
Speaker 1: the environment sooner or later that CFCs just seemed to
Speaker 1: be hanging around, So he makes a suggestion to Mario Molina,
Speaker 1: why don't you look into CFCs. Molina recalls, we thought
Speaker 1: it would be a nice, interesting academic exercise. We both
Speaker 1: knew that these CFCs were rather stable, so there was
Speaker 1: nothing obvious that would damage them soon after they'd be released.
Speaker 1: That's about as much as I knew at the time.
Speaker 1: If CFCs aren't interacting much with anything in the atmosphere
Speaker 1: close to Earth, Molina reasoned, they'll eventually drift upwards to
Speaker 1: the stratosphere, where the air is thinner. It would take decades,
Speaker 1: but they'd get there. When they did, they'd encounter more
Speaker 1: ultraviolet BE waves from the Sun, and maybe that would
Speaker 1: cause the CFCs to break down. Because UVB waves are
Speaker 1: pretty destructive. They're the main reason why too much sunshine
Speaker 1: can give you skin cancer. In fact, if the Earth
Speaker 1: had no protection from UVB radiation, life on land might
Speaker 1: not be possible. What does protect the Earth the ozone layer.
Speaker 1: Ozone is a gas made from oxygen atoms up in
Speaker 1: the stratosphere. A thin layer of ozone blocks most of
Speaker 1: the Sun's UVB radiation. Mario Molina sat down to work
Speaker 1: out what would happen to a CFC molecule when it
Speaker 1: drifts up to the stratosphere. It would get hit by
Speaker 1: a wave of UVB radiation that would knock off the
Speaker 1: chlorine atom. The chlorine atom would soon meet an ozone molecule.
Speaker 1: When it did, it would split the ozone apart and
Speaker 1: form oxygen and chlorine monoxide instead. But that's not the
Speaker 1: end of the story. Because chlorine monoxide isn't stable. It
Speaker 1: breaks down quickly. That frees up the chlorine atom again
Speaker 1: to take out another ozone molecule, and the cycle repeats,
Speaker 1: chlorine atoms pinballing around the stratosphere, popping ozone as they go.
Speaker 1: Melina was intrigued by this, but not alarmed. After all,
Speaker 1: there weren't that many CFC molecules in the atmosphere. It
Speaker 1: was a drop in a swimming pool. They couldn't possibly
Speaker 1: destroy enough of the ozone layer to cause a problem,
Speaker 1: could they. Molina got the data showing how much CFC
Speaker 1: gas had been produced. He sat down with a pencil,
Speaker 1: paper and a calculator and did the sums. Oh, that
Speaker 1: can't be right. He checked them. He checked them again,
Speaker 1: and again. He checked them a dozen times. That night.
Speaker 1: When he got home, Molina's wife asked how his day
Speaker 1: had been. The work's going well, Molina said, but it
Speaker 1: looks like the end of the world. Cautionary tales will
Speaker 1: be back in a moment. At the University of California, Irvine,
Speaker 1: Maria and Melina tracks down Sherwood Roland and may have
Speaker 1: found something important. Roland checks Molina's sums. He checks them again.
Speaker 1: That can't be right, but it was. The CFCs drifting
Speaker 1: slowly up towards the stratosphere were a ticking time bomb.
Speaker 1: Barely forty years had passed since DuPont started to manufacture
Speaker 1: their CFCs under the free On brand on an industrial scale.
Speaker 1: That wasn't long enough to expect any obvious impacts yet,
Speaker 1: but more and more CFCs were being produced every year.
Speaker 1: If that continued, what might it mean by say, the
Speaker 1: middle of the twenty first century. Molina and Roland calculated
Speaker 1: that up to half the ozone layer could disappear. As
Speaker 1: Molina had put it, it looked like the end of
Speaker 1: the world. The two scientists wrote up their research. They
Speaker 1: published it in Nature in the summer of nineteen seventy four,
Speaker 1: and hardly anyone noticed. A few reporters got in touch
Speaker 1: from local newspapers. That was nice, but this wasn't really
Speaker 1: a local story. An executive from DuPont phoned Sherwood Roland, I.
Speaker 3: Read your paper. I was appalled.
Speaker 2: Thanks for getting in touch. It is appalling.
Speaker 3: Throughout your paper. You talk about Freon. Don't you know
Speaker 3: that Freon's are DuPont registered brand name. You need to
Speaker 3: refer to CFC's generically, not Freeon specifically. I have to
Speaker 3: tell you we take this very seriously.
Speaker 2: Uh oh okay.
Speaker 1: Roland and Molina were dispirited. They'd discovered the end of
Speaker 1: the world and nobody cared. They looked for another opportunity
Speaker 1: to get attention. The Annual meeting of the American Chemical
Speaker 1: Society was coming up, the very same event that Thomas
Speaker 1: Midgley had wowed forty four years earlier by filling his
Speaker 1: lungs with die chlorod fluomethane and softly extinguishing a candle.
Speaker 1: Roland and Melina submitted their paper to the annual meeting,
Speaker 1: but lots of papers get submitted, so it's the job
Speaker 1: of the American Chemical Society's news manager to decide which
Speaker 1: papers to publicize. Her name was Dorothy Smith. She decided
Speaker 1: to go big, much to the displeasure of DuPont.
Speaker 3: Hello, I've just seen your press release. You're making a
Speaker 3: big thing of this paper on CFC's and.
Speaker 4: Ozone yes, it seems important.
Speaker 3: We think it's an insignificant story.
Speaker 4: A lot of people are interested.
Speaker 1: Dorothy Smith stood her ground. She put Roland and Melina
Speaker 1: on stage at a press conference, and finally their work
Speaker 1: started to gain some traction. Environmental activists called for a
Speaker 1: ban on CFCs. A few politicians took up the cause,
Speaker 1: but the industry fought back. Yes, the scientific theory seemed sound,
Speaker 1: but that's all it was theory. No ozone depletion has
Speaker 1: ever been detected, despite the most sophisticated analysis. All ozone
Speaker 1: depletion figures to date are computer projections based on a
Speaker 1: series of uncertain assumptions. The initial burst of attention slowly
Speaker 1: began to fade. Roland and Molina kept speaking out that
Speaker 1: fewer and fewer people were bothering to listen. Progress towards
Speaker 1: banning CFC's ground to a halt. It was clear that
Speaker 1: only one thing might reboot the interest of the world's governments,
Speaker 1: hard evidence of damage to the ozone layer. But if
Speaker 1: it took decades for CFCs to drift up to the stratosphere,
Speaker 1: the first ones to be manufactured would only just be
Speaker 1: making it there. Would the evidence come in time to
Speaker 1: avert disaster. We'll pick up the story of CFC's and
Speaker 1: the oz But I promised you three inventions by Thomas Midgley,
Speaker 1: and as we'll see, those three inventions have a theme.
Speaker 1: That theme on anticipated consequences. I mentioned that Thomas Midgley
Speaker 1: died young. How did he die exactly? Bossquttering's eulogy tiptoed
Speaker 1: around that delicate question.
Speaker 2: In the early fall of nineteen forty, Midgley was struck
Speaker 2: by an acute attack of poliomylidis, which deprived him of
Speaker 2: the use of his legs and made him a semi invalid.
Speaker 2: Middley died unexpectedly on November two, nineteen forty four, at
Speaker 2: the age of fifty five.
Speaker 1: Confined to his bed by polio. Midgley had applied his
Speaker 1: inventive mind to devising a series of pulleys and ropes
Speaker 1: by which he could move himself around. He died unexpectedly
Speaker 1: when a rope in this device got wrapped around his
Speaker 1: neck and strangled him. So one of Mitchelly's inventions had
Speaker 1: ended up killing him, and another was going to destroy
Speaker 1: the ozone layer and fry the planet. It's fair to
Speaker 1: say that unanticipated consequences is the right description for both
Speaker 1: these inventions. The phrase unanticipated consequences was coined a few
Speaker 1: years before Mitchelly's death in a much cited article by
Speaker 1: the great American sociologist Robert K. Murton. That article was
Speaker 1: called The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action. Throughout history,
Speaker 1: Merton argued, philosophers have grappled with the idea of unanticipated consequences,
Speaker 1: using various different words to describe it, but nobody had
Speaker 1: thought systematically about how unanticipated consequences come about. Merton set
Speaker 1: himself the task of categorizing all the possible ways in
Speaker 1: which our actions might backfire. Simple error is one way
Speaker 1: we might get unanticipated consequences. We think we know what
Speaker 1: will happen, but we're wrong. Another is what Merton called
Speaker 1: the imperious immediacy of interest. Roughly speaking, we're so keen
Speaker 1: to solve some pressing problem that we don't much care
Speaker 1: what else might happen down the line. And then there's
Speaker 1: ignorance when we don't have the knowledge that would be
Speaker 1: necessary to anticipate what might happen. In some cases, that
Speaker 1: might be because we haven't put in the time and
Speaker 1: energy that would be necessary to get that knowledge, or
Speaker 1: maybe the situation is so novel we can't imagine what
Speaker 1: we might need to know. That's a good description of
Speaker 1: what happened with CFCs. Midgley had tried to get some
Speaker 1: knowledge about potential risks by making animals breathe in dichlorodifluomethane,
Speaker 1: but the interaction with ozone came completely out of the blue.
Speaker 1: This phrase of Robert K. Merton, unanticipated consequences has a twist.
Speaker 1: To find out what it is, we need to turn
Speaker 1: to the third of Thomas Midgley's disastrous brain waves, arguably
Speaker 1: the worst of all. It came again from that fateful question,
Speaker 1: what do you want me to do next? Boss? This time,
Speaker 1: the problem Charles Kettering wanted Midgley to solve was engine knock.
Speaker 1: When you read your car and it sounds like you're
Speaker 1: firing a machine gun. It's not a common sound nowadays,
Speaker 1: but it blighted the lives of early motorists. General motors
Speaker 1: wanted to invent a product that would stop it, but
Speaker 1: nobody even understood why it happened. Thomas Midgley worked it out.
Speaker 1: In an internal combustion engine, A piston in a cylinder
Speaker 1: compresses a mixture of air and fuel until a spark
Speaker 1: plug ignites it. Engine knock happens when the mixture explodes
Speaker 1: before the piston has compressed it fully. It's not just
Speaker 1: an unpleasant noise, it can damage the engine. But where
Speaker 1: would you even start to look for a solution? Ketoing
Speaker 1: and Midgeley talked it over.
Speaker 2: We thought that maybe if the fuel were colored red,
Speaker 2: it would absorb more radiant heat and evaporate more completely,
Speaker 2: thus preventing the rough combustion. This theory came to us then,
Speaker 2: because we both happened to know that the leaves of
Speaker 2: the trailing arbuddhis are red on the back, and that
Speaker 2: they grow and bloom under the snow.
Speaker 1: Midgley went to a chemist's shop and brought iodine. He
Speaker 1: put the iodine in some fuel, which turned it red,
Speaker 1: and he ran the engine no knock. Midgeley and Kettering
Speaker 1: were astonished, But was it really the color red that
Speaker 1: was stopping the knock. Midgeley try other ways of dyeing fuel,
Speaker 1: but with no success. Apparently it wasn't the red color,
Speaker 1: but something else about the iodine. The leaves of the
Speaker 1: trailing arbutus had been a red herring. Midgley then tried
Speaker 1: ethyl iodide, which has iodine but no color. It stopped
Speaker 1: the knock just as well. Unfortunately, it also corroded the engine. Underterreed,
Speaker 1: Midgeley pulled the periodic table from his pocket and began
Speaker 1: to work his way through it.
Speaker 2: Many anti Knoch agents were discovered along the way, compounds
Speaker 2: of iodine, of nitrogen, of phosphorus, of arsenic, of antimony,
Speaker 2: of selenium, of tillurium, But everyone had some limitation or
Speaker 2: shortcoming which prevented it from being used in a practical way.
Speaker 1: Eventually, Thomas Midgley's perseverance paid off. He discovered something that
Speaker 1: he could add to gasoline that would stop engine without
Speaker 1: damaging the engine, tetra ethyl lead. Thomas Midley had invented
Speaker 1: leaded gasoline because of Midgeley's invention. I'm about five iq
Speaker 1: points stupider than I would otherwise have been, and so
Speaker 1: are you if you're around my age or older, because
Speaker 1: you too, will have spent your childhood inhaling fumes of
Speaker 1: leaded gasoline from car exhausts. The air pollution messed up
Speaker 1: brain development for whole generations of kids, and it caused
Speaker 1: cancers and heart disease and strokes. It's estimated that leaded
Speaker 1: gasoline hastened tens of millions of deaths. Leaded gasoline completes
Speaker 1: an astonishing trifector. Thomas Midgley invented a rope and pulley
Speaker 1: device that killed him, an additive for fuel that killed
Speaker 1: lots of other people, and a refrigerant that was on
Speaker 1: course to wipe out life on earth all together. How
Speaker 1: unlucky can one man be? That luck isn't the whole story.
Speaker 1: In the early nineteen eighties, the radio chemist Sherwood Rowland
Speaker 1: and his colleague Mario Molina kept on talking about the
Speaker 1: danger of CFC's to the ozone layer. Nobody wanted to listen.
Speaker 1: Roland became more and more exasperated.
Speaker 2: What's the use of having developed a science well enough
Speaker 2: to make predictions if in the end all we're willing
Speaker 2: to do is stand around and wait for them to
Speaker 2: come true.
Speaker 1: The predictions, however, were all too easy for the industry
Speaker 1: to dismiss. Remember the line from DuPont All ozone depletion
Speaker 1: figures to date are computer projections based on a series
Speaker 1: of uncertain assumptions. Only actual evidence of damage to the
Speaker 1: ozone layer would get CFCs back on the agenda, but
Speaker 1: the evidence would be hard to come by. The first
Speaker 1: CFCs to be produced decades earlier would only just have
Speaker 1: reached the stratosphere. If they were starting to reduce the
Speaker 1: levels of ozone, that might be hard to see for
Speaker 1: a couple of reasons. First, ozone levels fluctuate naturally. Second,
Speaker 1: there are different ways to measure ozone from the ground,
Speaker 1: from satellites, from special instruments tied to helium balloons, which
Speaker 1: were most accurate, No one was entirely sure. Tantalizing hints
Speaker 1: of evidence began to emerge. Some Japanese researchers sent balloons
Speaker 1: to the stratosphere. The ozone readings came back worryingly low
Speaker 1: that you really needed a long term series of data
Speaker 1: points to establish there was a trend. The Japanese team
Speaker 1: didn't have that, but someone else did. For twenty five years,
Speaker 1: an obscure organization called the British Antarctic Survey had been
Speaker 1: toiling away on a shoe string budget, sending researchers to
Speaker 1: a remote outpost in Antarctica to measure all sorts of things.
Speaker 1: They weren't looking for anything in particular, They just liked
Speaker 1: to collect data. In case it ever happened to show
Speaker 1: anything interesting. For twenty five years, it never had. Now,
Speaker 1: in the early nineteen eighties, it did. The ozone measurements
Speaker 1: were all over the place. The researchers suspected that their
Speaker 1: instruments had gone haywire. They send new ones to Antarctica,
Speaker 1: but the data came back the same. At first, it
Speaker 1: seemed random, but when the researchers looked more closely, they
Speaker 1: realized there was a pattern to the unusually low readings,
Speaker 1: a pattern related to the seasons, a pattern that reactions
Speaker 1: with chlorine could plausibly explain. NASA's satellites had also picked
Speaker 1: up some surprisingly low readings over the Antarctic solo. The
Speaker 1: computers had initially thrown them out as obvious anomalies. Now
Speaker 1: it was clear that something was happening. There was still
Speaker 1: room to doubt. Why was it really a chemical reaction
Speaker 1: caused by chlorofluorocarbons, or was it solar activities or wind
Speaker 1: There was only one way to be sure. NASA rushed
Speaker 1: to put together a team of scientists and flew them
Speaker 1: to Antarctica. In charge of the mission was thirty year
Speaker 1: old Dr Susan Solomon, an atmospheric chemist. Solomon had never
Speaker 1: been to Antarctica before, and she didn't have the right equipment.
Speaker 1: Her team had brought instruments to analyze light from the Moon,
Speaker 1: but they hadn't had time to build a tracking device
Speaker 1: to focus the Moon's rays. Instead, someone had to sit
Speaker 1: on the laboratory roof at night holding a mirror at
Speaker 1: just the right angle. The first time Solomon took the
Speaker 1: roof shift, she squinted to direct the mirror's reflect found
Speaker 1: that her eye had frozen shut. For the results of
Speaker 1: the experiments pointed only in one direction. On October the twentieth,
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty six, journalists gathered in Washington, d C. To
Speaker 1: hear Solomon relay her team's preliminary findings over a crackly
Speaker 1: satellite link from Antarctica.
Speaker 5: At present, we have not conclusively established the cause.
Speaker 3: Of the oath on whole.
Speaker 5: However, we have strong evidence against theories that upward wins
Speaker 5: or high solar activities caused the deplete it. We suspect
Speaker 5: a chemical process is fundamentally responsible for the formation of
Speaker 5: the whole.
Speaker 1: Solomon was right. More experiments confirmed it. The world's leaders
Speaker 1: acted with commendable speed. In nineteen eighty seven, they agreed
Speaker 1: the Montreal Protocol to phase out CFC's Sherwood Rowland and
Speaker 1: Mario Molina share and Nobel Prize. The end of the
Speaker 1: world was averted. By now, the impacts of leaded gasoline
Speaker 1: on human health were equally plain to see. Governments around
Speaker 1: the world were banning that too, albeit more slowly. As
Speaker 1: for Thomas Midgley, well with hindsight, Boss Ketowing's eulogy sounds
Speaker 1: a little different.
Speaker 2: Midgeley contributed so greatly to more pleasant and efficient living.
Speaker 1: So he did. Safe refrigerators, air assaults, smoothly running gas engines,
Speaker 1: pleasant and efficient, just deadly too. Seventy years after Ketoing's eulogy,
Speaker 1: the New Scientist looked back on Midgeley's life, memorably describing
Speaker 1: him as a one man environmental disaster, far from the
Speaker 1: epitome of industrial progress. He starts to look more like
Speaker 1: a byword for that phrase coined by the great sociologist
Speaker 1: Robert K. Merton, unanticipated consequences and yet unanticipated consequences isn't
Speaker 1: a phrase you hear much anymore. It's given way to
Speaker 1: unintended consequences. Merton himself switched from using one phrase to
Speaker 1: the other. They might sound like synonyms, but they're not.
Speaker 1: A professor of political science named Frank Dejevart points out
Speaker 1: that this shift in language obscures a whole category of impacts,
Speaker 1: ones that you don't intend but you might nonetheless anticipate.
Speaker 1: Think of a doctor prescribing a drug that often has
Speaker 1: side effects. She doesn't want you to suffer the side effects,
Speaker 1: but she does foresee the possibility, or at least she should,
Speaker 1: and she should be honest about it too. We expect
Speaker 1: doctors to speak truthfully about risks and trade offs. Other
Speaker 1: decision makers might not when they stand to gain while
Speaker 1: the risks fall on others. In cases like that, says Dejerrat,
Speaker 1: we should be skeptical when someone apologizes for unintended consequences.
Speaker 1: It can be an attempt to evade responsibility for harms
Speaker 1: they didn't intend but should have foreseen. That CFC's would
Speaker 1: destroy the ozone layer was genuinely unanticipated until Mariomalina sat
Speaker 1: down with his pencil and paper and calculator. It simply
Speaker 1: hadn't occurred to anyone as a possibility. But when Thomas
Speaker 1: Midgley and Boss Kettering launched tetra ethyl lead as a
Speaker 1: fuel additive to stop engine knock. The danger was all
Speaker 1: too predictable. It had been known for centuries that lead
Speaker 1: was poisonous. America's foremost expert in lead was doctor Alice Hamilton.
Speaker 1: In nineteen twenty five, she pleaded with US regulators not
Speaker 1: to allow me and Kettering to put lead in gasoline.
Speaker 4: I am not one of those who believe that the
Speaker 4: use of this leaded gasoline can ever be made safe.
Speaker 4: No lead industry has ever, even under the strictest control,
Speaker 4: lost all its dangers. Where there is lead, some case
Speaker 4: of lead poisoning sooner or later develops. Even under the
Speaker 4: strictest supervision.
Speaker 1: There had already been ample evidence of the risk. At
Speaker 1: a plant making tetra ethyl lead in New Jersey, five
Speaker 1: of the forty nine workers had died. Most of the
Speaker 1: rest had been taken to hospital in strait jackets, hallucinating, screaming,
Speaker 1: and convulsing. Midgeley and Ketching said that they could make
Speaker 1: the factories safe for workers. Even if that were true,
Speaker 1: said Alice Hamilton, could still have millions of cars belching
Speaker 1: lead in exhaust fumes into the air we all breathe.
Speaker 4: You may control conditions within a factory but how are
Speaker 4: you going to control the whole country?
Speaker 1: Midgley insisted there'd be too little lead in exhaust fumes
Speaker 1: to cause any problems for human health. He didn't intend
Speaker 1: to poison people, but he should have anticipated that he might.
Speaker 1: Alice Hamilton did, and she warned him. Faced with this
Speaker 1: kind of criticism, Bossquttering knew that he needed to get
Speaker 1: public opinion on his side. Fortunately for him, Thomas Midgley
Speaker 1: wasn't just an inventor. Remember he was that consummate showman
Speaker 1: we heard about earlier, filling his lungs with di chlorodie
Speaker 1: fluoromethane to blow out a candle. At a press conference
Speaker 1: on leaded gasoline, Midgley put on a similar kind of show.
Speaker 1: He produced a container of tetra ethyl lead, poured the
Speaker 1: liquid all over his hands, and ostentatious breathed in the fumes.
Speaker 1: I'm not taking any chance whatever, nor would I take
Speaker 1: any chance doing that every day. The journalists were wowed.
Speaker 1: But Midgley must have known how disingenuous he was being,
Speaker 1: and how reckless he had just taken months off work
Speaker 1: to recover from lead poisoning himself. Kettering and Midgeley knew
Speaker 1: the risks, was there really no alternative? Well? When governments
Speaker 1: finally banned leather gasoline, scientists found different ways to prevent
Speaker 1: engine knock. When governments banned CFCs, scientists found alternative ways
Speaker 1: to make fridges and air conditioners and air assaults. Science
Speaker 1: is great. Midgeley and Kettering knew of at least one
Speaker 1: promising potential alternative, ethyl alcohol, but any old farmer could
Speaker 1: make ethyl alcohol from whereas tetra ethyl lad was something
Speaker 1: that could be patented and monetized. They just had to
Speaker 1: get past experts such as Alice Hamilton.
Speaker 2: First, Mitchley went to work on the job of introducing
Speaker 2: the new product of the public and endeavor, which he
Speaker 2: met with and finally overcame many obstacles and much opposition.
Speaker 1: Overcoming obstacles in opposition. It's a fitting line for a eulogy,
Speaker 1: but I can't help thinking of another fine phrase. The
Speaker 1: sociologist Robert K. Merton, the imperious immediacy of interest leaded
Speaker 1: gasoline would make a lot of money. Who really cared
Speaker 1: what might happen next. For a full list of our sources,
Speaker 1: please see the show notes at Timharford dot com. Cautionary
Speaker 1: Tales is written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright.
Speaker 1: It's produced by Ryan Dilley with support from Courtney Gerino
Speaker 1: and Emily Vaughan, but the sound design and original music
Speaker 1: is the work of Pascal Wise. It features the voice
Speaker 1: talents of Ben Crow, Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford and Rufus Wright.
Speaker 1: The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work
Speaker 1: of Mea LaBelle, Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fane, John Schnaz, Julia Barton,
Speaker 1: Carlie mcgliori, Eric Sandler, Royston Basserv Maggie Taylor, Nicol Morano,
Speaker 1: Daniel Lacahan and Maya Kanig. Cautionary Tales is a production
Speaker 1: of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember
Speaker 1: to share, rape and review, tell a friend, tell two friends,
Speaker 1: and if you want to hear the show ads free
Speaker 1: and listen to four exclusive Cautionary Tale shorts. Then sign
Speaker 1: up for Pushkin Plus on the show page and Apple
Speaker 1: podcast or at pushkin dot fm, slash plus