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Speaker 1: Pushkin. Thomas Midgley Junior was born on College Hill in

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Speaker 1: Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, May eighteenth, eighteen eighty nine. His father,

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Speaker 1: Thomas Midgley Senior, was a prolific inventor in a variety

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Speaker 1: of fields, but notably that of automobile times, and his

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Speaker 1: mother had the eulogy for and invente, a hero of

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Speaker 1: industrial science who changed the world, and who died tragically young,

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Speaker 1: aged just fifty five. Thomas Midgley Junior studied mechanical engineering,

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Speaker 1: but he was just as fascinated by chemistry. As a

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Speaker 1: young researcher employed by General Motors, Midgley took to carrying

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Speaker 1: a copy of the Periodic Table around in his pocket

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Speaker 1: to inform his quest for new ideas. By the end

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Speaker 1: of his life, Midgley had accumulated over a hundred patents.

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Speaker 1: We're going to hear about three of his inventions. In

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Speaker 1: nineteen sixteen, Midgley became a member of our research staff

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Speaker 1: and began then his long association with me and his

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Speaker 1: remarkably productive career in research. The eulogist is Charles Boss Kettering,

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Speaker 1: himself an inventor of some renown. Kettering was Thomas Midgley's

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Speaker 1: boss in the General Motors Research department. He went on

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Speaker 1: to become a lifelong friend, mentor, and business associate as

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Speaker 1: the two men built lucrative careers with General Motors and

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Speaker 1: the DuPont Corporation. What do you want me to do next? Boss?

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Speaker 1: That simple question and the answer to it turned out

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Speaker 1: to be the beginning of a great adventure in the

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Speaker 1: life of a most versatile man. Versatile Indeed, the brain

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Speaker 1: children of Thomas Midgley touched many areas of life. This pudgy,

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Speaker 1: bespectacled inventor seemed to personify the mid twentieth century ideal

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Speaker 1: of progress, as summed up by DuPont in their famous

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Speaker 1: nineteen thirties advertising slogan better things for better living, living

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Speaker 1: through chemistry Chemistry. In his eulogy, Boss Kettering runs through

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Speaker 1: Midgley's long list of accomplishments Presidents of the American Chemical Society,

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Speaker 1: winner of the Nichols Medal, the Perkin Medal, the Priestly Medal,

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Speaker 1: the Willard Gibbs Medal, the Longstreth Medal, honorary doctorates from

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Speaker 1: the College of Wooster, and the Ohio State University. Kettering

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Speaker 1: quotes the citation from Ohio State. Midgeley contributed so greatly

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Speaker 1: to more pleasant and efficient living. He has made science

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Speaker 1: a liberator, and we rejoice with him and the satisfactions

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Speaker 1: that must be his in seeing the fruits of his labor.

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Speaker 1: Posterity will acknow their permanent value. Posterity alas, was not

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Speaker 1: as kind to Midgley as his many admirers had expected,

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Speaker 1: but they were absolutely right to say that he would

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Speaker 1: change the world. He did, he made it much much worse.

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Speaker 1: I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to cautionary tales? What

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Speaker 1: do you want me to do? An X boss? One day,

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Speaker 1: when Thomas Midgley asked that question of Charles Kettering, the

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Speaker 1: Boss had a problem he wanted Midgley to solve. The

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Speaker 1: problem had to do with refrigeration. At the time, people

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Speaker 1: didn't have fridges at home. It was too dangerous. The

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Speaker 1: chemicals you needed for the cooling coils were either toxic

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Speaker 1: or flammable, so refrigeration was mainly used in industrial settings

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Speaker 1: by trained personnel. Even then, accidents were common. Kettering wanted

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Speaker 1: Midchley to invent away to cool things safely. Midgley took

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Speaker 1: the periodic table out of his pocket. He soon zeroed

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Speaker 1: in on florine as a promising element for creating a

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Speaker 1: compound that might have the right properties. As Kettering's eulogy recalls,

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Speaker 1: he had a helpers prepared such a compound, dichlorodifluoromethane. It

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Speaker 1: proved to have just the properties required. It is highly stable, noninflammable,

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Speaker 1: and altogether without harmful effects on man or animals. Dichloro

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Speaker 1: difluoromethane it did seem to be all together without harmful effects.

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Speaker 1: Midgeley tested this by replacing all the nitrogen in air

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Speaker 1: with dichlorodifluoromethane and seeing what happened to animals who breathed

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Speaker 1: it in. Happily, for the animals, they were completely fine.

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Speaker 1: Midgley wasn't just an inventor, He was a showman. He

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Speaker 1: presented his new product in a dramatic lecture to the

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Speaker 1: American Chemical Society. Midgley lights a candle. He produces a

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Speaker 1: container of dichlorodifluoromethane. He sucks it in a long, deep sculp,

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Speaker 1: filling his lungs, and then slowly and gently he breathes

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Speaker 1: out over the candle. The flame goes out. It's a

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Speaker 1: bravura performance. Dichlorodifluomethane belongs to a class of chemicals called CFC's,

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Speaker 1: or chlorofluura carbons. Under Midgley's guidance, General Motors and the

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Speaker 1: DuPont Corporation start to produce a whole range of CFCs.

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Speaker 1: They give them the trade name free On. Thanks to

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Speaker 1: these new non hazardous coolants, people soon had refrigerators in

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Speaker 1: their own homes. That was a game changer. Food stayed fresh.

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Speaker 1: The housewives of America could spend less time endlessly shopping

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Speaker 1: for groceries. Food poisoning was easier to avoid, and it

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Speaker 1: wasn't just fridges. Air conditioners too. Even better, it soon

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Speaker 1: turned out that CFCs had uses beyond cooling. They were

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Speaker 1: ideal for making air assaul sprays, insect repellance, air freshness,

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Speaker 1: hairspray deodorance. It was just like DuPont said, better things

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Speaker 1: for better living through chemistry. In the summer of nineteen

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Speaker 1: seventy three, nearly three decades after Thomas Midgley's untimely death,

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Speaker 1: a chemistry professor named Sherwood Rowland welcomes a new postdoctoral

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Speaker 1: researcher to his team at the University of California. Irvine

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Speaker 1: Mariomelina is from Mexico. He's thirty years old, and he

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Speaker 1: needs Professor Roland to give him a project to work on.

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Speaker 1: Roland recalls something he heard over coffee at a conference

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Speaker 1: the previous year about a precise new way of measuring

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Speaker 1: trace gases in the atmosphere, gases like dichlorodifluoromethane. It turns

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Speaker 1: out that CFCs are present in the air around US

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Speaker 1: at two hundred and thirty parts per trillion. That's like

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Speaker 1: detecting a drop of gin in a swimming pool of tonic.

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Speaker 1: Roland is intrigued to hear that, not because the amount

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Speaker 1: sounds so small to him, but because it sounds so big.

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Speaker 1: He knows that it's only a few decades since CFCs

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Speaker 1: started to be manufactured on an industrial scale, not much

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Speaker 1: more than that dropful can ever have been produced. Roland

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Speaker 1: is a radio chemist. He studies how particles react and decay.

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Speaker 1: Most chemicals break down in the environment sooner or later,

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Speaker 1: but CFCs just seemed to be hanging around. So he

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Speaker 1: makes a suggestion to marry O Malina, why don't you

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Speaker 1: look into CFCs. Malina recalls, we thought it would be

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Speaker 1: a nice interesting academic exercise. We both knew that these

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Speaker 1: CFCs were rather stable, so there was nothing obvious that

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Speaker 1: would damage them soon after they'd be released. That's about

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Speaker 1: as much which as I knew at the time. If

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Speaker 1: CFCs aren't interacting much with anything in the atmosphere close

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Speaker 1: to Earth, Malina reasoned, they'll eventually drift upwards to the stratosphere,

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Speaker 1: where the air is thinner. It would take decades, but

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Speaker 1: they'd get there. When they did, they'd encounter more ultraviolet

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Speaker 1: bee waves from the Sun and maybe that would cause

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Speaker 1: the CFCs to break down. Because UVB waves are pretty destructive.

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Speaker 1: They're the main reason why too much sunshine can give

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Speaker 1: you skin cancer. In fact, if the Earth had no

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Speaker 1: protection from UVB radiation, life on land might not be possible.

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Speaker 1: What does protect the Earth the ozone layer. Ozone is

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Speaker 1: a gas made from oxygen atoms up in the stratosphere,

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Speaker 1: a thin layer of ozone blocks most of the Sun's

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Speaker 1: UVB radiation. Mario Malina sat down to work out what

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Speaker 1: would happen and to a CFC molecule When it drifts

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Speaker 1: up to the stratosphere, it would get hit by a

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Speaker 1: wave of UVB radiation that would knock off a chlorine atom.

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Speaker 1: The chlorine atom would soon meet an ozone molecule. When

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Speaker 1: it did, it would split the ozone apart and form

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Speaker 1: oxygen and chlorine monoxide instead. But that's not the end

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Speaker 1: of the story. Because chlorine monoxide isn't stable. It breaks

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Speaker 1: down quickly. That frees up the chlorine atom again to

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Speaker 1: take out another ozone molecule, and the cycle repeats, chlorine

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Speaker 1: atoms pinballing around the stratosphere, hopping ozone as they go.

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Speaker 1: Melina was intrigued by this, but not alarmed. After all,

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Speaker 1: there weren't that many CFC molecules in the atmosphere. It

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Speaker 1: was a drop in a swimming pool. They couldn't possibly

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Speaker 1: destroy enough of the ozone layer to cause a problem,

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Speaker 1: could they. Malina got the data showing how much CFC

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Speaker 1: gas had been produced. He sat down with a pencil,

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Speaker 1: paper and a calculator and did the sums. That can't

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Speaker 1: be right. He checked them. He checked them again, and again.

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Speaker 1: He checked them a dozen times. That night. When he

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Speaker 1: got home, Malina's wife asked how his day had been.

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Speaker 1: The work's going well, Malina said, But it looks like

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Speaker 1: the end of the world. Cautionary tales will be back

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Speaker 1: in a moment. At the University of California, Irvine, Mario,

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Speaker 1: Melina tracks down Sherwood Rowland and may have found something important.

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Speaker 1: Roland checks Melina's sums. He checks them again. That can't

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Speaker 1: be right, but it was. The CFCs drifting slowly up

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Speaker 1: towards the stratosphere were a ticking time bomb. Barely forty

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Speaker 1: years had passed since DuPont started to manufacture their CFCs

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Speaker 1: under the Freon brand on an industrial scale. That wasn't

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Speaker 1: long enough to expect any obvious impact yet, but more

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Speaker 1: and more CFCs were being produced every year. If that continued,

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Speaker 1: what might it mean by say, the middle of the

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Speaker 1: twenty first century. Melina and Rowland calculated that up to

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Speaker 1: half the ozone layer could disappear. As Malina had put it,

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Speaker 1: it looked like the end of the world. The two

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Speaker 1: scientists wrote up their research. They published it in Nature

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Speaker 1: in the summer of nineteen seventy four, and hardly any noticed.

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Speaker 1: A few reporters got in touch from local newspapers. That

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Speaker 1: was nice, but this wasn't really a local story. An

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Speaker 1: executive from DuPont phoned Sherwood Rowland. I read your paper.

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Speaker 1: I was appalled. Thanks for getting in touch. It is

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Speaker 1: appalling throughout your paper. You talk about free On. Don't

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Speaker 1: you know that Freon's are DuPont's registered brand name. You

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Speaker 1: need to refer to CFCs generically, not free On specifically.

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Speaker 1: I have to tell you we take this very seriously.

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Speaker 1: Oh okay. Roland and Melina were dispirited. They're discovered the

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Speaker 1: end of the world and nobody cared. They looked for

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Speaker 1: another opportunity to get attention. The Annual meeting of the

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Speaker 1: American Chemical Society was coming up, the very same event

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Speaker 1: that Thomas Midgeley had wowed forty four years earlier by

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Speaker 1: filling his lungs with die chlorodie fluo methane and softly

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Speaker 1: extinguishing a candle. Roland and Malina submitted their paper to

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Speaker 1: the annual meeting, but lots of papers get submitted, so

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Speaker 1: it's the job of the American Chemical Society's news manager

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Speaker 1: to decide which papers to publicize. Her name was Dorothy Smith.

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Speaker 1: She decided to go big, much to the displeasure of DuPont. Hello,

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Speaker 1: I've just seen your press release. You're making a big

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Speaker 1: thing of this paper on CFC's and ozone. Yes, it

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Speaker 1: seems important. We think it's an insignificant story. A lot

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Speaker 1: of people are interested. Dorothy Smith stood her ground. She

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Speaker 1: put Roland and Malina on stage at a press conference,

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Speaker 1: and finally their work started to gain some traction. Environmental

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Speaker 1: activists called for a ban on CFCs. A few politicians

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Speaker 1: took up the cause, but the industry fought back. Yes,

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Speaker 1: the scientific theory seemed sound, but that's all it was theory.

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Speaker 1: No ozone depletion has ever been detected, despite the most

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Speaker 1: sophisticated analysis. All ozone depletion figures to date are computer

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Speaker 1: projections based on a series of uncertain assumptions. The initial

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Speaker 1: burst of attention slowly began to fade. Roland and Melina

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Speaker 1: kept speaking out, but fewer and fewer people were bothering

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Speaker 1: to listen. Progress towards banning CFC's ground to a halt.

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Speaker 1: It was clear that only one thing might reboot the

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Speaker 1: interest of the world's governments. Hard evidence of damage to

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Speaker 1: the ozone layer. But if it took decades for CFCs

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Speaker 1: to drift up to the stratosphere, the first ones to

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Speaker 1: be manufactured would only just be making it there. Would

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Speaker 1: the evidence come in time to avert disaster. We'll pick

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Speaker 1: up the story of CFCs and the Ozone Layer. But

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Speaker 1: I promised you three inventions by Thomas Midgley, and as

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Speaker 1: we'll see, those three inventions have a theme, that theme

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Speaker 1: unanticipated consequences. I mentioned that Thomas Midgley died young. How

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Speaker 1: did he die exactly? Bosquetoing's eulogy tiptoed around that delicate question.

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Speaker 1: In the early fall of nineteen forty, Midgeley was struck

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Speaker 1: by an acute attack of poliomyelidis, which deprived him of

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Speaker 1: the use of his legs and made him a semi invalid.

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Speaker 1: Midgeley died unexpectedly on November second, nineteen forty four, at

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Speaker 1: the age of fifty five, confined to his bed by polio.

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Speaker 1: Midgley had applied his inventive mind to devising a series

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Speaker 1: of pullies and ropes by which he could move himself around.

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Speaker 1: He eyed unexpectedly when a rope in this device got

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Speaker 1: wrapped around his neck and strangled him. So one of

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Speaker 1: Mitchelly's inventions had ended up killing him, and another was

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Speaker 1: going to destroy the ozone layer and fry the planet.

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Speaker 1: It's fair to say that unanticipated consequences is the right

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Speaker 1: description for both these inventions. The phrase unanticipated consequences was

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Speaker 1: coined a few years before Mitchley's death in a much

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Speaker 1: cited article by the great American sociologist Robert K. Murton.

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Speaker 1: That article was called the Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action.

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Speaker 1: Throughout history, Murton argued, philosophers have grappled with the idea

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Speaker 1: of unanticipated consequences, using various different words to describe it,

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Speaker 1: but nobody had thought systematically about how unanticipated consequences come about.

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Speaker 1: Murton set himself the task of categorizing all the possible

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Speaker 1: ways in which our actions might backfire. Simple error is

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Speaker 1: one way we might get unanticipated consequences. We think we

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Speaker 1: know what will happen, but we're wrong. Another is what

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Speaker 1: Murton called the imperious immediacy of interest. Roughly speaking, we're

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Speaker 1: so keen to solve some pressing problem that we don't

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Speaker 1: much care what else might happen down the line. And

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Speaker 1: then there's ignorance when we don't have the knowledge that

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Speaker 1: would be necessary to anticipate what might happen. In some cases,

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Speaker 1: that might be because we haven't put in the time

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Speaker 1: and energy that would be necessary to get that knowledge,

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Speaker 1: or maybe the situation is so novel we can't imagine

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Speaker 1: what we might need to know. That's a good description

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Speaker 1: of what happened with CFCs. Mitchelly had tried to get

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Speaker 1: some knowledge about potential risks by making animals breathe in dichlorodifluomethane,

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Speaker 1: but the interaction with ozone came completely out of the blue.

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Speaker 1: This phrase of Robert K. Merton, unanticipated consequences has a twist.

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Speaker 1: To find out what it is, we need to turn

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Speaker 1: to the third of Thomas Midgley's disastrous brain waves, arguably

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Speaker 1: the worst of all. It came again from that fateful question,

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Speaker 1: what do you want me to do next? Boss? This time,

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Speaker 1: the problem Charles Kettering wanted Midgley to solve was engine knock,

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Speaker 1: when you red your car and it sounds like you're

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Speaker 1: firing a machine gun. It's not a common sound nowadays,

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Speaker 1: but it blighted the lives of early motorists. General motors

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Speaker 1: wanted to invent a product that would stop it, but

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Speaker 1: nobody even understood why it happened. Thomas Midgeley worked it

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Speaker 1: out in a internal combustion engine, a piston in a

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Speaker 1: cylinder compresses a mixture of air and fuel until a

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Speaker 1: spark plug ignites it. Engine knock happens when the mixture

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Speaker 1: explodes before the piston has compressed it fully. It's not

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Speaker 1: just an unpleasant noise. It can damage the engine. But

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Speaker 1: where would you even start to look for a solution?

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Speaker 1: Kettuing and Midgley talked it over. We thought that maybe

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Speaker 1: if the fuel were colored red, it would absorb more

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Speaker 1: radiant heat and evaporate more completely, thus preventing the rough combustion.

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Speaker 1: This theory came to us then, because we both happen

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Speaker 1: to know that the leaves of the trailing arbutists are

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Speaker 1: red on the back, and that they grow and bloom

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Speaker 1: under the snow. Midgley went to a chemist's shop and

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Speaker 1: bought iodine. He put the iodine in some fuel, which

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Speaker 1: turned it red, and he ran the engine no Knock

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Speaker 1: and Kettering were astonished. But was it really the color

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Speaker 1: red that was stopping the knock? Midgley tried other ways

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Speaker 1: of dying fuel, but with no success. Apparently it wasn't

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Speaker 1: the red color, but something else about the iodine. The

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Speaker 1: leaves of the trailing arbutus had been a red herring.

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Speaker 1: Midgley then tried ethyl iodide, which has iodine but no color.

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Speaker 1: It stopped the knock just as well. Unfortunately, it also

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Speaker 1: corroded the engine. Undeterred, Midgeley pulled the periodic table from

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Speaker 1: his pocket and began to work his way through it.

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Speaker 1: Many anti knock agents were discovered along the way. Compounds

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Speaker 1: of iodine of nitrogen are phosphorus, of arsenic, of antimony,

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Speaker 1: of selenium, of tellurium, but everyone had some limitation or

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Speaker 1: shortcoming which prevented it from being used in a practical way. Eventually,

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Speaker 1: Thomas's perseverance paid off. He discovered something that he could

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Speaker 1: add to gasoline that would stop engine knock without damaging

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Speaker 1: the engine, tetra ethyl lead. Thomas Midgley had invented leaded

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Speaker 1: gasoline because of Midgley's invention, I'm about five iq points

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Speaker 1: stupider than I would otherwise have been, and so are

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Speaker 1: you if you're around my age or older, because you too,

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Speaker 1: will have spent your childhood inhaling fumes of leaded gasoline

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Speaker 1: from car exhausts. The air pollution messed up brain development

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Speaker 1: for whole generations of kids, and it caused cancers and

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Speaker 1: heart disease. And strokes. It's estimated that leaded gasoline hastened

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Speaker 1: tens of millions of deaths. Leaded gasoline completes an astonishing trifector.

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Speaker 1: Thomas Midgley invented a rope and pulley device that killed him,

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Speaker 1: an additive for fuel that killed lots of other people,

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Speaker 1: and a refrigerant that was on course to wipe out

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Speaker 1: life on earth all together. How unlucky can one man be?

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Speaker 1: But luck isn't the whole story. In the early nineteen eighties,

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Speaker 1: the radiochemist Sherwood Rowland and his colleague Mario Melina kept

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Speaker 1: on talking about the danger of CFCs to the ozone layer.

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Speaker 1: Nobody wanted to listen. Roland became more and more exasperated.

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Speaker 1: What's the use of having developed a science well enough

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Speaker 1: to make predictions if in the end all we're willing

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Speaker 1: to do is stand around and wait for them to

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Speaker 1: come true. The predictions, however, were all too easy for

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Speaker 1: the industry to dismiss. Remember the line from DuPont all

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Speaker 1: ozone depletion figures to date are computer projections based on

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Speaker 1: a series of uncertain assumptions. Only actual evidence of damage

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Speaker 1: to the ozone layer would get CFCs back on the agenda,

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Speaker 1: but the evidence would be hard to come by. The

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Speaker 1: first CFCs to be produced decades earlier would only just

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Speaker 1: have reached the stratosphere. If they were starting to reduce

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Speaker 1: the levels of ozone, that might be hard to see

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Speaker 1: for a couple of reasons. First, ozone levels fluctuate naturally. Second,

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Speaker 1: there are different ways to measure ozone from the ground,

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Speaker 1: from satellites, from special instruments tied to helium balloons, which

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Speaker 1: were most accurate, no one was entirely sure. Tantalizing hints

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Speaker 1: of evidence began to emerge. Some Japanese researchers sent balloons

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Speaker 1: to the stratosphere. The ozone readings came back worryingly low,

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Speaker 1: but you really needed a long term series of data

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Speaker 1: points to establish there was a trend. The Panese team

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Speaker 1: didn't have that, but someone else did. For twenty five years,

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Speaker 1: an obscure organization called the British Antarctic Survey had been

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Speaker 1: toiling away on a shoestring budget, sending researchers to a

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Speaker 1: remote outpost in Antarctica to measure all sorts of things.

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Speaker 1: They weren't looking for anything in particular. They just liked

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Speaker 1: to collect data in case it ever happened to share

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Speaker 1: anything interesting. For twenty five years, we never had. Now,

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Speaker 1: in the early nineteen eighties, it did. The ozone measurements

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Speaker 1: were all over the place. The researchers suspected that their

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Speaker 1: instruments had gone haywire. They send new ones to Antarctica,

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Speaker 1: but the data came back the same. At first, it

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Speaker 1: seemed random, but when the researchers looked more closely, they

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Speaker 1: realized there was a pattern to the unusually low readings,

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Speaker 1: a pattern related to the seasons, a pattern that reactions

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Speaker 1: with chlorine could plausibly explain. NASA's satellites had also picked

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Speaker 1: up some surprisingly low readings over the Antarctic solo. The

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Speaker 1: computers had initially thrown them out as obvious anomalies. Now

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Speaker 1: it was clear that something was happening. There was still

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Speaker 1: room to doubt. Why was it really a chemical reaction

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Speaker 1: caused by chlorofleur carbons, or was it solar activities or

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Speaker 1: wind There was only one way to be sure. NASA

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Speaker 1: rushed to put together a team of scientists and flew

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Speaker 1: them to Antarctica. In charge of the mission was thirty

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Speaker 1: year old doctor Susan Solomon, an atmospheric chemist, Solomon had

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Speaker 1: never been to Antarctica before, and she didn't have the

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Speaker 1: right equipment. Her team had brought instruments to analyze light

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Speaker 1: from the Moon, but they hadn't had time to build

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Speaker 1: a tracking device to focus the Moon's rays. Instead, someone

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Speaker 1: had to sit on the laboratory roof at night holding

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Speaker 1: a mirror at just the right angle. The first time

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Speaker 1: Solomon took the roof shift, she squinted to direct the

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Speaker 1: mirror's reflection, found that her eye had frozen shut, but

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Speaker 1: the results of the experiments pointed only in one direction.

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Speaker 1: On October the twentieth, nineteen eighty six, journalists gathered in Washington,

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Speaker 1: d C. To hear Solomon relay her team's preliminary findings

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Speaker 1: over a Crackerly satellite link from Antarctica. We have not

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Speaker 1: conclusively established the cause of the oz on whole. However,

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Speaker 1: we have strong evidence against theories that upward wins or

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Speaker 1: high solar activities caused the deplica. We suspect a chemical

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Speaker 1: process is fundamentally responsible for the formation of the whole.

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Speaker 1: Solomon was right. More experiments confirmed it. The world's leaders

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Speaker 1: acted with commendable speed. In nineteen eighty seven, they agreed

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Speaker 1: the Montreal Protocol to phase out CFCs. Sherwood Rowland and

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Speaker 1: Mario Molina shared a Nobel prize. The end of the

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Speaker 1: world was averted. By now the impacts of leaded gasoline

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Speaker 1: on human health were equally playing to see. Governments around

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Speaker 1: the world were banning that too, albeit more slowly. As

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Speaker 1: for Thomas Midgley, well with hindsight, Boss Kettwing's eulogy sounds

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Speaker 1: a little different. Midgley contributed so greatly to more pleasant

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Speaker 1: and efficient living, so he did say refrigerators, aerosols, smoothly

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Speaker 1: running gas engines, pleasant and efficient, just deadly too. Seventy

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Speaker 1: years after Kettering's eulogy, the New Scientist looked back on

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Speaker 1: Midgley's life, memorably describing him as a one man environmental disaster,

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Speaker 1: far from the epitome of industrial progress. He starts to

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Speaker 1: look more like a bye word for that phrase coined

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Speaker 1: by the great sociologist Robert K. Merton, unanticipated consequences and

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Speaker 1: yet unanticipated consequences isn't a phrase you hear much anymore.

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Speaker 1: It's given way to unintended consequences. Merton himself switched from

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Speaker 1: using one phrase to the other. They might sound like synonyms,

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Speaker 1: but they're not. A professor of political science named Frank

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Speaker 1: de Javart points out that this shift in language obscures

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Speaker 1: a whole category of impacts, ones that you don't intend

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Speaker 1: but you might nonetheless anticipate. Think of a doctor prescribing

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Speaker 1: a drug that often has side effects. She doesn't want

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Speaker 1: you to suffer the side effects, but she does foresee

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Speaker 1: the possibility, or at least she should, and she should

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Speaker 1: be honest about it. Two. We expect doctors to speak

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Speaker 1: truthfully about risks and trade offs. Other decision makers might

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Speaker 1: not when they stand to gain while the risks fall

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Speaker 1: on others. In cases like that, says de Jarart, we

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Speaker 1: should be skeptical when someone apologizes for unintended consequences. It

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Speaker 1: can be an attempt to evade responsibility for harms they

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Speaker 1: didn't intend, but should have foreseen. That CFCs would destroy

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Speaker 1: the ozone layer was genuinely unanticipated until Mariomelina sat down

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Speaker 1: with his pencil and paper and calculator. It simply hadn't

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Speaker 1: occurred to anyone as a possibility. But when Thomas Midgeley

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Speaker 1: and Boss Kettering launched tetra ethyl lead as a fuel

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Speaker 1: additive to stop engine knock. The danger was all too predictable.

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Speaker 1: It had been known for centuries that lead was poisonous.

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Speaker 1: America's foremost expert in lead was doctor Alice Hamilton. In

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Speaker 1: nineteen twenty five, she pleaded with US regulators not to

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Speaker 1: allow Midgeley and Kettering to put lead in gasoline. I

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Speaker 1: am not one of those who believe that the use

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Speaker 1: of this leaded gasolene can ever be made safe. No

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Speaker 1: lead industry has ever, even under the strictest control, lost

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Speaker 1: all its dangers. Where there is lead, some case of

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Speaker 1: lead poisoning sooner or later develops. Even under the strictest supervision.

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Speaker 1: They had already been ample evidence of the risk. At

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Speaker 1: a plant making tetra ethyl lead in New Jersey, five

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Speaker 1: of the forty nine workers had died. Most of the

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00:31:56,570 --> 00:32:02,010
Speaker 1: rest had been taken to hospital in strait jackets, hallucinating, screaming,

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Speaker 1: and convulsing. Midgeley and Kettuing said that they could make

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Speaker 1: the factors is safe for workers. If that were true,

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Speaker 1: said Alice Hamilton, you'd still have millions of cars belching

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Speaker 1: lead in exhaust fumes into the air we all breathe.

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Speaker 1: You make control conditions within a factory. But how are

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Speaker 1: you going to control the whole country. Midgley insisted there'd

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Speaker 1: be too little lead in exhaust fumes to cause any

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Speaker 1: problems for human health. He didn't intend to poison people,

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Speaker 1: but he should have anticipated that he might. Alice Hamilton did,

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Speaker 1: and she warned him. Faced with this kind of criticism,

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Speaker 1: bosquecheuing knew that he needed to get public opinion on

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Speaker 1: his side. Fortunately for him, Thomas Midgley wasn't just an inventor.

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Speaker 1: Remember he was that consummate showman we heard about earlier,

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Speaker 1: filling his lungs with die chlorodie fluo methane to blow

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Speaker 1: out a candle. At a press conference on leaded gasoline,

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Speaker 1: Midgeley put on a similar kind of show, produced a

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Speaker 1: container of tetra ethyl lead, poured the liquid all over

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Speaker 1: his hands, and ostentatiously breathed in the fumes. I'm not

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Speaker 1: taking any chance whatever, nor would I take any chance

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Speaker 1: doing that every day. The journalists were wowed, but Midgley

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00:33:32,170 --> 00:33:36,690
Speaker 1: must have known how disingenuous he was being, and how reckless.

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00:33:37,370 --> 00:33:40,410
Speaker 1: He had just taken months off work to recover from

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Speaker 1: lead poisoning himself, kettering and Midgley knew the risks. Was

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Speaker 1: there really no alternative? Well, when governments finally banned leader gasoline,

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00:33:53,570 --> 00:33:57,890
Speaker 1: scientists found different ways to prevent engine knock. When governments

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Speaker 1: banned CFC's, scientists found alternative ways to make fridges and

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Speaker 1: air conditioners and air assouls. Science is great. Midgley Kettering

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Speaker 1: knew of at least one promising potential alternative, ethyl alcohol.

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Speaker 1: But any old farmer could make ethyl alcohol from grain,

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Speaker 1: whereas tetra ethyl lead was something that could be patented

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Speaker 1: and monetized. They just had to get past experts such

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Speaker 1: as Alice Hamilton. First. Midgley went to work on the

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Speaker 1: job of introducing the new product of the public and endeavor,

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Speaker 1: which he met with and finally overcame many obstacles and

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00:34:39,850 --> 00:34:45,370
Speaker 1: much opposition. Overcoming obstacles in opposition. It's a fitting line

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Speaker 1: for a eulogy, but I can't help thinking of another

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00:34:48,810 --> 00:34:55,730
Speaker 1: fine phrase. The sociologist Robert K. Merton, the imperious immediacy

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00:34:56,450 --> 00:35:00,610
Speaker 1: of interest leaded gasoline would make a lot of money.

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Speaker 1: Who really cared what might happen next. For a full

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Speaker 1: list of our sources, please see the show notes at

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Speaker 1: Tim Harford dot com. Cautionary Tales is written by me

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00:35:33,530 --> 00:35:37,530
Speaker 1: Tim Harford with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Ryan Dilley

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00:35:37,730 --> 00:35:41,530
Speaker 1: with support from Courtney Guarino and Emily Vaughne. The sound

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00:35:41,530 --> 00:35:45,010
Speaker 1: design and original music is the work of Pascal Wise.

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00:35:45,490 --> 00:35:48,890
Speaker 1: It features the voice talents of Ben Crow, Melanie Gutridge,

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00:35:49,170 --> 00:35:53,130
Speaker 1: Stella Harford, and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have

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00:35:53,130 --> 00:35:56,690
Speaker 1: been possible without the work of Mia La Belle, Jacob Weisberg,

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00:35:56,970 --> 00:36:02,010
Speaker 1: Heather Fane, John Schnars, Julia Barton, Carlie mcgliori, Eric Sandler,

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00:36:02,290 --> 00:36:07,930
Speaker 1: Royston basserv Maggie Taylor, Nicole Morano, Danielle Lakhan, and Maya Caaning.

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Speaker 1: Caution Retales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you

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00:36:12,730 --> 00:36:15,810
Speaker 1: like the show, please remember to share, rate and review,

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00:36:16,170 --> 00:36:18,570
Speaker 1: tell a friend, tell two friends, and if you want

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00:36:18,610 --> 00:36:20,970
Speaker 1: to hear the show, adds free and listen to four

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00:36:21,210 --> 00:36:25,970
Speaker 1: exclusive Cautionary Tales shorts. Then sign up for Pushkin Plus

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00:36:25,970 --> 00:36:29,170
Speaker 1: on the show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin

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00:36:29,330 --> 00:36:31,370
Speaker 1: dot fm, slash plus