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If you were to select "the greatest inventors of the 20th century", Edison would probably be on the list.
But if you choose "the most dangerous creature of the 20th century", Thomas Midgley is definitely at the top of the list. Even Hitler has to step back a little. After all, Hitler relies on the army to kill people, but Midgley only needs to let you breathe to kill people.

He has only done two major things in his life.
The first thing is that lead was added to the gasoline.
The second thing is the invention of Freon.

Sound familiar? Yes, these two things are the beginning of our environmental nightmare.


1. This "poison" was once more fragrant than gold

The story begins with General Motors (GM) in the 1920s.

Cars at that time had a big problem: engine knocking.
That is to say, when it is turned on, there will be a "clang, clang, clang" knocking sound from the engine, as if there is a blacksmith living under the hood. Not only does this sound unpleasant, it also damages the car and makes it lose power.

As General Motors' ace engineer, Midgley received a KPI: Find an additive to solve knocking.

In fact, there was a ready-made solution known at that time: Ethanol (alcohol) .
Add some alcohol to gasoline, and the knocking will disappear immediately, and it will burn cleanly, non-toxic and harmless.

But GM's top brass refused.
Why? Because ethanol is so easy to obtain, any farmer can make it from corn. The inability to apply for a patent means that there is no monopoly, and the inability to monopolize means that you cannot make big money.

The boss said to Midgley: "Find me something that no one else can make."

Midgley tried more than 30,000 chemicals on the periodic table like a headless fly. Finally, he set his sights on element No. 82 - Lead.

He discovered that as long as he added a little tetraethyl lead to the gasoline, the engine would immediately become as quiet as a chicken and as smooth as silk.
The most perfect thing is that although lead is poisonous, it can be patented!

Thus began a half-century-long poisoning.

2. Crazy "madhouse" factory

In order to cover up the word "lead" (after all, everyone knew that lead was poisonous), General Motors and Mobil Oil teamed up to form a new company, named the lead-added gasoline "Ethyl" (Ethyl), and never mentioned lead.

But on the production floor, the gates of hell opened.

Tetraethyl lead is a highly fat-soluble poison. It doesn't need you to drink it. As long as it touches your skin or you inhale its volatile gas, it will directly penetrate your cell membrane and get into your brain.

Just a few days after the new factory opened, things started to go wrong among the workers.
Some people started to giggle, some were catching butterflies in the air, and some jumped out of the window in fear in the middle of the night.
This was known at the time as the "Madman's Gas Building".
In just a few months, five workers went crazy and died, and 35 suffered permanent neurological damage.

At this time, the public began to wonder: "Is this thing of yours poisonous?"

3. Actor-level performance: Lie with your life

Facing media doubts, Midgley staged one of the most shameless and hard-core public relations shows in the history of science.

In 1924, at a press conference, Midgley took out a bottle of highly toxic tetraethyl lead in front of dozens of reporters.
He poured the viscous liquid into his hands, washed his hands, then put his nose to it and inhaled deeply for more than a minute.

He raised his head, smiled like a normal person and said:
"Look, I do this every day, no problem at all."

This scene fooled everyone. Leaded gasoline was released and began to be sold around the world.

But the truth is: in the days after the press conference that day, Midgley himself suffered from lead poisoning and quietly went to Europe to recuperate for half a year before recovering.
But he won.
In the decades since, tons of lead have been spewed into the air as billions of cars speed down the road.

They fall on the streets, drift into windows, and settle on children's toys.
Later, scientists analyzed that the lead content in the blood of humans living in the 20th century was 600 times that of ancient people.
Lead can damage children's brains, leading to reduced IQ and increased violent tendencies.
Some criminologists even believe that the high crime rate in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s is directly related to these children who grew up smoking lead.

4. He thought it was not enough, so he broke the news

If the story ends here, Midgley is just a profit-seeking businessman.
But he is a genius, and he will continue to invent.

This time, he set his sights on the refrigerator.

Early refrigerators used dangerous refrigerants (ammonia or sulfur dioxide) that could poison an entire family if they leaked.
With a stroke of his pen, Midgley circled two more things on the periodic table: fluorine and chlorine.

He invented dichlorodifluoromethane.
Still the same old trick, in order to sell it easily, he gave this thing a nice business name - Freon.

To be fair, Freon seemed perfect at the time.
It is non-toxic, non-flammable and extremely chemically stable. Midgley even performed another "dope gas" performance: he took a puff of Freon and then blew out the candle, proving that the stuff was both safe and fireproof.

This time, he did not poison anyone directly.
But he almost killed the Earth.

Because Freon is too "stable". It did nothing on the ground, just kept floating, and kept floating, until it reached the stratosphere.
There, intense ultraviolet light breaks its chemical bonds, releasing chlorine atoms.

A chlorine atom is like a serial killer wandering into a herd of sheep. It breaks down ozone (O3) into oxygen (O2).
And it doesn’t consume itself! After it decomposes one ozone, it immediately looks for the next one.
One chlorine atom can destroy 100,000 ozone molecules.

In this way, the earth's sun protection layer, the ozone layer, was burned with a big hole by the gas invented by Midgley.
It is also known as the "Antarctic Ozone Hole".
If the world had not stopped the Montreal Protocol urgently later, at the current rate, humans would not be able to go out during the day by 2050, because ultraviolet rays will directly burn your skin.

5. The most absurd way to die: being strangled to death by your own invention

Midgley's life seems to have been scripted by Satan.
The leaded gasoline he invented poisoned the human brain;
The Freon he invented pierced the earth's shield.

And his own ending is full of fatalistic black humor.

In his later years, Midgley contracted poliomyelitis (poliomyelitis) and was paralyzed in bed.
As a mechanical genius, he couldn't stand having to be picked up every time he got up. So he once again used his talents as an inventor.

He designed a complex rope pulley system that allowed him to hoist himself up from the bed and adjust his sitting position by simply pulling the rope.
He was proud of this ingenious machine.

One morning in 1944, when his family entered his room, they found him dead.
He was strangled to death by this complex system of ropes wrapped around his neck.

This is Thomas Midgley.
He died at the hands of his proud invention.


Conclusion

In the history of materials science, Midgley is a name that cannot be bypassed.
It’s not that he doesn’t understand chemistry, he understands it too well.
He pinpointed molecular structures that were extremely effective, extremely profitable, and extremely deadly.

He proved one thing:
Technology without conscience is more terrifying than the plague.

Today, leaded gasoline has been banned globally, and Freon has also been phased out. The atmosphere is slowly repairing itself, and the lead levels in our blood are declining year by year.
It took the earth more than half a century to barely clean up the mess left by this man.

Next time you take a breath of fresh air or look up at the blue sky, thank those who sent his invention to the trash.
Because we almost became sacrifices for his great cause.