Karma

[S8ight]

heard this story a while ago but thought it wasnt true, its a bit long but has an interesting end;

"You may recognize two lines from a political poem by James Russell Lowell: "New occasions teach new duties, Time makes ancient good uncouth." So it is with some inventions. Meet Thomas Midgley. He gave us two ancient goods that've grown uncouth.

Born in 1889, Midgely did an engineering Ph.D. at Cornell. In 1916 he joined Charles Kettering's Lab in Dayton, Ohio.

Kettering was marketing a small kerosene engine to drive home-lighting systems on farms. It knocked horribly. Midgely guessed that dyeing the fuel red might cause it to absorb more heat and knock less. That was terrible physics. But when he doped the kerosene with iodine, there was less knock.

Midgely set out to find a better antiknock additive. First he wasted time with a hit-and-miss search. Then he began working systematically through the periodic table. After six years he found that tetraethyl lead worked beautifully.

So Ethyl gasoline swept America. Questions about its toxicity came up right away and lingered for sixty years. Finally, we introduced the new catalytic converters to combat other pollutants. They strangled on leaded gas, so we gave up lead. It certainly had been a health threat. But it also allowed the modern auto engine to evolve.

Midgely took only three days to make his second great contribution. Early refrigeration units used nasty chemicals like sulfur dioxide and ammonia. We needed something better. Midgely went back to the periodic table and invented dichloroflouromethane -- the first of the Freons.

The Freons aren't toxic at all. So they served us long and well. Then we found they were eating up our protective ozone layer. Now the survival of Earth depends on giving up Freons. We're replacing them with new chlorine-free chemicals.

So, Midgley changed American life twice. Both times his inventive heritage was life-threatening. And his final invention was really death-dealing, as it turns out.

He contracted polio when he was 51. As he lost the use of his legs, he invented a harness to get himself out of bed. On Nov. 2, 1944, he tangled in the gadget. It strangled him."