Posted by downbad_ 2 hours ago
Thomas Midgley Jr.: Accidentally The Most Dangerous Man Who Ever Lived[0]
Leaded gas, CFCs, and accidentally created a machine that ended his own existence.[1]
[0]https://allthatsinteresting.com/thomas-midgley-jr [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.
The titles like annoy me to no end.
Because Thomas Midgley was an engineer. Not overlord of General Motors. Not director. Not even a large shaholder.
GM Leadership knew effects of TEL. And for decades traded everyone's health for their profits. Midgley is complicit, but he's just a small piece.
Being a prescriptivist creates no end of everyday pains. Language just won't conform.
Also leads to another great list-of-lists; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_unusual_deaths
Based on the OP, it wasn't at all accidental. They knew it was dangerous and chose it because they could make more money than with safer alternatives such as ethanol.
And plenty of stuff is toxic in large quantities but harmless (or even vital!) in small quantities.
He would then spend months in Florida recovering from lead poisoning.
He knew, and he didn't care.
He's not some incidental commentator. He's an engineer and a principle force behind this technology. He is responsible for the outcomes - 'I didn't know' is reckless negligence. And if there were clear acute problems, chronic problems weren't hard to guess at for anyone, much less an engineer, with all those resources, working on it for years.
well he's not some biochemist...
and even biochemists have trouble within their own field because there's so much 'unknown' stuff in biochem (eg Thalidomide scandal)
Note: it’s now banned for road vehicles everywhere [1].
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/every-country-has-n... Algeria, 2021
Avweb has done a good series of videos on this. There were some real engineering concerns and some typical aviation conservative decision making. But really, it's a tragedy of the FAA fumbling the ball for decades at this point.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9F-WngVMJBQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mvse4Xhzwuk
https://avweb.com/features/unleaded-avgas-airport-playbook-l...
> Two beliefs became entrenched:
1. that lead is natural to the human body, and
2. that a poisoning threshold for lead existed
Robert Kehoe, working for GM, was the chief advocate for leaded gasoline, and really the only person/lab doing research on lead until Clair Patterson stumbled into it while measuring the age of the earth. [0,1]
A modern equivalent might be if Facebook was the only organization researching social media's impact on society, while being able to set the paradigm/assumptions about said safety for half a century.
So even when Patterson's research was published in 1965, it took time to change the paradigm, and more time to phase out lead's use.
Should anyone want to read a narrative about the intertwined lives of Midgley, Patterson, Kehoe and lead, then this Mental Floss article is a good read. [2]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A._Kehoe
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clair_Patterson#Campaign_again...
[2] https://www.mentalfloss.com/science/environment/clair-patter...
Catalytic converters? Don't need 'em! There's no CO or unburnt fuel in the exhaust to catalyse because they run as lean as a vegan's dog!
CO2 emissions? Sure, but the stuff is getting flared off as waste at refineries anyway, and we're not going to stop making plastics and fertilisers any time soon, so may as well extract useful work from burning it!
We could have had incredibly clean cities everywhere by now, by simply keeping older cars on the road and adapting them to run on much cleaner safer fuel.
But there was a problem, an absolute bombshell of a problem. The fatal flaw that killed LPG as a road fuel.
It didn't sell new cars. It didn't sell anyone any debt.
So they came up with "scrappage schemes" where you'd get a couple of hundred quid for your old car, it would get destroyed, and then all you had to do was buy a nice new Cleaner Greener Diesel car instead, at some swingeing rate of interest (expect to pay well over twice the sticker price by the end of it - and no, you didn't get the Scrappage Scheme cash if you didn't take the finance package).
And you see how well that worked out.
Gas cars faced the same thing when they first came out but by the time they became used for longer trips there was gas everywhere and in the meantime there was gas at least where you bought the car and so it was good enough for the short trips that bought it for.
Now it's mostly wholesale fuel suppliers that have pumps.
* https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/leaded-gas-wa...
Some can run on ethanol-free 87-octane automotive fuel, generally the low-compression engines that already can run 80/87 aviation fuel.
80/87 and 100/130 leaded fuels are all but unavailable, but 100LL is ubiquitous. There is a chicken and egg problem to make G100UL and UL94 available, which will encourage its use. Even automotive fuel is hard to find at airports, possibly because they don't want the liability of improper fueling. (100LL is compatible with almost every gasoline aircraft engine, the rest are not.)
The G100UL also may have an issue with being too good of a solvent, although the developer insists that's a libel.
Swift Fuels is also supposed to introduce a different type of 100-octane unleaded called 100R that has had good results in testing but hasn't been broadly approved yet.
It was like pulling teeth from a dragon to get the FAA to move forward with G100UL as I understand it, and then they suddenly approved it for just about anything provided they write a supplemental type certificate. So maybe the same will happen when/if 100R is approved and someone will handle the marketing.
There is a timeline to transition to UL, but very low collective confidence it'll happen by the 2030 goal.
edit: to the commenter that fired off the reactionary reply and deleted it before I could help you. No, not because "[rich people] won't do the right thing." It's because lead is an anti-knock additive for piston engines, and a safe replacement has to go through unimaginable amounts of testing. Once it's certified, one must still figure out scaling production, distribution, etc. Aviation is a very slow moving industry and regulatory environment, which I'm personally thankful for.
PDF (77pgs): https://download.aopa.org/advocacy/2026/2026-01_Draft-Unlead...
ZERO, thirty years ago when there was definitive proof is it forever and irreversible
all lead exhaust aircraft should have been phased out a decade ago if not two decades ago if they cannot be converted
again, there is no acceptable amount, imagine it being sprayed on you, your car, everywhere
your body tries to process it like calcium and stores it forever
how much damage and disease to you and your family are you willing to accept just so someone can keep using their prop aircraft for another decade to make profit?
yes it's all about the money, it's pretty obvious, if there wasn't profit involved it would have been phased out with cars THIRTY YEARS ago
all that lead sprayed all around the land and on people is FOREVER, it doesn't go away, it doesn't wash away, it doesn't evaporate