Timeline Thursday 2 November 1944

Events on Thursday 2 November 1944 2

• 1889 – 1944 Thomas Midgley Jr Two solutions, two disasters Thomas Midgley solved two real engineering problems brilliantly. Engine knock was limiting compression ratios, so he found tetraethyl lead. Refrigerators were poisoning families with ammonia and methyl chloride, so he found Freon. Both worked perfectly, and between them they put lead into the bloodstream of most of the twentieth century and opened a hole in the ozone layer. The historian J. R. McNeill wrote that he had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in the planet's history. He held over a hundred patents and won every major prize American chemistry could give him.
• 1944 Thomas Midgley Jr dies at Worthington, Ohio Caught in his own device Midgley is found dead at fifty-five, entangled in the lifting apparatus he had built. The coroner records it as suicide, though it is very widely retold as an accident, and the truth is not settled. It is the third time in his life that something he designed to solve a problem turned on the person using it.