Thomas Midgley Jr Timeline

Thomas Midgley Jr 16

1889 Thomas Midgley Jr born in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania The son of an inventor Thomas Midgley Jr is born into a family of inventors — his father held tyre patents, his maternal grandfather invented an inserted-tooth saw. He grows up in Columbus, Ohio. As a schoolboy he works out that rubbing elm bark on a baseball makes it curve more sharply, which turns out to be a fair preview of his entire method.
1911 Cornell, mechanical engineering Not a chemist Midgley graduates from Cornell with a degree in mechanical engineering. He never trains as a chemist. His approach to chemistry throughout his career is essentially that of an engineer — try things systematically, in enormous numbers, until something works — which is both why he succeeds so fast and why the consequences take so long to surface.
1916 Joins Charles Kettering in Dayton The knock problem Midgley goes to work for Charles Kettering at the Dayton Research Laboratories, soon absorbed into General Motors. He is handed the knocking problem: engines detonating fuel prematurely, which caps compression ratios and therefore power and efficiency. He works on it for five years, testing thousands of compounds, at one point pursuing an iodine derivative and at another a tellurium compound that makes everyone who handles it smell so appalling their families refuse them entry.
1921 Tetraethyl lead stops the knock The worst decision in the engine's history Thomas Midgley at General Motors finds that adding tetraethyl lead to petrol eliminates engine knock and allows higher compression ratios. It works beautifully. It also puts lead into the air of every city on earth for the next seventy years, with measurable effects on the intelligence of an entire generation. Midgley later invents CFCs.
1923 Lead poisoning, and a winter in Miami He knew Within a year of the discovery Midgley is himself seriously ill with lead poisoning and spends the winter in Florida recovering. He writes to a colleague that his lungs need clean air. He then returns as vice president of the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation and spends the next two decades publicly maintaining that leaded petrol is safe. The corporate name carries no mention of lead anywhere.
1924 The Bayway refinery deaths The looney gas building At the Standard Oil works in Bayway, New Jersey, workers producing tetraethyl lead begin hallucinating and convulsing. Five die and dozens are hospitalised. Similar deaths follow at DuPont and at Dayton. The press names the plant after what it does to the men inside it. Several states and cities ban leaded petrol outright.
1924 The press demonstration Washing his hands in it To answer the Bayway coverage, Midgley calls a press conference, pours tetraethyl lead over his hands, holds a beaker of it under his nose and breathes deeply for a full minute, and tells reporters he could do this every day without harm. He had already been treated for lead poisoning the previous year, and he requires further treatment shortly afterwards. It is one of the most effective pieces of industrial public relations of the century.
1925 – 1926 The Surgeon General's conference Absence of proof, taken as proof of absence The US Surgeon General convenes a conference on leaded petrol. Alice Hamilton and others argue that a known cumulative poison should not be dispersed into the air of every city. The committee reports that there is no proof of danger at current levels and recommends further study. Sales resume in 1926. The further study is not seriously funded for another forty years.
1930 Freon, in three days And the candle trick Asked to find a refrigerant that will not poison families in their sleep — ammonia, methyl chloride and sulphur dioxide had all been killing people in their homes — Midgley settles on dichlorodifluoromethane within days. At the American Chemical Society meeting in Atlanta he demonstrates it by inhaling a lungful and exhaling onto a candle flame, showing in one gesture that it is neither toxic nor flammable. It is a genuinely great invention that saves many lives before anyone thinks about the stratosphere.
1937 – 1942 Every medal American chemistry has Perkin, Priestley, Nichols, Gibbs Midgley collects the Perkin Medal in 1937, the Priestley Medal in 1941 and the Willard Gibbs Award in 1942, having taken the Nichols Medal back in 1922. In 1944 he is president and chairman of the American Chemical Society. He is, at the time, regarded as one of the most successful industrial chemists who ever lived, and that judgement is not obviously wrong on the evidence then available.
1940 Polio Disabled at fifty-one Midgley contracts poliomyelitis and is left severely disabled. Characteristically, he treats his own body as an engineering problem and designs a system of ropes and pulleys to lift himself in and out of bed without help. He continues working, and serves as a director of the Ohio State University Research Foundation.
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.
1974 Molina and Rowland The stratosphere bill arrives Mario Molina and F. Sherwood Rowland publish in Nature: chlorofluorocarbons are so stable that they drift intact to the stratosphere, where ultraviolet light breaks them apart and the freed chlorine destroys ozone catalytically — one atom taking out tens of thousands of molecules. The chemical industry spends years attacking the finding. The two share the Nobel Prize in 1995.
1985 The Antarctic ozone hole Worse than the models Joe Farman and colleagues at the British Antarctic Survey report a springtime collapse in ozone over Halley Bay so severe that satellite software had been discarding the readings as instrument error. The hole is far larger than anyone had predicted. Public opinion turns almost immediately.
1987 The Montreal Protocol The one that worked Signed on 16 September 1987 and eventually ratified by every country on earth, the protocol phases out CFCs worldwide. It is generally reckoned the most successful international environmental agreement ever made, and the ozone layer is now measurably recovering. It is also the clearest evidence available that a global atmospheric problem can in fact be fixed.
2021 The last leaded petrol A hundred years, ended in Algeria The United Nations Environment Programme announces that leaded petrol for road vehicles has ceased worldwide, Algeria having exhausted the last stocks. UNEP estimates the phase-out prevents over a million premature deaths a year. Studies of the lead era attribute measurable losses in population-level IQ and a substantial share of the twentieth-century crime wave to Midgley's additive. Small aircraft still burn it.