Thomas Midgley Jr .: Meet the Inventor Who Almost Destroyed Our Planet

Have you ever thought that the most boring thing to get into history as one of the most dangerous figures ever? This, unfortunately, is the legacy of Thomas Midgley Jr., an inventor who unintentionally ended up being responsible - indirectly - for terrible and irreversible environmental damage, as well as the deaths of thousands of people around the world.

Thomas Midgley Jr. was a brilliant chemist and mechanical engineer who, throughout his life, managed to register over 100 patents and earn the respect of the scientific community in his day. In 1915, Midgley began his career working for Dayton Research Laboratories, a subsidiary laboratory of General Motors.

Dangerous solution

Their mission was to find a solution for engine self-ignition - that is, to avoid the damage to the connecting rods caused when the fuel mixture explosion occurs early. Midgley knew the problem was caused by the way gasoline burned in the engine's cylinders, and his first proposal was to add iodine to the fuel to tint it red and thus alter its heat-absorbing properties.

However, turning gasoline red didn't work, and Midgley basically started testing all the elements of the periodic table until it hit Pb or lead. Thus was born Tetraethylchumbo, an additive that eliminated the problem of self-ignition - and even slightly improved vehicle consumption - but created a much bigger headache.

Lethal additive

Of course, it was not long before the additive was mixed with gasoline worldwide. But tetraethyl lead releases particles of lead into the air - and this element is extremely toxic to humans, especially children.

This is because lead occurs naturally in the environment, but when it is swallowed or inhaled, it can cause a number of serious health problems, as well as impair the neurological development of children under 6 years, causing permanent damage. Exposure to the element may result in increased inattention, inability to follow instructions, difficulty in troubleshooting, and irritability.

It turns out that with Midgley's discovery, additive research was eventually abandoned in the 1920s. From then on, millions of leaded gasoline-powered cars began to circulate around the planet - all of them releasing heavy metal particles through of your exhausts. "Cool huh?

Negligence

What's worse is that everyone knew about the lead problem, and in 1923 several doctors and specialists expressed their concern about the release of the element into the environment. But because addictive use was generating an absurd sum of money, GM chose to ignore the warnings - even after its workers began to suffer the consequences of metal poisoning.

Just to give you an idea, in a plant GM maintained with Standard Oil - now Exxon Mobil - over 80% of workers were poisoned and even killed by lead! Surprisingly (or not, when it comes to operations involving a lot of money), it took five decades before anyone took any kind of action.

The use of the additive began to be discontinued between the 1970s and 1980s, and in the 1990s tetraethylchumbo was finally banned. But don't think that after poisoning thousands of workers and three generations of leaded children, Midgley decided to retire and stop contaminating the planet. Nothing ... The inventor still had one more important contribution!

Refrigerators

Refrigerators, as you know, are metal boxes with an insulating door, and the cold is generated by absorbing heat from inside and releasing them into the environment. They have a series of tubes on the outside (at the back) that contain a coolant - which at this stage of the cycle is in liquid form due to high pressure.

A compressor passes fluid through a valve and, after a strong pressure drop, enters a gaseous state and cools dramatically. The gas then circulates through a coil located inside the refrigerator, where it begins to “steal” the heat from food - and heat up.

Then the gas travels through the coil until it passes through the compressor, where it is again subjected to high pressure - which causes its temperature to rise and return it to its liquid state. Finally, the fluid passes through a new tube where it loses heat to the environment before the entire cycle begins again.

It turns out that in order to function properly, refrigerants must have certain properties, such as being volatile - to evaporate easily - and inert, so as to cause the equipment to oxidize and not chemically bond with other elements. But back to Midgley ...

Environmental damage

In the 1930s, after quitting additive work, Midgley was hired to work in a GM division called Frigidaire, which focuses on the production of refrigerators. Their new mission was to find a cheap alternative to propane, ammonia, sulfur dioxide or chloromethane - toxic and highly flammable substances - which were the coolant options that existed at the time.

For in a mere three days of work, Midgley was able to develop Dichlorodifluoromethane - the first chlorofluorocarbon halomethane ever synthesized in the world. Midgley created nothing more than the infamous CFC, that substance that was used in refrigerators, air conditioners and aerosols in the past and is currently banned worldwide. Take it easy, you'll find out why.

CFC is inert, which means that when it is released into the environment, no natural chemical process can degrade it. Thus, all the CFC released by the refrigerators that began to emerge in the 1930s, through the hair sprays that allowed the 50's and 60's hairstyles to stay in place - including the rebellious wigs of the 70's and 80's - remains in the atmosphere. Not to mention deodorants, paint cans, etc.

It turns out that although CFC is used here on the surface, it eventually ends up in the higher layers of the atmosphere where it is bombarded by cosmic rays. And when CFC molecules interact with cosmic rays, the elements that make up dichlorodifluoromethane - chlorine, methane and fluorine - are released and, in addition to contributing to the greenhouse effect, one of them (chlorine) is capable of destroying the ozone layer.

Everyone knows that ozone in the atmosphere helps filter out the sun's ultraviolet rays. But the ozone layer is not just for preventing skin cancer from developing among earthlings. Excess radiation can interfere with the growth rate of terrestrial and aquatic plants, which in turn can affect entire ecosystems and potentially reduce the absorption of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Karma ?

The effects of the CFC were not discovered until long after its inception, and production, as we have already mentioned, was banned in the mid-1990s. With respect to Midgley, it did not deliberately inflict such damage and died tragically in 1944, without knowing the real extent of the catastrophic problems that their inventions caused. In fact, we can say that, in a way, he paid for what he did, poor fellow.

In 1940, Midgley contracted polio and invented a contraption to help him get out of bed. It was a system of pulleys and levers he had installed in his room, and one fine day he was found dead - strangled by the handles of his own creation.

* Posted on 7/16/2015

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