Most influential people throughout history have been well known. Leaders like Genghis Khan, Adolf Hitler, Nelson Mandela, JFK and Julius Caesar have - for better or worse - altered the course of history for millions or even billions of people. But there are also those whose actions affected as many people, while managing to keep out of the public eye.
One such individual was Thomas Midgley Jr, an American mechanical and chemical engineer. In 1916 he was contracted by General Motors (GM) to find a solution to the problem of ‘knocking’ in internal combustion engines. Over the course of the next five years he assayed more than 33,000 additives, eventually settling on tetraethyl lead (TEL). It was easy to make, inexpensive and required only a low dose to be effective - unleashing the full potential of internal combustion engines from 1921 onwards.
Unfortunately, Midgley’s decision unleashed a plume of toxic lead that hung over the 20th Century. TEL can pass from the lungs to the blood and then to the brain. At low concentrations, it impairs cognitive function. At high concentrations, it causes cramps, headaches, memory issues, mood swings and, in extreme cases, death.
In 2011 researchers placed the direct ‘toll’ of TEL at 1.1 million excess deaths, 322 million ‘lost’ IQ points and more than 60 million crimes.1 The cost was estimated to be US$2.4tn in 2011 alone, 4% of global GDP for that year. The research did not assess the knock-on effects of this unrealised potential, nor did it assess the impacts of the proliferation of motor vehicles, which Midgley’s research undoubtedly facilitated. Most countries banned TEL by 2000 and the last TEL factory closed in 2021, 100 years after his discovery.
But TEL wasn’t Midgley’s only ‘gift’ to the world... By the late 1920s, he had moved within GM to a division to develop new refrigerants. At the time these were unstable and/or explosive. Midgley focused on alkyl halides, specifically dichlorodifluoromethane, which GM sold as Freon. This first chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) was very stable and very volatile but, unknown to its inventor, also destroyed ozone (O3), the atmospheric layer that stops UV radiation from reaching Earth. The appearance of the Ozone Hole over Antarctica in the 1980s led to elevated rates of skin cancer in Australia and New Zealand. In what remains a unique example of global environmental cooperation, CFCs were banned in 1987. The hole should be ‘healed’
by 2100.
Midgley died long before the negative impacts of his discoveries were realised. Having lost the use of his legs to polio in 1940, he invented a contraption to automatically move him from his bed to his wheelchair. He was found unresponsive entangled in the mechanism in 1944. Although officially recorded as a suicide, many suggest that Midgley may have - like so many others - become ensnared in one of his inventions.
If Midgley was, in the words of New Scientist writer Fred Pearce, a ‘one-man environmental disaster,’ then his polar opposite is Stanislav Petrov. Petrov was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Soviet Air Defence Forces in the 1970s and 1980s, ‘watching the skies’ for nuclear missiles from the United States. In the event of an attack, Petrov would be duty bound to report his observations to his superiors, who were more than likely to retaliate.
On 26 September 1983, Petrov was covering a night shift for a colleague when scanners identified what appeared to be a US nuclear missile approaching the USSR. Instead of reporting this up the chain of command, Petrov was intrigued as to why the US would launch a single missile, rather than the thousands it had at its disposal. He also knew that the alert system was relatively new and didn’t trust it, even as four more ‘missiles’ appeared. Next came the longest 17 minutes of Petrov’s life - the time it would take for the first missile to detonate.
Of course, you are reading this now because Petrov was right to trust his gut. The ‘missiles’ were actually sunlight reflecting off some high altitude clouds over a US nuclear base. The USSR did not launch a nuclear retaliation. Had another - less considered - duty officer been on shift, billions would likely have perished.
Unlike Midgley, Petrov was all too aware of the influence of his action, but was unable to even tell his wife. He was shuffled out of the military in mid-1984 for ‘failing to file the correct paperwork.’ His actions only came to light after the collapse of the USSR.
Prior to his death in 2017, Petrov said that he was ‘just doing his job.’ Some Midgley defenders say that he was ‘just doing his job’ too. As I sit here, ‘just doing my job,’ I am sure that, while Global Cement is the world’s most widely-read cement magazine, its impact is nothing like that of these two men... Thank goodness!
